Category: Weblog

There is reason that most construction in office buildings is done at night, when office workers are not around. It has nothing to do with noise or cleanliness. It has to do with doorways to meeting rooms.
In the doorways of most company meeting rooms are coils of copper wire, wrapped in wool yarn, installed via a simple ritual involving a small amount of blood and dried avian bones. Workers walk through these coils as they pass into the meeting room. As they walk through the doorway, the coils absorb a small amount of their lifeforce, their third eye chakra to be exact.
Early attempts at energy collection were met with large scale side effects due to over harvesting, resulting in a depleted and uncreative workforce. This side effect, first seen in the Great Depression of the United States, were only resolved by the use of far stronger magic in World War II by the Allied and Axis powers. Modern collection techniques are subtle enough to allow sufficient individual restoration of energy over time, but with frequently harvested meeting goers, the effect on health and thought can be debilitating.
Modern chakra lifeforce removal systems route collected energy to the nearest living entity, most commonly a plant where it is stored for removal later. There is no sane reason that plants should be living in office buildings, yet they are found on every floor of every building. Gardeners visit the plants weekly and appear to be dusting off the leaves. In actuality the beeswax coated dusting cloths remove the energy from the plants, and the used cloths deposited into metal cans with concealed Leyden Jars as collection points.
The purpose of all this lifeforce energy collection is enable the performance of the Scalzi-Hunter Ritual of Success, first developed by Professors Scalzi and Hunter of Miskatonic University in 1925. Rite requires huge amounts energy to perform correctly, but does allow for the somewhat accurate prediction of the answer to a specific question spoken aloud at the height of the Ritual.
Corporate performers of the Scalzi-Hunter Ritual of Success typically ask specific questions about the marketplace or products. There is some risk involved, as that the Rite has been empirically found to give the correct answer only ~90% of the time. For many purposes this is an acceptable risk, but in obvious cases such as the Edsel, New Coke, and the Second Gulf War, the failures are spectacular in nature.
The only known countermeasure to the collection system is known as the Sculpin Defense in which a knowing person can take advantage of the direct sunlight to replenish their energy reserves directly. To avoid this possibility, many meeting rooms are designed without windows or with blinds to limit the amount of natural light entering the room.

Last year, I posted a list of teams in the Tour de France and their sponsors. Again, as we watch, we wonder about some of the sponsors. Here’s the list of cycling teams and their sponsors.
2010 Tour de France Teams & Sponsors

AG2R-LaMondiale– French team sponsored by Ag2r Group, a French retirement fund, and LaMondiale, a French insurance firm
Astana – Kazak team, sponsored by the Astana Group, a group of Astana government run companies
Bbox Bouygues Télécom – French team, sponsored by Bouygues Télécom, a French mobile phone company
BMC – American team, sponsored by BMC, a Swiss bicycle maker
Caisse d’Epargne – Spanish team, sponsored by Caisse d’Epargne, a French bank
Cervélo Test Team – Swiss Team, sponsored by Cervélo, a Canadian maker of bicycle frames
Cofidis – French team, sponsored by Cofidis, a French consumer lending company
Euskaltel-Euskadi – Basque Spanish team, sponsored by Euskaltel, a Basque telecom company
Footon-Servetto-Fuji – Spanish team, sponsored by Footon, a shoe insole maker, Servetto, a maker of wardrobe lifts, and Fuji, an American bicycle maker
Française des Jeux – French team, sponsored by Française des Jeux, the French National Lottery
HTC-Columbia – American team, sponsored by Columbia Sportswear, an American maker of sportwear, and HTC, a Taiwanese maker of mobile phones
Garmin-Transitions – American team, sponsored by Garmin, an American maker of global positioning devices and Transitions, an American maker of glasses
Lampre – Italian team, sponsored by Lampre Group, an Italian maker of pre-coated steel
Liquigas – Italian team, sponsored by Liquigas, an Italian provider of liquified gas products
Quick Step – Belgian team, sponsored by Quick Step, a maker of laminate flooring
Rabobank – Dutch team, sponsored by Rabobank, a Dutch bank
Radio Shack – American team, sponsored by Radio Shack, and American electronics retailer
Silence-Lotto – Belgian team, sponsored by Lotto, the Dutch National Lottery, and Omega Pharma, a Belgian pharmaceutical company
Team Katusha – Russian team, sponsored by Russian Global Cycling Project, a foundation funded by Gazprom,
Itera and Rostechnologii
Team Milram – German team, sponsored by Milram, a German maker of cheese and dairy products
Team Saxo Bank – Danish team, sponsored by Saxo Bank, a Danish investment bank

Team Sky – British team, sponsored by Sky, a British television and media company
Missing from last year: Agritubel, Skil-Shimano
New this year: BMC, Footon-Servetto-Fuji, Radio Shack, Sky

