As Andy was leaving yesterday after a dinner including whole wheat pasta (I'm not a fan) we couldn't figure out whether to hug or shake hands. Instead we both leaned into each other for an almost hug then recoiled in male fear of too much of a feminine gesture and switched to an awkward handshake. Andy coined this a "SHUG".
I try not to read the spam that I get but I couldn't help but learn today from my spam that 4 out of 5 men have a positive response to Viagra while only 1 out of 4 have a positive response to a sugar placebo. Makes you wonder about that one guy.
I never thought I'd see this headline.
Hackers Serve Rootkits with Bagles
and
Latest Bagle Worm Attacks with Trojan Horse
I just thought it sounded funny that there are all these bagels attacking in various ways.
During a rather low energy weekend I decided that apathy may be the result of the current political and economic climate in the United States. We should have a study on the rate of apathy among Americans today vs. prior times in history. My guess is that nobody would have the energy to do the study and once published very few people would care to read it or make changes based upon the recommendations.
During a rather low energy weekend I decided that apathy may be the result of the current political and economic climate in the United States. We should have a study on the rate of apathy among Americans today vs. prior times in history. My guess is that nobody would have the energy to do the study and once published very few people would care to read it or make changes based upon the recommendations.
Jeremy and I were disheartened regarding our hopes of becoming the world's preemininent podcasters when Jeremy ran into this site, Bikini calculus which is a couple of attractive women that explain calculus to dorky guys who watch podcasts. So we were figuring we'd be better off doing a hot chick version of Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman. But we are still putting out the same old stuff until then on the Entropy podcast with a long argument between Jeremy and me about the war in Iraq.
Jeremy posted another podcast from a few weeks back onto the Entropy podcast web site. He creatively called it – Entropy Episode Due. He has been suffering through the perils of editing a group of conversations from driving in the car into something coherent including editing out the content that is either boring, top secret, or would affect our personal relationships in a severely negative way. In the content he explains that he can do the work each week despite the fact that the content is over three weeks old.
Having been assigned to promote the podcast, episode one of Entropy is live today, I went to the itunes web site to register it with them. What I noticed were all of the free podcasts and video podcasts already available for free through itunes. I only had time to briefly look at a video broadcast of a tiki bar with a doctor, another guy, and a woman talking about things that was not interesting enough to keep my attention for more than twenty seconds. But I do believe there is something to be said for the medium. I saw a glimmer of the tournament starting to come alive. With few barriers to publishing video content the long tail of publishing is rushing to fill the many gaps left open by the mainstream media. We'll soon be able to find large chunks of niche items and creative productions straight from every city. Our local improv troupes will be recording their sessions and putting their funniest bits up for viewing, the street musicians will broadcast semi-live from Porter Square, odd ducks will overdub old porn movies in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (MST3K) style. Any wacky concept or new sub-culture has a chance to go pop in the big tournament of Internet media.
I haven't figured out who will make money at it yet but my best guess is to back the standard winner of any tournament - the promoters and the ones running the tournament themselves. If it's itunes - power to them. If it's those Allaire brothers then so be it. I for one plan to be one of those poor shmoes contributing as best I can at the bottom of the heap in the widest stretch of the pyramid and will be loving every minute of making media that only the the bold and brave with iron visual cortexes and ears of steel will attempt to imbibe.
Jeremy while obsessing about the quality of the sound and focusing all of his brain cells not dedicated to filtering the Internet dating scene has tasked me with figuring out how to properly enclose and promote the revival of our college radio show in the form of a podcast. The initial test can be found on a blogger blog called Entropy and packaged as an RSS feed using Feedburner.
Among the interesting things that I found for promoting the podcast was the Podzinger site. It is a search engine that indexes podcasts into text and then allows you to search for the content and load the section of the podcast that raised your search results. At first glance this appears to be some incredible technology. What I found interesting about it given that I have been doing some research into the speech to text world is that Podzinger is a BBN technology. Now for those people who are unfamiliar with BBN, they were a big time government contractor building among many things the original infrastructure for the Arpanet, the government’s private predecessor to the public Internet. One speech to text expert had mentioned to me that BBN had a large contract in the 80s building speech to text for the government, probably the NSA, in order to filter international telephone calls. The system would convert International conversations to text and then identify conversations that might be worth listening deeper into for national security. If BBN has been working on this technology since the ‘80s for Uncle Sam then they probably are going to be getting to the point by now where they are good enough at it to really recognize what it happening when people are talking. They might even be better at it than the Microsoft Speech to Text engine.
It isn't fair to expect the people in the speech to text division of Microsoft to translate what Madeline was saying. So instead Sarah and I spent some time telling it a story after I had trained it using the Aesop's fables and excerpt from some novel that it requested. After about 30 minutes of training here is some fabulous speech to text poetry (excerpted and mildly modified). We weren't stoned but I can imagine that this technology is something that stoned college students around the world can't wait to get their hands on.
Your own tax plan.com plan name is old and I see you will happen now to take a new price. But no tax man.com. I mean, I'm I've even had been now over taxed until you had not modified my idea, But I am affected by this . The reason they are used in the house defense plan is because it is the perfect tool. It is a list of rooms with the word and they can turn it into a real back door by the dozens. We were very well in hand and it comes up with very fine. I mean we may know that you can be one for when they heard that when I was a mime they said Mahlmann over a five. Call in the debate statements about moving the team."Send a mailto: to Debbie Ito so that I can tell myself that you fall in the hope that you can not need the old, We'll need what I'd had. You are now losing and used by the denied. No is the palace museum of art snow. He will not have seen us stopping this year and in the two we will have to support." said bill gates and no, I am two melons and I am buried in a lot while why did our lab travel at all but not been ranked. The lack of the line has done in and out of time a line of fire. Nineteen sumerian banks in an Airport issued by Dean was caught Mike. He is known to have been in an interview with the latest addition to the top. He gets to lead to what I know is the new beetle sex.
No high today for the mature are to now self-examine. It lacked but it did not involve your pitch. What I need I meet its even I'm going to come to you if you get anyone to visit to Rome. I will kill you and your children and you will be directed into stuffed animals. An even did not know how to top stop the cop who went to rock the stop. I said to the man if you don't file a tax.com then you may as well as read the error that will satisfy the Islamics to the the line. You have black citizens in alliance's and AOL in December!
Jeremy and I were testing podcast equipment yesterday in the car. The adventures began by my giving him a 256MB card that didn't work and lost most of the conversations we attempted to record while walking around the apartment and coolidge corner. We then went to RadioShack to purchase better microphones but discovered that the cheap crap at Radio Shack really was cheap and bad quality stuff. So we drove to guitar center and got recommendations from some people about what equipment to use as a microphone. I tried to get the headset microphone to work but it was uncomfortable and didn't look like a good thing to wear while driving. So we ended by purchasing a condenser microphone that had a shock cage. Upon taking it home it didn't perform any better than the crappy microphone included with the recorder we had purchased.
The full recording for it was launched on our new podcast site Entropy.
It is far from our best work but we figured we would start with some very bad quality things so that we could improve from a low base. It would allow us to set people's expectations very low in case we somehow produced something interesting. Unfortunately the podcast world is filled with many people who actually edit their content on a regular basis and take it very seriously.
Our little improv troupe was dealt a heavy blow last week when we discovered that our leader who had stepped-up to direct temporarily, Suzi, had landed a full time part in an Improv Boston show about twisted superheroes. So we had been reduced from six, down already from eleven, and now down to five. The news was enough to shock the group into not practicing and try to rethink whether we had any chance of holding things together. Among the ideas were to start meeting other people to get fresher by going to Sunday Yes And practices, the Sgt. Culpepper’s Jamboree, keep taking classes outside of our group. I think I was terse with Suzi and didn’t properly congratulate her. I was happy to see her succeed but in turmoil from her leaving the group and the clear havoc it would wreak with the little team we were trying to bond together. So we walked over to the Inn now located in what was once the fire station at Kendall and shared a bottle of wine. We got a full detailed history of Joan’s life leading to her marriage and were generally chatting about marriage because Hillary had just gotten back from her wedding.
The result was that this week Mike and I went to the Improv Foundry audition instead of our usual group gathering. The room was brimming with improvisers, about forty in all. We started by doing a gesture wave around the room where each person would do the gesture and sound from an initiator around in a circle and then the next person would initiate. It was especially fun because we had such a large group that we had to go through it super fast. As usual I wasn’t very funny because it was an audition and I felt clumsy and clueless. On the audition sign-up sheet they asked for a haiku about how I felt. Mine was:
Try to be funny tonight
Big blister on lip
The baby is coming soon
I have no grand illusion that I’ll be called back for more of what I did in there. I had actually auditioned for them a year or two back and not gotten very far. I hope they don’t think I’m some freak who lives to be rejected by them. But that isn’t a bad freak to be.
