Connecting the Dots

In touch with your inner geek...

For years people have frequently said to me, "Gee...you're kind of a geek aren't you?" Though my outside package and demeanor makes many people just assume that I'm "a suit", I have to admit that I'm a closet geek and am very intellectually curious about all things tech that most think scream "geek" and "nerd".

But I believe that geek/nerd=propellerhead-who-smells-funny-and-loves-computers isn't the norm any longer. Nor is geekdom or being nerdy the exclusive domain of those of us in technology. Just like my blog covers open source software, space science, nanotechnology, sentient computing, the internet and other things people have described as "eclectic", I find geeks and nerds in *every* discipline -- especially as technological advances touch them all (I'd even say one of my sisters-in-law is a "quilt geek" as she is really passionate and in-to quilting technology, etc.). 

I'm often asked how I stay on top of what's going on in the world of technology. I read many different books, of course, but here are a handful of my favorite stops on the 'net that keep my geekiness fed:

• Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. This is *the* #1 stop for nerds and geeks.
• Freshnews.org: Great news compilation site about open source, etc.
• Wired: Still the best all around magazine and great site too (I also have the premiere issue and probably the first several dozen...and have been a subscriber from day one)
• New Scientist: Love this site as it covers science...and lots of it.
• CNet's News.com: Great place to keep your fingers-on-the-pulse
• Engadget: Fun daily stop to see what's new in gadgetry
• Gizmag: Even cooler as it covers A LOT of different gizmo's and doohickey stuff.

I have many more sites I visit daily (and lots of blogs I go to as well), but this is a good start and covers quite a bit.

Oil, Iraq, China and the U.S.: The geopolitics of "freedom and democracy"

Had an interesting conversation last night at a gathering I was at that made me think about how quickly we'll run out of oil and what that might have to do with our foreign policy of "spreading freedom and democracy" and the war in Iraq. Then today -- during my reading adventure on the 'net like most days --  I came across this fascinating and balanced article in China Daily entitled, "Experts: Petroleum may be nearing peak."

"Could the petroleum joyride — cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades — be coming to an end?"

The article talks about experts on both sides of the debate. A guy I'd heard about before, M. King Hubbert, sounded the alarm a LONG time ago and was mentioned in this article, "Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970.

His superiors at Shell Oil were aghast. They even tried to persuade Hubbert not to speak publicly about his work. His peers, accustomed to decades of making impressive oil discoveries, were skeptical.

But Hubbert was right. U.S. oil production did peak in 1970, and it has declined steadily ever since. Even impressive discoveries such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, with 13 billion barrels in recoverable reserves, haven't been able to reverse that trend."

Iraq provides a strategic position in the Middle East. Controlling Iraq and having a base in the Middle East means we'll get *our* oil...no matter what. Part of my conversation last night was about the war in Iraq: "We went there because of terrorism and 9/11" my non-critical-thinking conversation companion insisted. "It's got nothing to do with oil."

Oh if it were only true. There is absolutely no question in my mind that terrorism plays some small justification role in the U.S. invading Iraq, but a strategic position in the Middle East -- and ensuring America's uninterrupted supply of oil over the next 4 or 5 decades -- is the primary reason we're there in my opinion. General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in 1990: "Middle East oil is the West's lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world's proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry."

The world is running out of oil. How fast is open to debate...though with China's consumption accelerating it's bound to happen faster. Projecting 2001 production levels, by 2020 83% of global oil reserves will be controlled by Middle Eastern regimes -- so you can now see why we're in Iraq spreading "freedom and democracy" to the Iraq people...while hypocritically tolerating the conservative, highly restrictive Saudi Arabian monarchy.

If you're interested in learning more, first read "The Oil Factor in Bush's "War on Tyranny", then move on to  "Life after the oil crash"...then look at this and this and finish with this Google "peak oil" search. You may end up as agitated as I am.

SourceForge breaks the 100,000 open source project barrier!

For a few years I've been following many of the projects on Sourceforge.net and use several of them personally. Projects such as Audacity, Filezilla, Gallery, Gimp, Fire, Streamripper, and many others. Imagine my delight when I visited the site tonight and saw that, "SourceForge.net Surpasses 100,000 Projects!" Seems like it was late last Fall when there were approximately 85,000 projects. Why the surge?

If you don't already know, "SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development web site, providing free hosting to tens of thousands of projects. The mission of SourceForge.net is to enrich the Open Source community by providing a centralized place for Open Source developers to control and manage Open Source software development. To fulfill this mission goal, we offer a variety of services to projects we host, and to the Open Source community."

