4/16/2004 02:07:48 PM
like wifi, but you can roam 5 miles from your base station. a small MAN, but sweet.
WiMAX will potentially kill this, but 802.16 is still a long way out on the horizon.
4/16/2004 01:44:33 PM
public discontent grows over Iraq:
Republican Senator John McCain
Marine General Anthony Zinni
Secretary of State Colin Powell
4/15/2004 11:04:43 PM
somebody is trying to hack my Hotmail account. i was just locked out of it for "too many failed log in attempts" between writing an email and trying to send it.
i can no longer log in to send or receive email. please be patient if you are waiting on me. alt.email for dan.
i am back into Hotmail.
4/15/2004 10:34:33 PM
The Passion has certainly brought the money changers back into the Temple.
At least they are funny this time around. Some of them at least.
Nest, the quarterly interior design magazine, #24 is entitled, Decorating the Christian Home. Cut in a fabulous leaning rectangle Nest takes a serious, tongue-in-cheek look at the space created when religion and design overlap.
The color chart on the back is priceless. Such classics as "Heaven Scent" and "My Angel" are joined by new and delightful hues like "Please Don't Tell Satan" and "Succubus." The suggestive "David and Jonathan" and ironic "Job's Delight" are my favorites, but, given my autumn complexion, "The Sins of Solomon" would likely suit me best.
Other highlights: the "Ten Commandments of Decoration" and the phenomenal full page comic comparison of "Our Family Values" and "Their Family Values."
4/15/2004 10:02:22 PM
Your Urban Network of Strangers
via smart mobs
...The principle metaphors of Jabberwockies are "digital scents" and "digital tagging." As individuals traverse an urban landscape, they simply infuse their path with a unique and detectable digital redolence....
As two people approach one another, each person's individually carried Jabberwocky mobile phone application transparently detects and records the other's unique identity. In fact the beauty of the application is that it still operates even if the other Bluetooth mobile phone is not running the Jabberwocky application. Over time each Jabberwocky application accumulates a log of unique entries of people that have been previously encountered.
Later, as the user crosses through another part of the city, takes the subway, or waits at a street corner, the Jabberwocky application senses nearby groups and crows and renders an abstract real-time visualization of familiarity. It is able to account for the amount of Familiar Strangers nearby as well as a notion of your shared history with them. This visualization provides an interface to groups and crowds rather than individuals, thus avoiding numerous privacy issues....
One of the most powerful elements of Jabberwocky is that it is not driven by the bits of an online network, but by actual real-life daily ebb and flow within our actual urban landscapes... (emphasis mine)
4/15/2004 05:30:32 AM
U.S. occupied Iraq is looking little different from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The press and affiliation are violently controlled. Civilians are being slaughtered. There may be marginal, symbolic gains, but for the average Iraqi totalitarian control feels little different now than it did two years ago--except that now it is a well dressed white man and his army that rules them.
4/14/2004 04:59:12 PM
i like Google.
i love Amazon.
Amazon now has a search engine called A9.
it seems that Amazon is garnering its straight search results through Google from a partnership that, reportedly, requires them to serve two Ad Words per query. some might ask why Amazon needs a search engine if Google is doing the heavy lifting? search is power. its pretty much that simple.
there is a definite precedent set for Google enabling their competition for a time--for the right price. until recently Google was the search provider for Yahoo. it will be interesting to see how long it takes before Amazon ditches the Google deal for their own, home-spun algorithms.
what Amazon brings to the search equation is a viciously loyal fan base and the unique value of Alexa and Search Inside The Book. A9 offers a personalization engine that enables a personal search history as well as offering the now requisite browser toolbar (not Mozilla friendly at this writing).
the right hand expandable panels on the A9 interface are a convenient way to span searches across the web and print worlds--which is a rather revolutionary thing from my perspective.
what does that mean to me--one now caught between a love and a friend?
we'll have to see.
4/14/2004 09:26:18 AM
you have to realize that someday you will die
until you know that
you are useless.
...i say evolve and let the chips fall where they may.
love,
tyler
4/14/2004 08:55:51 AM
current mp3
met::the.wait
[One, two, three, four]
we watched School of Rock last night @ our Tuesday tribal gathering for conversation and pizza amidst the new Rudd digs. the girls and i saw the film in the theatre last year. it was better on DVD... lower expectations. i have been in a rock mood this morning as a result of our late Jack Black inspired evening.
i'm listening to the Metallica cover of Killing Joke's The Wait, at the moment--a song that was in the film (the speeding van scene). Garage Days is such a good cover album. i remember buying it in Greece back in '86 or '87. i remember my dad saying, "you are in Greece and all you want to buy is a tape?" i remember answering simply, "yes."
the '84 Garage Days Revisited had two killer songs that the '87 Garage Days Re-Revisited did not--Am I Evil and Blizkrieg.
I got something to say...
it's funny the paradigms we bring to the things we end up doing. for the longest time i saw everything in terms of being in a band. to me it seemed the natural manner of approach for just about everything. a band is small and loyal. a band is about passion. a band is about leveraging small things to move people. a band was all that i loved about community and creative production in an easily conceived arrangment. i don't know when i stopped seeing life through this prism. perhaps i still do at times.