The nice cheerful thing about the audition was that there was a long pause/break when the official improvisers were off chatting about how crappy the various new recruits looked. During this break I walked out into the hall of the Egg Atrium to find a ballroom dance class in session. The class included an uneven number of boys to girls with one girl as the extra so I offered my services as a ballroom dance student. I qualify because I have no idea how to ballroom dance. The girl was probably a Wellesly student and was excited to have someone to chat and dance with rather than look silly alone and pitiful on the sidelines while everyone else danced. Unfortunately she had missed the first two classes and this was the third so we were both horribly behind in our expertise and just stumbled about looking like idiots while the rest of the class glided, ungracefully, but in unison to the instructors command. After twenty minutes the opportunity came to switch partners and I worked hard to market my dance partner to a lucky man and quickly made my exit before I was assigned a new and more experienced dance partner that might not be so entertained that I was dance class crashing.
The depression that set-in last week in my own emotional crash after the Suzi breakdown and my two person attendance at my Bootstrap Boston monthly meeting crawled into me late last week. I got a bad illness inside from it or maybe from a passing flu that eventually condensed into a long, thin, and painful cold sore on my lip. I feel like sometimes I am a moron explorer who roams from place to place haphazardly planting flags into the ground to establish new territories that only I believe in. For a short time one or two insane people are willing to go along with my little flags and then sooner or later the few people around me leave and I am left alone looking cock-eyed and slumped over my own failure at this flag that I put into the ground to claim some key idea like PRM, smart organizer, improv practice troupe, bootstrap Boston, whatever.
It is depressing times when I get thoughts like these that I am ecstatic that my baby daughter is soon to be born. I can fail at everything else but my greatest ambition is to be a good father and to raise a generation of good children. While my own accomplishments will likely always be just crazy flag planting, recruiting, building, and breaking down, my hope is to find an enduring success with be produced from the love that I put into my own family.
If you have ever tried to sell enterprise software and been presented with responding to a dreaded RFP. This is what an RFP would be like if someone was interested in buying your house. I dug this off my old computer too. I am not sure why I wrote it.
Home Owner RFI
This RFI (Request for Information) has been sent to you because you have been selected as a potential vendor for Daniel Housman and his family in the area of HOME OWNERSHIP. Mr. Housman and his family have contracted our consulting firm Amoco, Price, and Kraft to aid in the selection process. Your response is due on [ print yesterday’s date] in order to be considered for a demonstration of your home. If your home is selected for the next round of our purchasing process you will be contacted via a secret code and be provided with a key to unlock the code. In order to respond you will first need to send back an NDA that you have received this and are not intending to show it to anyone else.
If the house burns down will I be able to replace it the next day? What tools will you use to rebuild it?
How many houses have you sold before and to who? Can you provide 50 references of people who have purchased properties from you and which types of things such as bathrooms, swimming pools, or solar panels were included in each one.
Can your house fly?
If not what are your plans to make your house fly in upcoming remodeling?
Can your house fly if we remodel the basement?
Our family would like to move our current swimming pool to where your swimming pool is because we like our swimming pool better. Can you describe any tools you are offering with your house to allow us to do this? Is there a price break for bringing our own swimming pool (REQUIRED)
What materials was your house built with? Please explain how it was built describing each layer in the houses architecture.
Does your house support all standards for power, television, and reception? We have some appliances that we bought in England and would like to use them in our new house including a telephone – France , a toaster oven – China, a Television and VCR – England. Please describe how your house would accommodate these appliances.
Does you house provide broadband access?
Do your outlets support industrial machinery standards?
How many people can be fit into your house before it crumbles t o the ground. Please provide any load testing you may have done on your house such as total volume of people that can be fit into the building as well as what will happen during particularly active periods with varying numbers of participants such as
A) A dance party
B) Riot
C) Tae-Boe
Have you ever held a party with more than 800 people in your house before? IF so please provide the names of some of the attendees at the party.
Home features – We are evaluating features of our home please enter whether you have any of these features and whether it is a “Minor”, “Moderate”, “Major”, or “Impossible” home improvement to improve your home to meet our requirements
Included – Included in price of home
Minor – Small adjustment to furnishings
Moderate – Cosmetic change such as paint, interior modification
Major – Structural change to walls, floors, etc.