Catching up on hotel rooms…

In the lobby at work, there is a Starbucks that I walk by multiple times a day. Last week I saw the sky blue color of the new instant iced coffee that they are hawking and decided to take a look. Long time Cruft readers know I like a good iced coffee, usually the Japanese style, canned iced coffee.
At least it’s not an iced tea mix. I’m starting to believe that people who drink restaurant iced tea simply have given up on tasty beverages. I understand a good southern style sweet tea, but the tannin rich, bland crap they server most places is horrid made worse by dumping Sweet ‘n Low into it creating some sort of chemical festival of inorganic compounds. Heaven forbid they get the raspberry or passionfruit ‘flavored’ iced tea than smells like someone poured the crappy iced tea through a bowl of potpourri that’s been sitting on grandma’s coffee table for a few years. Yet, time after time, I go to lunch with folks and they order iced teas. They never never smile about it. They kinda look they they just ordered some cod liver oil or other foul medicine.
But I digress. Back to instant iced coffee. What the heck, it’s summer, I’ll give it a try.

Yes, I haven’t posted much lately. But here’s another slice of Las Vegas from my most recent trip.

Finally got around to uploading the hotel room videos from our mini-vacation from December.

Three Networks for the Twitter kings under the sky,
Seven for the Facebook lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Weblog Men doomed to die,
One for the Google on his non-evil throne,
In the Land of Internets where the Shadows lie.
One Network to rule them all, One Network to find them,
One Network to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Internets where the Shadows lie.

About three years ago, I built my last computer and made a timelapse while I worked.
Last night I built my new computer. Here’s the timelapse.

My little post about the iPad is getting a lot of views, and strident, indignant comments from my beloved Internets. That you for all the comments that exactly, perfectly prove my points…
I would reply point by point, but as this is the Internet, discussion can never end in someone changing their mind, so it becomes fruitless.
The best is me being called an Apple fanboy. Let’s be clear here, this is my computing environment at home:
4 desktop running Vista – one per family member
1 desktop running Vista – a media hub/home audio/phone dock
1 Media Center PC – hooked to TV to watch DVDs and Blu-ray
1 laptop running Vista
1 Microsoft Home Server – backing everything up
Currently putting together a new gaming PC to run Windows 7
and to top it off, one of the desktop PCs is a 20″ Mac that only runs Vista – good design for my wife
3 iPhones – me, wife, eldest daughter – youngest uses a Samsung Impressions
If that make me an Apple fanboy, then everyone is an Apple fanboy.

“Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” – Gertrude Stein

Oh Internets, how I love your unrealistic optimism, your pervasive cynicism, your willingness to believe any rumor, no matter how far fetched, and your desire to pronounce judgment on things with the tiniest amount of actual information.

Today Apple announced the iPad. Amazingly it did not fulfill every expectation that was floating out there. Most importantly, it does not fulfill every, specific desire you have and expected. The rumor machine of tech web sites promised you so much more.

Oh noes.

Let me explain it clearly and talk you off the ledge before you go and do something stupid.

Remember way back to January 2007, when the iPhone was announced? Oh Internets, you wailed and gnashed your teeth endlessly. No 3G network? No MMS? No apps on the iPhone? No replaceable battery? Oh, your complaints were endless. You were sure that the iPhone was doomed because it didn’t meet all your requirements.

And what happened? Well, Apple has sold 40 million iPhones. FORTY MILLION. They have become the largest mobile device company in the world.

So today, you moan on and on about all the features you expected and demand in the iPad. What no Verizon? No two-way camera? It’s not weightless? A full half inch thick? Only 10 hours of battery life? You make tons of predictions on the success and failure with scant details and without ever actually trying one.

Well, I am lucky enough to have been at the Apple Event today. Deep within the Reality Distortion Field. I saw the demo live, not snap shots on a web site. I got to use the iPad and see how it worked in person. I talked with other people that had tried it.

And you know what, just like Steve Jobs said, you need to hold it for yourself. It’s a different computing experience. It’s intuitive and simple. The device is blazingly fast and obvious how to use. It is a third kind of computing between a smartphone and a laptop.

For those that have iPhones, you know the experience of showing someone the iPhone for the first time. The look in their face, when they first flick the screen or squeeze the image to zoom. The realization that this is something different, very different, than what they have experienced before.

I am a technology professional. For almost 20 years I’ve tested, used, broke, fixed, and played with all kinds of technology from broadcasting to air conditioning to software. I am not easily swayed in these things. But even with all my skepticism, I think the iPad is something different. A new way of computing that will become commonplace.

Oh Internets, I know you won’t believe till you hold one in your hands. You’ll bang on about features, data plans, DRM, open source, and a multitude of issues. You’ll storm the message boards, wring your hands, and promise you won’t buy one till ‘Gen 2’. The din will grow and grow as time passes.

And then one day, in a few months, you will actually hold one and use it. And you will say, “I want one. I want one right now.”

So, my sweet beloved Internets, please take a deep breath, relax and stay away from your regular knee-jerk reactions. Have a little patience, a quality you are not known for, my sweet Internets.

And please, please stop trying to make predictions about what’s next, you have no clue and just look stupid when you do.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs