19
Nov 05

Hanging out in the Wifi cloud

Trying to work at the libraryI’m busily surfing and doing a few things here at the library where Jody works her second job. She works harder than anyone I know, with one full-time job, one part-time job, and enough projects to choke a horse. She’s already talking about getting her PhD now that she’s done with graduate school. Even though I do my freelance work in the evenings several nights a week, I still feel like a slacker. The woman is driven.

It’s nice to be able to look over at her reading and helping patrons while I mess around online, adding blogs to my feedlist, so I can view them from any computer instead of trying to store my opml files to the USB drive like I have been doing. She had to be at work at 9am, so I had a nice walk around until the library opened at ten. I went down some unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a McDonald’s swarmed with soccer kids and their parents. I got an egg McMuffin and some coffee then I walked back along this dry, grassy park (Rawhide Park, as a matter of fact) while I sipped my coffee.


17
Nov 05

Rediscovering my photos

The Flickr account has been a good thing for me. It’s freed up some space on the web server and it’s gotten me interested in photography, although less about taking and more about appreciating. This is a photo Jody took of me about two years ago. I like it.

Dried lake bed


17
Nov 05

Nokia boosts enterprise push with $430m Intellisync buy

Nokia boosts enterprise push with $430m Intellisync buy “This, alas, will bring it face-to-face with Qualcomm Inc, which has just applied for an injunction to halt the sale of Nokia Corp’s handsets in the US, alleging it is infringing its patents.”

Historian Charged With Denying Holocaust “Irving was detained on a warrant issued in 1989 under Austrian laws that make Holocaust denial a crime, Golia said. If formally charged, tried and convicted on the charge, Irving could face up to 20 years in prison, said Otto Schneider of the public prosecutor’s office.” You have to be kidding me. What next, a law against moon-landing deniers?


16
Nov 05

Greedy eyes and hands

This camera is awesome. For $800, it’s actually a great deal, in my opinion, considering that an entry level point and shoot is gonna run $200.
Nikon D-50


16
Nov 05

More on the Intellisync buy

The more I read about this, the smarter it seems. This is about more than just push email. Intellisync focuses on a big problem for both business and consumer users: data synchronization, whether it be email, PIM, documents, etc. Intellisync’s software is built to fit into existing business software environments and is already used in conjunction with Act!, Quicken, Quickbooks, Outlook, Exchange Server, and more. I’ve also used it in conjunction with Yahoo, which offers Intellisync as a method to sync your contacts and calendar. Their approach is, let’s just help you sync your data, whatever it may be. Intellisync is also device agnostic, which is a bad thing for RIMM, since using Intellisync’s software you won’t need a Blackberry… or a Nokia, for that matter. Nokia is pushing to provide more than just hardware / software. It looks like they’re aiming to help business customers evolve their existing business environments into a wireless cloud of devices and data without the need to replace every piece of software and hardware.


16
Nov 05

Nokia Buys Into Wireless Email

Nokia to Buy Intellisync for $430 Million

HELSINKI, Finland (AP) — Nokia Corp. said Wednesday it is paying $430 million to acquire Intellisync Corp., a provider of wireless e-mail service for cellular carriers, adding to the mobile phone maker’s growing arsenal of products to compete with BlackBerry.

The deal comes just two months after Nokia barged into the increasingly crowded field of BlackBerry rivals by becoming the first major handset maker to announce its own brand of mobile e-mail service — essentially becoming a rival to the U.S. company it is now acquiring.

Nokia is embarking on a multi-pronged strategy: low-end devices and network equipment for the developing world, media-enabled Smartphones and Linux tablets for techno-fetishists, and now push email capability to compete with RIMM. This is Nokia’s bid to bust into the business environment, which is now really catching onto technology.


16
Nov 05

In the Shadow of the Leaves

There is a passage in the Hagakure “In the Shadow of the Leaves” that a samurai should meditate on death daily:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, muskets, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

When I think about death I know that everything that exists is fleeting and temporary, like a mist, not just myself, but every aspect of the universe. All the works of man, all the bones of our ancestors, all the knowledge we have produced and compiled, but we still desire perpetuation and timelessness. Defeat of death is the defeat of time itself.

We move through time as if stepping from one crumbling stone to another. In a very real sense, all you have is the flow of each moment, although this is itself a form of timelessness. My memories of life live on in some fashion. That much is undeniable.


16
Nov 05

MIT to launch $100 laptop prototype in November

MIT to launch $100 laptop prototype in November “The 500MHz laptop will run a “skinny version” of the open-source Linux operating system. It will have a two-mode screen, so it can be viewed in color and then by pushing a button or activating software switch to a black-and-white display, which can be viewed in bright sunlight at four times normal resolution, according to Negroponte. He estimates the display will cost around $35.”

Study: Squirrels Have Complex Language

Love this woodcut from Pruned, the topography / landscape blog:

Woodcut


16
Nov 05

Breathe deep, me hearties!

Today be the first cold day of the year! I’ve been experimenting with “indoor roughing it”, which has led me to forgo indoor climate control in favor of clothing control. I woke up very cold this morning, and had to get up every few minutes to readjust my blankets. Brrrrrr.

Something about cold weather brings out my inner caveman. My mind retreats inward, the senses sharpen, my skin dries and thickens becoming less sensitive, and I get a strong impulse to stop shaving. There has to be DNA memory. I am feeling wild. It reminds me of that scene in “American Werewolf in London” where he has the dream in the forest after being bitten by the werewolf. In the dream, he’s naked and hunting down a deer with his bare hands.

When I was last in Oklahoma, Jody, her mom, and I went out to feed the “calves” (in this case, yearling bullocks who have yet to be castrated). At this age, they’ve bulked up around the neck and shoulders, on their way to becoming true bulls. This particular morning was cool and the young bulls were feeling their oats, butting each other with their hornless heads trying to dig in and push each other back.

I screwed up and let an unbred heifer into the same pen as the young bulls, and the reaction was immediate. Within a few seconds she had a train of bulls following after her their heads raised, eyes rolled back, and upper lip lifted to catch the seductive scent trailing behind her.

It’s a mirror of our own world. The center of it all is the same: survival and perpetuation of the species. Everything else we have serves to take up all the time we used to spend just surviving and procreating.


15
Nov 05

“Women are still a closed book to men”

I found this article interesting, although not surprising. Any guesses at the reasons why men don’t read novels by females?

But a gender gap remains in what people choose to read, at least among the cultural elite. Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles. The report said: ‘Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men.

Out of the recent eighteen or so books I have mentioned here on my site (not even including audiobooks), only three have been by women, and two of the books were by the same woman, Margaret Atwood.