Impossible – Beyond the laws of physics
Kitchen - Requirements
Big Sink big enough to fit 100 unwashed dishes
Self-Cleaning Oven with top grill
Microwave oven
Sub-Zero Fridge
Wooden Cabinets
Wooden floor
Washing machine and dryer
Robot that cooks and cleans for me
I was scanning an RSS feed while testing the new find RSS feeds functionality in an alpha release. It was something just sitting around on feedster for the Red Sox feed. The news item listed was a short piece about how Matt Clement has gained Psychic powers since he was hit on the head. The site it came from, Call of the Green Monster, is just awesome and funny (if you are a Red Sox fan).
I somehow bumped into the new Synch Magazine site today. They had created some imaginary IT products for gangsta's.
I think I know enough about Photoshop to start creating my own similar photo inventions. That is what I have been doing with trying to build an OEM channel at work. The work is mainly taking the existing product, other products, and photoshop to show how they would work together. It is a fun activity and is generally received well because people are able to appreciate the visual prototype more than the conceptual one. They can look at it and go... "oh that is exactly what we need to have." once they see it.
I personally want the gun remote control or the low-rider laptop. My only problem with the gun remote control is that it didn't appear to have the universal remote buttons that I need.
On the entrepreneurship side I was talking to Bijoy Goswami who started a group called Austin Bootstrap that has been steadily growing. The bootstrap mantra at some level is one that most people don't intuitively trust but is very important. It is sell, build, market. You have to find some customers willing to pay for the product and then build it for the ones who pay for it. You can then market the success to other folks with the same needs. At least that is among the solution to the problem of getting out of the cycle of needing capital.
Bijoy wrote a book that he self-published and talked me into being the leader of Bootstrap Boston, the wing of his organization. He also had made a keen observation about the differece between east coast entrepreneurial culture and west coast culture. The west coast culture provides a greater degree of respect and importance to the entrepreneurial activity of evangelism while the east coast is still focused on the technologist who can build the solution.
As a convert to the religion that the problem with technology is that people try to make products but don't know why anyone needs the technology or how to convert a generic tool into an actual business solution I was happy to hear about it. It filled my head with crazy ideas including that schools teaching technology (ahem MIT) should also teach courses in evangelism to give the students a real edge. Evangelism is different from marketing and even the generic entrepreneurship although they go hand in hand. Maybe I can mention this to folks around MIT like Ken Morse and see what they think.
It was Monday night and I was on my way back from the KIS audition down at the puppet theatre. I had made the third callback along with four other folks. I was really tired from having stayed-up late creating a powerpoint presentation for an analyst at Forrester. So during the KIS audition I made what I believe to be the fatal mistake of making an offer for a scene inspired by “Bald at 15” in the foreign film exercise that related to one of the two people on stage having cancer. It was the main reason why I could justify a bald girl at 15 but afterwards I think it got me into enough trouble as an auditionee to get some black marks. The highlight of my audition was when we were playing worlds worst, but called Die, and coming-up with fake names for cereals and mine was “Chunky bits of Steve”. So it is on to another future audition. I’ll hear that I didn’t make the troupe by Wednesday. How humbling!
But I do have an audition with IB next Monday with my wonderful instructors. It was somewhat uncanny that the feedback that I got from KIS from the first two auditions was pretty much identical to the feedback that I got from the IB classes. I look out into the audience too often for approval, talk too much/mime too little, take on too many high status characters, and don’t explore a wide enough range of characters. My guess is that these things are embedded in my personality but I should try to change them for the good of my adoring fans, mainly Lisa my sister.
So I was walking home from the audition feeling that about to be rejected feeling that is similar to standing under a piano held by a fishing line. Next to the used television store/ mob front money laundering service, on the corner of Harvard and Aspinwall I saw some books in the garbage. The one that caught my eye was a big hard cover Combat and Survival book. That caught my interest and digging a little further I also found a stack of large format hard cover art books with VanGogh, Matisse, Cezanne, and Dali. So I called Sarah and grabbed the stack of books. Then I saw two boxes labeled the Playboy Centerfold Collector Cards The January Edition Collector’s Case. Since I have this belief the collector cards and beanie babies are highly desirable by crazy obsessive compulsive people on eBay I grabbed the two boxes of January edition cards.
I then tried to figure out what they were worth but it was almost impossible to do so. Instead I found some choice other items including a person who collects Alf trading cards, a useful tidbit about sugar packet collecting. Still no information on the value of my found artwork collection.