4/13/2004 10:22:26 AM
Jakob Nielsen's Why Mobile Phones are Annoying
...the problem seems to be that people pay more attention when they hear only half a conversation. It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns.
4/12/2004 07:55:36 PM
Leah (who is Jewish) posted a great thought on Easter. One of the many comments on her post (the one from Jim on 4/12 06:29pm) calls Christianity, "a kind of Jewish starter kit for the Pagans." Not a bad summary.
4/12/2004 07:42:38 PM
i am regularly asked what i am reading. here are some books i have enjoyed in the last two months (top of my head... i may add a couple as they come to me):
the death and life of great american cities -Jane Jacobs
after theory -Terry Eagleton
urban tribes -Ethan Watters
holding on to reality -Albert Borgmann
in the name of identity -Amin Maalouf
the didache: faith, hope, & life of the earliest christian communities -Aaron Milavec
the search to belong -Joe Myers
free prize inside -Seth Godin
a passion for the impossible -Mark Dooley, John D. Caputo
4/12/2004 05:50:06 PM
Forbes is running the first hands-on review of Gmail here. The snippet below interested me. It seems that, at least at this stage, Gmail is allowing users to build rudimentary taxonomies to organize their correspondence. This logical structure will do away with the old folder metaphor allowing for a single piece of data to logically reside in multiple places within the taxonomy.
I like.
...Organizing messages from your inbox is also different with Gmail. Gmail's approach is to use labels, instead of folders, which allows messages to have overlapping types.
For instance, you might subscribe to a mailing list where you discuss politics, but also correspond privately about politics and other things with a personal friend, with whom you're also making vacation plans. If a message from your friend addresses both an ongoing political discussion and vacation plans, it can be labeled as "politics" and "vacation." On the left side of the inbox screen you can click on these labels and instantly see all the messages labeled as politics or vacation or whatever you want.
4/12/2004 07:31:08 AM
emergentkiwi: A toast to opaquacity. Now is the world any different?
"Now is the world any different?" yes, i believe so. every thin fiber of interaction and each tissue of credulity and incredulity brought on by such dalliances as this have part in that from which our futures emerge. these are perhaps some of the more important world-changing activities we undertake throughout the day because they have to do with how we are shaped through the nuance of language and narrative within which we live. The effects of simple interactions are like slight, invisible changes that over time pile up to impact us in substantial, visible ways.
The question, though, seems out of place to one, like me, who views such interaction as a normal part of life not unlike defecation or tucking my children into bed. the world is changed by all of it, but is the world changing the criterion of success we are really to shoot toward in such things? perhaps you do not agree that the world is changed by the mundane? that there is a threshold for an action to be world-changing that is not met by such engagements? though a particularly satisfying moment of solitude on the commode or the laughter of games before bedtime refreshes and reinforces one's resolution and relational security perhaps they are not included under the "World Changing" banner alongside such events as a particularly rousing political speech or stable, job-producing company; a soul-saving revival or disaster-assisting NGO project? perhaps, but such distinctions, i would suggest, have more to do with scale than with effect. It is likely that the politician and the industrialist, the preacher and the aid-worker all have defining bathroom and bedroom moments that contributed to the intentional and unintentional identities and actions that have now come to represent "who they are." Who they are is not a final state that materialized from nowhere. It was the circuitous pathways and false starts of small actions, innocuous engagements and simple decisions that brought about the context that offered opportunities with broader scope and greater risk and enabled them to execute in such a way as to actualize the opportunity in some fashion.
Marx, the modern popularizer of the world-changing-over-world-analyzing maxim, were he contributing to this thread would perhaps point to my nonsense above as indicative of the analytical way that stands as impediment to the world-changing course that we desperately believe ourselves (if we are earnest) to be just one important action away from initiating. for me the world changing is secondary to my part in the things that make life life. i have no control over the world as such. i often question control as a category of approach to anything. what i do have, for all too brief a moment, are the means by which i choose to engage life.
world-changing is focused on ends. life is all about means.
it is by the means that my world and i are changed.
revolution is in the details.
4/12/2004 06:54:50 AM
Loose Democracy: The Saudi exodus on 9/12 ...When they [Ashcroft and Mueller] testify -- especially Mueller -- we will see whether or not the commission has the stomach to address what may be the single most egregious security lapse related to the attacks: the evacuation of approximately 140 Saudis just two days after 9/11. "In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term."
Craig Unger asks, in the Sunday Globe's Ideas section, raises an important question:
This episode raises particularly sensitive questions for the administration. Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that President Bush himself played a role in authorizing the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What did he know and when did he know it?
I'd also like to know why Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines 6 weeks before 9/11:
4/11/2004 02:44:35 PM
Travis Henderson is a good friend of mine. This is his Orkut professional profile:
college/university: University of Kabul
occupation: I live off a trust fund
industry: Non-Profit, Program Development
job description: I travel alot and do whatever I want. I meet awesome people all over the world and spend money like it will never run out.
career Skills: Social engineering
career Interests: Find social justice through peace and violence.
The last line cracked me up.
I feel like a space monkey in Fight Club, "Do you know Travis Henderson?"
Syndicate