What I'm about to write will definitely "out" me as the closet geek I am: sometimes I'll grab my laptop in the evening and browse the projects on Sourceforge. While this may seem a little bizarre (or make you wonder, "how boring *is* this guy anyway?"), every one of the projects I listed above were ones I stumbled across on Sourceforge by just poking around.

There are some really great personal computer-based projects and they're quick to download and try out. What I some times wrestle with though, is that I'm not technically competent enough to perform due diligence on the features, function, code and merits of projects that are enterprise-class in scope. Still, when I'm told by a Gartner analyst that, "...and Compiere ERP/CRM is quickly becoming ready for prime-time and is close to midlevel enterprise-class" I sit up and take notice. Adding to this analyst's view of the merit of Open Source projects and the effort and energy being expended on them, the home page of the Sourceforge site states in part:

"...we've seen an amazing surge in projects posted to SourceForge.net over the past several months. We think this is due in part to the traction that Open Source is making in the enterprise as more and more companies and organizations begin to migrate and adopt Open Source technologies."

Hmmm....are we at critical mass with Open Source software?

Make your brain better

New Scientist is running an article on "11 Steps to a Better Brain" that I found fascinating. Specifically these snippets leapt off the page:

"...with the help of modafinil, sleep-deprived people can perform even better than their well-rested, unmedicated selves. The forfeited rest doesn't even need to be made good. Military research is finding that people can stay awake for 40 hours, sleep the normal 8 hours, and then pull a few more all-nighters with no ill effects."

"...many people are using Ritalin not because they suffer from attention deficit or any other disorder, but because they want superior concentration during exams or heavy-duty negotiations."

"...go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fueled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work.

But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention."

This last part was about a study of nun's in a convent right here in Minnesota, "...a study of its 75 to 107-year-old inhabitants is revealing more about keeping the brain alive and healthy than perhaps any other to date." The study was undertaken due to the longevity of the nun's and that many of them -- after death and autopsy -- were revealed to be in severe states of dementia though showed no outward symptoms.

I've written about brain hacks, how your brain is wired, ADD/ADHD stuff and more. There are alot of great resources and articles on the 'net about all of these areas that are focused on brain and mind enhancement -- like one blogger I follow religiously, Zack Lynch (in fact, you can use Zack's blog as a launching pad to access tons 'o sites and blogs about this category).

Dave Winer on the Apple iTunes podcasting announcement...

Still think that Apple's announcement (see previous post) that Dave Winer wrote about today, provides a very interesting perspective that this is going to be very powerful, that Apple is in the catbird's seat and that RSS is *the* enabling technology to have made this happen at all.

If you want to read what *a lot* of other bloggers are saying about this, take a peek at these links from Technorati.

iTunes 4.9 to offer support for podcasts....

Big news over at Engadget and on other sites: the next version of iTunes will support podcasting.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that:

"The new version of iTunes will let users of Apple's music management program and integrated online music store find and download podcasts, which are homemade radio-style shows that have become a grassroots phenomenon on the Internet.

"Already millions of people are subscribing to these podcasts,'' Jobs said. "I think this is going to send it into orbit.''

Jobs gave a preview of the software at D: All Things Digital, an annual technology conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal. He later said the new version of iTunes won't be released for a "few months.''

I agree it'll send podcasting in to "orbit" but there is also a clear opportunity for Apple: allow podcasters a way to monetize our podcasts and generate revenue for Apple. Why? I listen to podcasts every day instead of the radio or any of the hundreds of songs I've purchased from the iTunes music store. This is a problem if Apple wants to continue to drive revenue from the iTunes music store.

Here are some suggestions that will make this a viable business model for Apple:

1. Publish quality guidelines for a podcast (fairly straightforward to do one in Garageband but output is NOT certain to be broadcast quality) as well as provide testing tools or ways to ensure levels are set appropriately, etc.
2. Rather than have podcasters wrestle with signing up for a BMI or ASCAP license to have music as part of a podcast, get this out of the way for them so any piece of music in the iTunes music store is usable as part of a podcast
3. Allow podcasters to get a piece of the action and monetize their podcasts (subscription model for all podcasts would be good...with aggregate payment based on number of downloads). Following the Amazon.com model for Associates.Amazon.com which allows accruals based on number of click-through purchases from blogs.

Pretty exciting stuff and I'm glad Apple is taking a leadership position in this new phenomena.

Potkast: new super directory of podcasts...

Podcasting keeps accelerating! This new site called "Potkast" has a great user interface, podcasts by category and country, and even a search function (and I even found my own podcasts by searching for "Borsch").

With Adam Curry getting his own podcast show on Sirius satellite radio, Leo Laporte (formerly of TechTV fame) and his former TTV cronies new show "This Week in Tech" apparently picked up by a radio station (may be the downtrending KYCY who decided to go "all podcasting"), this podcasting phenomena is getting pretty exciting.

Of course, for the handful of people who've listened to my heretofore modest podcasts, my efforts may not be all that exciting. I still submit that there will be a 'radio' show for everyone who wants to do one and a show for nearly every taste. I wonder how this is going to affect the music services like iTunes, Napster and Yahoo? I've been downloading TONS of content for free and have plenty to listen to without buying anything...and this trend will continue.

FAA: No Billboards in Space

Imagine looking up in the night sky and -- instead of looking for the Big Dipper or thinking about a galaxy far, far away -- you instead see a lit up advertisement for, say, Marlboro's.

According to this Reuters article, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has proposed to amend its charter to allow them to enforce a law against "obtrusive" advertising up in space.

Don't know how the United States can stop another country from launching rockets that would deploy orbiting advertisements over our country (maybe I'm just ignorant of actual international laws already in place to stop it). As soon as something is possible, there is always someone there to exploit it. Heck...just look at what it's like when you're in Disney World, a football game in an open-air stadium, or on a crowded Florida beach and planes trailing banners suddenly appear overhead.

<sarcasm> There's a lot of perfectly good darkness every night just crying out to be filled with ads. </sarcasm>

Swimming with your iPod

It's Summer and some of us can't be without our tunes or podcasts.

Music definitely makes exercise more interesting...and having been on the swim team in high school (and spent many a morning in lap-after-lap in a pool for over an hour), I sure woulda loved having a housing for an iPod!

Surfers, wakeboarders, water skiers, and swimmers can now strap on a convenient and secure armband or swim belt and take their iPod out for a day of music-accompanied activity. Read more and see more photos.

CTD Podcast for May 18, 2005

A second podcast (15 minutes, 24 seconds) on a speech by Bill Moyers' speech to the National Conference for Media Reform as well as a brief rant about the secret Patriot II Congressional discussions occurring and that mainstream media aren't asking the tough questions.


Download MP3 File

IBM takes big risk by encouraging 320,000* employees to become bloggers

Wow...this is *big* news. According to Silicon Valley Watcher, "Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company."

Immediately upon seeing this, my first thought was of the incredible risk this public company was taking by giving free rein to this number of people -- especially in a Sarbanes Oxley world where it seems that even the least laissez-faire attitudes, policies and procedures have become anally retentive ones. The more I thought about it though, the smarter it seems: they're opening the door to an acceleration of employee empowerment, of trust, of openness all while holding the promise of a multiplier effect of dialogue within the marketplace that IBM can use to its advantage. Imagine the trial balloons that individual groups and people within IBM could float with clients, partners and others around products, services, markets and disruptive ideas.

It's even smarter when you realize that this is an open source-like position for them to take.

Apparently the bloggers at IBM are driving the guidelines for fellow bloggers (with some polishing by corporate communications and legal). One of IBM's blogger's, a guy named James Snell, has a blog post about "Blogging@IBM" that talks about this as well as showing the clear and concise guidelines provided to IBM employees -- as potential bloggers -- and what to keep in mind if they choose to embark themselves on a blogging adventure.

This is gutsy as hell. It's also pretty amazing that a behemoth the size of IBM can move so nimbly and with such openness.

*UPDATE 5/18/05: Though Silicon Valley Watcher says "130,000" employees in their article, IBM employee and blogger James Snell says in his post that, on May 16th, IBM published, "...an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of "blogging"."

Makes this even gutsier in my view.

NewTek and the Video Toaster: What might've been...

When I think what could've been with NewTek and the Video Toaster, I must admit feeling a twinge of sadness. NewTek could've been the next Apple Computer if, in my opinion, one thing would've happened that was a pretty clear tipping point.

In April of 1990, NewTek introduced the Video Toaster. A board-level product (with great special effects and switcher software) that plugged in to the only video-ready computer at the time (the Commodore Amiga). It revolutionized the video business and kickstarted the desktop video category.

Two guys I'd become acquainted with, Reid Johnson and George Johnson (no relation but college buddies), owned a video dealership that had introduced the Video Toaster to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area to great success and acclaim. Tim Jenison (founder & owner of NewTek) and his VP, Paul Montgomery (sadly now deceased), were so enamored with what they'd done that they hired Reid and George to open a sales headquarters in Minnesota.

Needing someone that had channel experience to assist them, they hired me.

What an adventure! The Toaster began selling like hotcakes and we had dealers scrambling to carry it. We had three major distributors that were buying up all our production. The company nearly tripled in revenue in a year.

This was *the* cool company too. We were showcased on the NBC Evening News with Tom Brokaw. Our Christmas party had people like James Doohan (Scotty on Star Trek), Wil Wheaton (Star Trek Next Generation) and the guy that played Lurch (Carel Struycken) in the Addams Family movie that year, as well as a host of others. NewTek had a whole "cool friends" network which included people like Penn & Teller. 1993 brought NewTek and its founder, Tim Jenison, recognition in the form of a Prime Time Emmy Award for Technical Achievement from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

We also had a "spokesmodel" named Kiki Stockhammer that could demo better than anyone I'd ever seen...and she drew crowds of men at all the video related events. I've lost track of her and wonder about her some times.

Driving toward a tipping point that would either make us a great company or a small cool one only, we had a strategic planning session out at Pajaro Dunes on Monterey Bay in California. Its claim-to-fame was the volume of Silicon Valley companies that had had sessions like it there (including Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team). Brad Carvey (Dana Carvey's brother) was my roommate in our rented house with 8 bedrooms -- as he'd been the key hardware design engineer on the Video Toaster -- and was just a great and really smart guy. I recall spending hours talking with him one night...and ultimately I fell asleep listening to the crash of the waves from the Bay.

What was the tipping point? We all knew that we had to get off the Amiga since Commodore was on pretty shaky financial ground. Visiting Irving Gould at his Commodore Bahamian headquarters, our leadership tried to convince a reluctant Gould to license the chipset so we could build a board for the Macintosh and the PC. Alas, Gould wouldn't since he was making too much money in currency arbitrage moving containers of finished Amiga's around the world. Also, the Video Toaster was nearly the *only* reason Commodore was selling any of the boxes anyway so he had little incentive to license the chipset that would eliminate his primary sales channel and reason for Amiga computers to live.

Commodore declared bankruptcy in late 1994...making any further discussions a moot point and eliminating the platform upon which the Video Toaster relied.

My own back-of-the-envelope projections indicated we'd have been a $100M company and more within a year or so had we'd been able to license the chipset. Instead, NewTek has gone off on other adventures (Lightwave 3D, etc.) and is roughly a $5M company today. Sigh....

NOTE: For a nice history of the company, read the article here.

CTD Podcast for May 14, 2005

A brief and first podcast (11 minutes, 42 seconds) on my adventure today playing "Johnny Appleseed" on media technologies for a couple of people with whom I interacted...


Download MP3 File

Broadband continues to grow...

According to this article in Reuters, "the top U.S. telephone and cable companies added a record 2.6 million high-speed Internet lines in the first quarter, a 7 percent increase spurred by price cuts by telephone companies." Providers are accelerating their connectivity backends in anticipation of what? Increased access? Or is it anticipating more content (e.g., video) being consumed? 

According to this article in Internet Week, "The number of online adults as of April reached 163 million, a 4 percent increase over eight month ago, market researcher Harris Interactive said. Fully 74 percent of adults are online at home, in the office, at school, the library or other location, a 1 percent increase over the summer of 2004. In 2000, 57 percent of U.S. adults were online." We're already beyond critical mass.

I submit that it's both being anticipatory of more use and competition within the provider space. Either way, bandwidth will grow and costs will fall.

Vlogging: How to at "Free Vlog"

When I posted Vlogging: Grassroots media continues to explode, it was clear then that this was moving fast and really fun stuff was going on. Lot's of energy devoted to this too as well as the coming together of many different enabling technologies that make vlogging pretty straightforward (and inexpensive) to offer.

Two vloggers (Ryanne Hodson &  Michael Verdi) have created a fun how-to on video blogging called "freevlog.org". Though everything described on this site is a no-brainer, that perspective is *only* for those of us willing to invest the time to figure all of this stuff out on our own. If you need some assistance with understanding how to post video on the 'net, where to store it and how to do it for free, this site will help. Check it out.

IBM and tech innovation

This morning I was listening to a fascinating talk by Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger from IBM that I downloaded to my iPod from ITConversations. He gave this talk at the Open Source Business Conference last month.

The focus of his talk was on innovation from an IT perspective. Alot of description about business process innovation within IT and how that maximizes return on investment. He talked too about self managing systems or, as IBM describes it, "autonomic computing" (for more, read the 8 elements of an autonomic computing system).

No question that managing the complexity of business processes, applying best practices and being in a position to benchmark oneself is key. But I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of meaningful tie-in's to the open source community (though some were obvious) and yet, there hasn't been any technology corporation that has done as much for the open source movement than IBM. From patents to Eclipse to their support for Linux, they're strategically placing their bets which benefit anyone focused on open source.

Changing the World

My little girl has somehow ended up a young woman. A woman with skills, talents, hopes and dreams. A person with a fundamental disinterest in material things and a great passion for the downtrodden and the least among us -- which includes animals. She delights in people and animals and is an amazingly caring person.

In her volunteering she was involved in Perspectives Family Center, an organization that provides interim housing for adults and children in transition and immediate need. The staff chose her -- from among many -- to be the sole honoree in a community youth recognition.

Besides being the typical proud papa filled with an additional amount of love for her, I was impressed by who this person is and that other people see someone with a remarkable presence and poise that I rarely get to see. The person I interact with often is someone that sees me as an authority figure from whom she needs to exert her independence. But that's not who she is...and I got to hear first hand the other night about her and the impact and change she has already brought to the world.

The only thing you can hope for as a parent is to instill in one's children the values, good judgement, and an outlook on the world that is a positive one. Armed with those attributes, you further hope that they're prepared to accelerate in to adulthood successfully. As evidenced by my post the other day about "The Man Who Planted Trees", this young woman I helped bring in to the world has *already* changed it and is well on her way in to a remarkable adulthood.

My little girl young woman is prepared and -- based on this event and others -- is ready for more success which she already deserves.

The Man Who Planted Trees

Reading IDFuel this morning, I looked at a post they'd done and took some time to read this story. As I get older, I think more and more about my own mortality like Dave Winer did today, and whether or not I've made a positive impact on the world. Most of my life it's all been about "hitting a home run" or "the big score" with a startup, so this story about a man named Elzéard Bouffier and the impact he made over decades -- with a remarkably modest and humble undertaking -- really touched me.

It's in the public domain so I've cut-n-pasted it below:

The Man Who Planted Trees
By Jean Giono
Translation from french by Peter Doyle

In order for the character of a human being to reveal truly exceptional qualities, we must have the good fortune to observe its action over a long period of years. If this action is devoid of all selfishness, if the idea that directs it is one of unqualified generosity, if it is absolutely certain that it has not sought recompense anywhere, and if moreover it has left visible marks on the world, then we are unquestionably dealing with an unforgettable character.

About forty years ago I went on a long hike, through hills absolutely unknown to tourists, in that very old region where the Alps penetrate into Provence.

This region is bounded to the south-east and south by the middle course of the Durance, between Sisteron and Mirabeau; to the north by the upper course of the Drôme, from its source down to Die; to the west by the plains of Comtat Venaissin and the outskirts of Mont Ventoux. It includes all the northern part of the Département of Basses-Alpes, the south of Drôme and a little enclave of Vaucluse.

At the time I undertook my long walk through this deserted region, it consisted of barren and monotonous lands, at about 1200 to 1300 meters above sea level. Nothing grew there except wild lavender.

I was crossing this country at its widest part, and after walking for three days, I found myself in the most complete desolation. I was camped next to the skeleton of an abandoned village. I had used the last of my water the day before and I needed to find more. Even though they were in ruins, these houses all huddled together and looking like an old wasps' nest made me think that there must at one time have been a spring or a well there. There was indeed a spring, but it was dry. The five or six roofless houses, ravaged by sun and wind, and the small chapel with its tumble-down belfry, were arrayed like the houses and chapels of living villages, but all life had disappeared.

It was a beautiful June day with plenty of sun, but on these shelterless lands, high up in the sky, the wind whistled with an unendurable brutality. Its growling in the carcasses of the houses was like that of a wild beast disturbed during its meal.

I had to move my camp. After five hours of walking, I still hadn't found water, and nothing gave me hope of finding any. Everywhere there was the same dryness, the same stiff, woody plants. I thought I saw in the distance a small black silhouette. On a chance I headed towards it. It was a shepherd. Thirty lambs or so were resting near him on the scorching ground.