Home | Comments | IM or Webcam Chat | Forum
email me: chris@chris-karath.com

April 2011

<--Previous Month | Next Month -->

Blog starts below


Ptw GL Movie stuff

Ptw GL Movie stuff

Flickr: Sat 04-30-11 22:19:59 -0400


Ptw Really? #IFeelOld

Ptw Really? #IFeelOld
-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Flickr: Sat 04-30-11 19:55:05 -0400


Ptw Almost some Blue Sky peekingthru - sigh

Ptw Almost some Blue Sky peekingthru - sigh
-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Flickr: Thu 04-28-11 13:01:37 -0400



Sat 4/23/11 12:32pm #

Surfing

In days gone by, people would sit in front of the television and channel surf. Now a days of course we are much more advanced, we can sit in front of our desktops/laptops/tablets and phones and surf the internet instead.

It's a tremendous amount of progress.

So while I busily did “not much” this morning, through the power of social networking (Twitter and Facebook) I was also able to follow dozens of other people this morning as they did “not much” as well.

Again, a tremendous amount of progress. Before people would have to wonder what their acquaintances were not doing. Now one can be constantly connected to the non-activities of others as well.

Little but not much sarcasm intended. The internet still continues to be pretty much the most interesting thing going. But it's not so shiny as to not poke a little fun at it on occasion.

Tablets

Switching gears, it seems like everyone on my Twitter (and by everyone, I suppose I mean 4 or 5 people) are getting iPad 2s soon. Apparently Apple is having a hard time keeping the things in stock and most people are having a multiple week wait to get one. It's only April, but typically as sumer or spring approaches people get outside and spend less time with their computers, but given the portable nature of the tablets and the still growing popularity of social networks, maybe that will be less the case this year.

What's next?

Scanning my Google Reader this morning, I am still left with the thought, “what's next?”. Social Networking and tablet's seem like such a bright event horizon, that so far I'm having a little challenge seeing what's over it to what's next when they become ubiquitous.

Is there something out there happening that I'm not seeing?

“Regular folk” will likely, this year, start getting Android and Apple smartphones in massive numbers. The more “techy folk” will probably all have iPads by the end of the year. Twitter and Facebook will continue to shift people away from voice and text unless real time communication is a necessity. It's trivial to subscribe to news about all your interests now, and with so much entertainment streaming to our devices there is always something to watch, listen to and read. The personal media/info cocoon seems to be on the verge of being perfected this year for the masses.

So I guess, following that logic, if the internet has reached a point where it can completely entertain the individual, perhaps connecting groups of people in real time should be next?

With my cable internet, a comfy chair and an assortment of screens, there is no need to leave the cocoon, but there is still the desire to.

Social network app makers need to stop focusing on sharing. We can all share anything easily now.

That's done.

But how do we come together for a flash mob/group concert. How do pez/stamp/vinyl/sneaker collectors organize a massive meetup in realspace efficiently and regularly? How can people come together for 2 hours and paint a school's fence, or 10 people show up to rake an old person's yard.

There are ways to do those things sure, but how do you make such activities as ubiquitous to find and convenient as Facebook has made keeping up with your friend's children's birthday photos?

And what new public spaces need to be invented to allow these flash groups to come together for an hour or two? For business, you see little spots of coworking locations pop up here or there, but in my opinion for the knowledge worker a small home office is going to be the most effective place to work if you aren't in a big office. But where will the coworking of socialization happen? You don't want a flash mob of strangers in your backyard. But if there was a MeetingSpace where 20 people could use paypal to spontaneously contribute $2 to rent for 2 hours? What cool things could people connected by the internet come together to do? Maybe just a board game, or maybe people rent a location to watch their favorite series season finale together, or maybe it's just a lecture or a vacation slide show presentation.

Sharing is nice, but people have to get together and solve how they can actually connect people in real space instead of just screens. The pathfinder robot on Mars does wonderful things by remote, but two astronauts together on location would do more in a day than such a virtual connection would do in a month. But that's mostly what the internet is today, virtual connections. And as of yet, noone seems to have an effective solution for real connections. We're still trapped in, lets meet at the the corner bar, and let's face it, the corner bar isn't good for much beyond drinking and swapping informal stories. We can use the internet to do more, I'd hope something like that would be what's next. But more likely we'll probably just get a holographic iPad 3 next year. “Help me Obi-wan, you're my only hope.”

I want to hear your



Ptw Got an HDMI cable to hook my Android tablet to tv

Ptw Got an HDMI cable to hook my Android tablet to tv
Got it thru dealextreme for $6.70. Outputs video to tv well too. Looking forward to using it in hotel next time we travel. Probably wont use it at home since the mac mini works a bit better for most things.

