Life, politics, things that don’t fit elsewhere.
For some odd reason I agreed to be in a play. I haven’t acted in a real play in many years. It’s less than 2 weeks to go before we open in Look Back in Anger at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre and I am still working on my lines! I am only in one scene. But I have a lot of lines in that scene. It’s been a real struggle for me. It may...
This is a slightly edited and enhanced version of an article that appeared November, 2011 as part of the Times-Standard/Redwood Technology Consortium Tech Beat series. The health industry in slowly adopting technology on a large scale, moving to electronic documents, computer generated prescriptions and information sharing. It’s been a rough road as standards and privacy issues have to be grappled with beyond the sheer technical problems. But the trade-offs in efficiency, accuracy and data...
On our trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington I helped guide our way using my IPhone and the Google maps app. I was having fun watching our pin move along Highway 101, going around curves as we drove around the same curves. My wife said “Look out the window!” Oh, yeah – there’s Sequim Bay and lots of trees. “But look, this app is tracking our every move!” I said. I have to...
I think I started out the new year right, today. I got up early and after the frost melted, went for a long run in the early morning sun. I encountered this poor fellow who didn’t fair as well as I. His life, like so many has been cut short but I keep moving, grateful, at nearly 60 to have some more time to breath and be productive. I have so many ideas and...
In a world in which so many people have so little, I am truly thankful for my friends and family and that I have a warm home and plenty of food to share with them. I am also thankful for my health that allows me to enjoy, maybe even indulge a little in, these gifts. But as this is a blog on technology, I am also thankful for these astounding technical innovations: I am...
I am suddenly watching more TV or rather, video (TV shows, movies, Internet videos, etc.) over the Internet . I broke down and bought a Roku box the other day. If you’re not familiar with the Roku, it’s one of several set top boxes that hook up to your TV, download or stream video from various sources and play them on your big screen. Some of the the other best known devices are Boxee...
(Read with your best Andy Rooney whiny voice): Do you ever wonder why people like to dress up in stupid costumes and have their kids go door to door begging for crap food? Yeah, me too. What’s the deal? OK, maybe I spent 20 years in the theater and the circus and greasing up my face no longer holds an appeal. I understand some people like to play pretend as it lets them get...
Update: After several tries I got both my IPhone and IPad working with the new iOS. It appears I was a victim of Apple’s popularity and lack of planning. Their servers were overloaded with people trying to download the new system. Just because I’m sitting in front of my computer I think it’s good idea to get iOS 5 THE MOMENT it’s released. Dumb. As. A. Brick. Which is what my iPhone is now....
Nearly 2 years ago I posted a list of some of my favorite podcasts. Reviewing that post I see some have disappeared and some I don’t listen to as regularly as I should. And there a some that I listen to regularly now that are not on the list. I will update my favorites some day soon, but want to mention one I listen to daily (working days): Marketplace Tech Report. It’s a 5...
Let’s imagine Steve Jobs was in a position to set policy for the government for various programs and one of the programs he had oversight for was the Post Office. Would we be at the position today where the Post Office was on the brink of collapse? No. In fact, 10 years ago he would have been laying the groundwork for eliminating the Post Office altogether. Or at least transforming it in to something...
Last week I had my 15 seconds of almost fame. I’ve been an Amazon Affiliate for years. When I got my email from Amazon that they were closing my account because of the sales tax law passed by California. For some reason my name got passed to a couple journalists as a spokesperson for the 10,000 or so affiliates who had their business shut down without recourse. So while I was up on a...
Yesterday’s The Writer’s Almanac featured one of my favorite poems of all time: Question, by May Swenson: Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Read or listen to the rest >> I used to recite the first lines regularly and hearing that poem in my ears as I ran this morning and caught...
I’ve been working on a review list of favorite IPad apps for a while now, but never finishing it. Maybe I will one day, but I thought I’d take a slightly different approach with this post. I use my IPad a lot for work and recreation and the stuff in between like listening to or watching tech podcasts. I use my IPhone in a similar way, but for most of those things except listening...
The headlines were rather alarming. The Apple IPhone is storing data both on the phone and on the computer where you connect with ITunes that reveals all the places where you’ve accessed a cell tower. Who knows why? Who knows if other phones are doing the same thing. Even though Apple doesn’t seem to be sucking the data to their own servers, apparently people are really concerned that hackers, estranged spouses, marketers and law...
I attended the Plan It Green Conference last weekend and I found it both stimulating and frustrating. I was stimulated by the size of the crowd and the number of vendors. There’s clearly a great deal of interest in and “energy” around green technologies at least locally. Many of the vendors had interesting information to share. Though I didn’t see anything really mind blowing. What frustrates me is the return on investment that using...
