Ford Street

Who needs a Razr?

There are people reading this that have never even seen a rotary phone. I really need this thing, right now. 

This is from Sparkfun; it’s a portable phone. It needs the SIM card from your cell phone to work; then you’re off and running. Picture it: you’re at the market and your phone rings.  You reach into your tote bag (this thing won’t be tucked into your little tiny purse, after all) and haul out your super-cool red rotary phone, and talk to your buddy. Better yet, haul it out at a business meeting (“Just one sec, I have to call the office.”)

From the Sparkfun website: “Phone dials out like normal through the rotary. Incoming calls ring the original, loud, gong style metal bells. Please note: As with all cellular phones, there is no dial tone. While we thoroughly enjoying taking the Port-O-Rotary out on the town, please realize the sound quality will not be as good as your pocket phone. This phone is for entertainment purposes only!”

Who cares what the sound is like.  I need this thing. 

I didn't realize so much was riding on this

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, called “Hoarders vs. Deleters – You are your inbox.”  The author noted that “the makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you.”

What the hell? 

"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"

I mean to tell you, I cleaned up my work inbox straight away. 

The good doctor went on to say; “If you have 1,000 emails in your inbox, it may mean you don't want to miss an opportunity, but there are things you can't pull the trigger on…If you have only 10 emails in your inbox, you may be pulling the trigger too fast and missing the richness of life."

There are 68 emails in my personal inbox and 474 in my work inbox.  I don’t think I’m in danger of missing the richness of life any time soon.  I have to go now, though, and finish cleaning up my work inbox. 

Business 2.0's nasty list

Business 2.0 magazine has compiled a rather mean-spirited list of “10 People Who Don’t Matter.”  Now, the name of the alone would compel me to hurl insults at them, but this particular list happens to contain two people that I have personally met on several occasions.  One of them is a former client; I worked with the other when the company that capitalized on his venture was a client of mine.  (VA Linux, now VA Software.) 

The first guy who doesn’t matter, according to Business 2.0, is Rob Malda, of Slashdot.org, until recently a top news site (and not just for nerds.)  For those of you unfamiliar with Slashdot, it was the first news site with a unique user-driven platform; users themselves moderate comments and contributions.  OK, so sites like Digg may be getting more traffic now, because they appeal to a wider selection of people.  Saying Rob Malda doesn’t matter is quite foolish; the people who get their news from sites like Digg are not the Slashdot crowd.  The latter, frankly, is much smarter.  It never wanted to be “news for the masses.”  Oh and incidentally, on 9/11/01, guess what the only source of news in NYC was?  The networks didn’t know anything, CNN.com was down, as were other Web sites.  When I finally made it to a computer, I learned about what had happened from Slashdot. 

The second guy who doesn’t matter is Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, the granddaddy of Open Source software.  I promise you, even if you’ve never heard of Open Source, it touches your life somehow.  And whatever way it touches you, it doesn’t cause the problems that software operating systems like Microsoft cause you.  From the Business 2.0 site: “Torvalds' project has matured to such an extent that it's largely outgrown its illustrious creator.”   You knuckleheads.  That’s the highest compliment you could pay a guy like Torvalds.  It was all he was ever shooting for – and saying he doesn’t matter is beyond naïve, it’s dumb. 

I think the editors at Business 2.0 need to go back to school and take Technology 1.0. 

Not so Smart

This is the new Smart car from Mercedes.  They are thinking of bringing it to the U.S.

How would you like to drive around New York City in this vehicle?  Forget about the taxi drivers; this thing wouldn't survive a collision with a bike messenger!

Net Neutrality

This trend of trying to panic us into paying more for what we've already got cracks me up.  The internet isn't going to crash because more and more people are downloading video and huge files; it's not like it lives alone in a warehouse in Washington State. 

I already pay for my usage, thanks, and yes, I pay more because I want broadband.  I started paying more for broadband the very second it was available in my neighborhood.  (Cablevision was the only game in this town back then, and you'd better believe I took a day off work and waited outside for that truck to turn the corner.)

Yes, we're going to have to lay more pipe.  Yes, we need to improve the infrastructure.  As far as I'm concerned, the companies that are going to be collecting monthly fees for access for YEARS and YEARS can bloody well pay for that infrastructure -- which by the way will serve all of us, not some of us. 

Dang lazy-ass computers

Distributed computing is not dead.  I know you thought it was, but it’s not. 

I confess to loving this idea the very minute I heard it, so many years ago I can’t remember.  Early 90s, anyway.  Science has been after a way to use the unused parts of the human brain for years; in lieu of that particular achievement, somebody came up with distributed computing, or network computing, or grid computing, to use the unused parts of a computer’s brain.  I used to do PR for IBM in the mid-90s, and they were very hot on this back then.  (I don’t think that, like everyone else under the sun, they claimed to have invented it.)

So the concept is: take an ordinary computer that only gets used for part of the day, and snoozes the rest of the time, and use its downtime to turn it into a soldier in an army of similarly underutilized computers.  Use the combined brainpower of all of these soldiers to solve very complex problems. 

Years ago I signed up for the SETI@Home project, so that I could help find little green men in my spare time.  What that did was use radio telescopes, like the one in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to scan the universe.  Then it broke up all of that data into bite-size packets, and sent those packets out to computers like mine to analyze.  My computer would do its homework, and send back the results to SETI.  (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.)  Then it repeats the process, and so on. 

According to an AP report in the current issue of Technology Review, there is a fellow using this process (and the SETI software) to try to find a cure for cancer. 

Here’s the link:

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16960

Go put your computer to work, dammit.