Flickr: Fri 04-22-11 17:56:32 -0400



Sun 4/17/11 11:32am #

Let's Go Surfing

- Learn to Sew
source: Instructables: exploring - featured

Learn to Sew gives you full step-by-step instructions for 17 projects to teach you the ins and outs of sewing. Learn basic hand-sewing stitches, how to thread a machine, and the basics for making your own clothes! All projects come from Instructables.com

- The Four Player Coffee Table Pong Video Game.
source: Instructables: exploring - featured

Very cool.

- Super Table - covered with comic books
source: Instructables: exploring - featured

I want to hear your




Sun 4/17/11 10:39am #

Let's Go Surfing

- The Elasticity of the "Love Hypothesis"
source: Modeled Behavior

However, student loans are an example of the principal and the agent being the same person. Students are largely mortgaging their own futures in order to increase their marginal productivity. Thus they dont need to love themselves, that explains why people spend money on other peoples education (indeed, it explains the skyrocketing tuition at ivy league schools, where parents do pay the bills many times).

- David Frum On Making the World Anew
source: Modeled Behavior

We can fulminate against unchangeable realities, alienate ourselves from a country that will not accede to the changes we demand. That way lies bitterness and irrelevance. Or we can go back to work on the core questions facing all center right parties in the advanced economies since World War II: how do we champion entrepreneurship and individualism within the context of a social insurance state?

- Why Do We Send Kids to School?
source: Modeled Behavior

However, it does introduce lots of puzzles. If education is really about giving you the skills to get a good job then why isnt education more vocationally focused.

If its all just a signal then why is our long drawn-out educational process not replaced by testing to see if you are smart and then a grueling internship to see if you have the work ethic to cut it. The military does this for enlisted soldiers and it seems to work well for them.

On the other hand the education as a sign of love hypothesis explains lots of things. It explains a focus on small class sizes. It explains a focus on prestige. It explains why spending on education would just go up as society got richer and why rising inequality would lead to exploding inequality in educational spending.

- Imagining a world without the moon race
source: Modeled Behavior

But perhaps not building a huge network of highways would have kept American families in more compact, walkable neighborhoods. Instead of sprawling suburbs and SUVs, wed have more high-rises and bike lanes. The Interstate Highways helped supersize Americas government, by centralizing authority in D.C., and our waistlines, by encouraging us to drive and to fatten up on fast food. Its not obvious to me that were better off as a nation plagued by high taxes and heart disease.

- Landsburg on Responsibility
source: Modeled Behavior

Heres why: The governments chief asset in fact, pretty much its only asset is its ability to tax people, now and in the future. The taxpayers are the governments ATM. Make a withdrawal today, and there's less available tomorrow.
See, it's stuff like the above where conservatism really fails. The implied idea that government does not produce value. Most liberals have a more balanced view. There are some things the private sector does well and there are some things that government does better.

Anything where "profit motive" is your main driver, the private sector is going to handily succeed at. Throw any other motive or mix of motives into the mix and you are going to need to find a balance between private and public.

While I'm at it though, companies really aren't private enterprises. If you have 10s of thousands of employees, your organization by size becomes to large to be a private concern. Companies started as a government charter for groups of people to act in concert with limited individual liability. Somewhere we lost that notion and these massive undying conglomerates instead became perceived as individuals.

Any reasonable person would need to acknowledge that should not be the case. Even if you are the sole owner of a large corporation. That corporation is not a part of you any more than my shoe is a part of me.

- Taxes, Spending and Debt
source: Modeled Behavior

Nice Article. Good essay on why the above in your personal life do not apply the same to a nation.

- In Defense of Cash
source: Modeled Behavior

The problem is that its bad for showing tribal allegiance. One can show up to a friends house for dinner with a bottle of wine as gift but not $40 in cash. I let everyone know that would gladly take the cash, but my wife says "this is why no one wants to have dinner with you."

There is a similar problem replacing Medicare with cash.

- Bacon Roses
source: Instructables: exploring - featured

Roses, made of bacon.

- How to Make Edible Angry Birds
source: Instructables: exploring - featured

Food Fight!

- Cheap iPad/Tablet stand.
source: Instructables

What a great way to repurpose one of those cheap sheet metal bookends with a few rubber stickon dots.

I want to hear your



Ptw Fresh made brownies with glaze

Ptw Fresh made brownies with glaze
Microwaveable glaze. What a great invention.

Flickr: Sat 04-16-11 21:37:10 -0400


Ptw Last of Wave Two including Build a Figure Stel

Ptw Last of Wave Two including Build a Figure Stel

Flickr: Sat 04-16-11 19:22:34 -0400



Sat 4/16/11 1:22pm #

Random Non-Sequiters

Walked by my Palm Pre and picked it up and checked Twitter real quick. The Pre will be two years old in June. It's still my favorite Twitter and Facebook experience. Probably the best email experience too. It's 2 years old. Things feel pretty static over the last two years tech wise.

Ah, but the iPad! Well you may be right on that. I don't have one though (Although I do have a 4th gen iPad Nano (er I mean Touch). I have had a couple 7" Android tablets to date. The latest of which works well enough that I've largely abandoned carring my netbook around with me day to day. But for the most part the tablet really does just feel like a larger version of the smartphone. (I'm getting closer to just breaking down and springing for a proper iPad 2, instead of the more hobbyist Android tablet. Maybe in the fall.)

When I was in San Francisco earlier in the week, I used the Tablet, Touch and Pre exclusively for 5 days. Worked perfectly fine. Nothing like having Google maps' public transit info when you are in a new city. One thing that was a little odd, was coming back home an realizing how spacious the dual 19" monitors on my desk are. Not any more functional really, but compared to living on tablets and smartphones for awhile, the 2 big monitors are like candy bars after you've been off sugar for a week. Delightful.

You see that thing about Benton Harbor? We've got this new law in Michigan where the state can more or less dissolve local governments. Republicans now that they arein charge of the House want to more or less end Medicare. And the population is so distracted in general, that we can start wars with countries without any public discussion at all. Then of course there is the whole business of the country being broke and that being the fault of union teachers.

Television news channels are more or less worthless at this point. Most, at the moment, are giving constant coverage to polls showing Donald Trump as the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination. At least Glenn beck is getting booted off Fox. Sure there's lots of great news to be had on the internet, it's just a challenge to wade through most of the crap.

Have I lamented my vast Google Reader subscriptions in the last few weeks? I love Google Reader and I'm firmly in the camp that RSS is not dead but there's still so many worthless posts on the major blog sites now. Maybe it goes back to my first paragraph above that there really hasn't been a new paradigm in the last 2 years, but as much as I love the "hit" i get from hitting the next story arrow. The blogs are full of mostly boring stuff right now.

Ok, enough negativity for the moment. There's some media that is worth looking forward to. Game of Thrones premiering this weekend looks really good. And in another week, a new Doctor Who season starts up! Plus this is certainly going to be the summer of superheroes, X-Men First Class, Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America, and I'll even toss Cowboys and Aliens into that mix. With that many genre film coming out, that $30 refillable popcorn bucket at Celebration Cinema actually looks like it might make sense. (Now that I think about it, maybe that should be part of the Republican health care plan, for $5,000 a year you get a pill bottle and you then get to refill it with any medication from a private pharmacy you need. Ryan, Boehner -- feel free to use that.)

As for now, I'm off to go do a bunch of laundry. I'll most likely catch up on the last few weeks of Wizard World Digital on my tablet while doing that.

Got anything to add? Post in the comments, or tweet back, or facebook me, send me an Instagram, upload it in a twitpic, or give me a link to your own thoughts on your Tumblr, Blogger or Posterous.

I want to hear your




Sat 4/16/11 11:33am #

Let's Go Surfing


- WonderCon 2011 Green Lantern
source: ActionFigurePics.com

Nice selection of Green Lantern toy pics.

I want to hear your




Sun 4/10/11 9:57am #

Spent first day in San Fransisco.

Nice city, but not exactly what I expected so far.

We've been up by Fisherman's Warf and Pier 39 for the most part, but we also got down to Chinatown as well the edge of the financial district.

Things that have struck me differently. Haven't really seen any fast food chains around this area. Very little to non-existent advertising anywhere in this part of town either. Both are very notable because the foot traffic hustling too and fro Saturday was quite immense-- people everywhere.

Scarfs around people's necks seem to be big as well. Not sure that's a San Fran thing, but given the weather which has been nice when in the sun but then cold as soon as you hit the shade and get hit with those Bay Area breezes, scrafes seem a practical idea.

We're off for more exploration today.

I want to hear your



Ptw Sea Lions and a whole lot of apartments

Ptw Sea Lions and a whole lot of apartments
-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Flickr: Sat 04-09-11 16:45:15 -0400


Ptw San Fran bound

Ptw San Fran bound

Flickr: Sat 04-09-11 06:28:24 -0400


Ptw Haircut

Ptw Haircut
-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Flickr: Thu 04-07-11 18:38:56 -0400


<--Previous Month | Next Month -->