Jeremy and I were listening on the radio to NPR as usual today. Maybe I'm the only person who has noticed this but the BBC World News thus far in 2006 has been using a lot more people with various accents in the newscast. They had a Scottish reporter embedded in China interviewing people with a translator with a heavy Chinese accent yesterday and today they had plenty of people with heavy Israeli accents. My guess is that someone at the World News decided to make a resolution to include a more worldly sound to the news but the result is that we are having more fun than ever trying to repeat what people say in funny accents as we drive. I think the Scottish reporter said that some number of people had trebled.

Today Jeremy and I had been discussing the surprising lack of an adult related channel on Sirius Satellite radio which surprised both of us. The NPR folks were discussing the rise of the podcast and interviewing Adam Curry who has a new podcast network that is attracting podcasters to leave their day jobs. Among the people they said were successful podcasters were a priest, a stay at home mom, and a guy who talks into a recorder on his way home from work. Jeremy and I may give podcasting a try for fun by recording our conversations in the car. They will likely include such interesting topics like our thirty minutes lost in Burlington looking for the Mexican restaurant as well as the conversation about whether aliens could actually eat us or not based on their biological chemistry including sugars common to our biological evolution. I am certain that the average number of listeners wouldn't get beyond one person per month but boy would it be fun to play with recording equipment and put the recordings on the Internet!

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I heard about this bird that got shot for knocking over dominoes while the folks were trying to break some domino run.

"The bird was shot by an exterminator with an air rifle while cowering in a corner."

Maybe I am a bit of an odd duck but it's hard not to empathize with the bird. I find myself imagining what it would be like to be a bird happily flying through a window into a giant hall and then suddenly finding that I had pissed off some obsessive compulsize dutch domino fanatics that would normally not hunt down a happy sparrow but due to circumstances beyond the normal expectations they needed someone to pay. It at least would make a great scene in a novel to highlight the futility of life at all levels.

Posted by Melody at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Liz sent me a note this morning that our old drivers ed teacher is in some hot water. The folks at Boston.com wrote about it in an article about Drivers ed rape allegations. I remember Mr. Swerling as the guy who ran the movies like Blood on the Highway. He was famous for his extra brake in the passenger seat and saying... "Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up-up-up-up-up, STOOOOOPP!!!".

He never tried to sexually assault me but I wasn't a very attractive child. In general I would have to place drivers ed teachers, sorry to malign the entire profession, in a similar category as priests. People who show movies of bloody boodies to teenagers and have the teenagers drive them to the donut shop to get coffee are definitely suspicious.

In Mr. Swerling's case the courts already decided his fate. According to the Daily News Tribune he was acquitted. I think I believe him.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scorzelli family goes back to the future
I learned in an email from DK that the Scorzelli family has been hiding a Delorean in their garage for the past few years. They were interviewed about it in Town Online This Car's a Throwback to the Future. The article contained some great quotes from Chris' dad and mom including:

"I don't know what I'm going to do. The car's become an albatross around my neck, to be honest with you," Scorzelli said.

"This car has taken on a life of its own. It's ludicrous," said Reinke-Scorzelli. "The idea of having it was more fun than actually getting it. It became such an obstacle."

In other news, Ron and Jen are finally getting married which brings the summer of weddings total, including the wedding we missed in California due to morning sickness and our own wedding, to seven. I think we will need to watch the movie Wedding Crashers to figure out how to better optimize these events.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)