Discovering Art and Artists in Blogs

I have just recently discovered how much interesting and original art is out there in Artists' Blogs. It's an excellent way of checking out art, especially if you are learning to draw or paint. There's an entire an art gallery of unique out there that you can learn from, and if you use RSS readers, it's really easy to quickly get updates on your favorite artists' newest work.

"The Real Effects of Global Warming." Let's be Smart about "Going Green"

On today's NBC 11's: The Bay Area at 6's "Going Green Report," was a showcase of a family in Santa Clara county who installed the county's first residential wind turbine after watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and flying to Alaska to witness "the real effects of global warming," when they decided that they needed to do something. The NBC 11 news story continued that family member who installed the turbine says, "that at least he'll be able to look his grandkids in the eye, and tell them Grandpa tried to do his part."

Now let's do some math here. The terrapass flight CO2 emmissions calculator tells us that a round trip flight to Alaska generates approximately 1,571 pounds of CO2. Yes, by flying to see "effects of global warming" in Alaska, the family generously added to global warming. And that's just one person. Let's assume that only two people in the family went. That's 3,142 lbs of CO2. Their wind turbine generated 11 kilowatt hours of electricity over the last 3 or 4 days, let's be generous and say 3 days. The project cost the family $20,000 dollars. The Vermont Earth Institute's carbon worksheet points out that on average if you generate 1 kilowatt hour of electricity, you emit 1.5 lbs of carbon. So they, reduce their footprint by a very optimistic estimate of 5.5 lbs per day.

The math doesn't lie. The "Going Green Report" family will need to run their $20,000 wind turbine for about to 571 days to make up for the carbon that was spewed forth on their enlightening trip to Alaska. That's over one and a half years! The family needs to run their $20K wind turbine for over one and a half years to make up for the carbon they emitted on their trip to see "the real effects of global warming." In my opinion, they are the real effects of global warming.

Look, I love the Earth. I think "Going Green" is extremely important. I applaud the effort and money spent by the showcased family's part, but let's be smart about how we reduce our emissions. The real effects of global warming are right in front of us and can be reduced if we make smart, efficient choices in our daily lives. We need to encourage citizens of the world to make smart and efficiently green decisions, not spend tens of thousands of dollars on a fancifully delusional pipe dream of "Going Green." The easiest solution to global warming is not spending more, but spending less, and yes, cutting back on flights to Alaska.

Real Estate Analogies for the Internet

You can draw a lot of analogies between the internet and real estate. Especially from the business side of things.

Assertion 1: The value of real estate property is that people want to spend their time there.
The value of nearly all real estate property can be simplified into this. People pay the big bucks for property, whether it is for residential or commercial purposes because they want to spend their time there.

This is very similar to much of the internet. People pay the big bucks for companies like Yahoo, Facebook, and YouTube because that is where people spend their time. The model is a bit different, in that the more time people spend there, the more you can advertise to them, but the rule is the same. The more people want to spend on your internet space, the higher the value. This is true for smaller operations like blogs too!

Assertion 2: Curb Appeal is important
The old adage goes, "don't read a book by it's cover," but that adage exists, like other adages, because it is a rule that we constantly break. We always judge a book by it's cover, and that is why curb appeal is so important in real estate. First impressions count.

The same is true for websites and online services. Your first impression counts. Beware of putting out a website that looks ugly or that doesn't make a good first impression. For every 20 people that visit your site, only a few might become long term residents. If you make a better first impression, you can increase that number. So make your website have a good first impression.

Assertion 3: You can increase your value by subdividing your property
The real estate market is stagnating now, but just a few years ago in the seller's market, one of the best ways to increase the value of your property was to subdivide your property into parcels.

That is precisely what online services like facebook, friendster, myspace, blogger, wordpress do best. They create a service that people each use a little piece of, little condominiums of content. All those people visiting the many little sites aggregates into huge numbers of visitors and advertising big bucks. What a great idea. Sub-divide, let other people do all the hard work of contributing content, than reap all the profits.

There are plenty of differences between internet property and real estate property, but as we spend more and more time online, locations on the internet look and behave more and more like off-line locations. Drawing analogies between the two can be helpful in understanding how online businesses succeed and fail.

WMD's found in Iraq, and it's Chuck Norris

Reuters reports that U.S. troops are reporting that have finally found WMD's in Iraq and it's Chuck Norris.

see the article

Living with Bugs and Errors

Does your car make funny sounds that you ignore? Does your web browser quit on you? Do your software applications quit all of a sudden, right before you save? Do you have a door that doesn't close quite right? or a key that you have to jiggle to turn?

I don't mind having a few bugs and errors in my life. Workarounds are just part of life. But not everyone agrees. People fall all across the spectrum of what they kinds of bugs and errors that they are willing to live with in a product and what they are unable to live with. Some people think of a buggy product as "quirky," and other's think of then as "broken."

There is a delicate balance that smart companies try to strike between sinking time and money into making a product perfect and the cost of losing customers. And let's face it, debugging is the worst part of making a product; just ask a programmer what he hates most about his job (other than his boss.)

It's inevitable that as technology and software continues to get more and more advanced and complicated, that it's going to get buggier and buggier. Have you ever used the autosave feature built into all of Microsoft Office. I attest that the autosave was first introduced because it was extremely likely that the software was going to crash and lose all your work. As technology continues to become more comples, we will find either find ourselves living with more and more "quirks" in our products, or we will need to find a new process to elegantly and cheaply create and develop programs and products that are bug and mistake free.

forced to upgrade - I need a faster internet

It used to be that I would upgrade my computer because I couldn't run the newest hottest computer game. The computer's got faster and the games would get more complex and computationally intensive. Computer's and software would feed of each other. Well that was a long time ago, at least in technology terms. I don't play games much anymore, although I have to admit Sins of a Solar Empire recently caught my eye. I just don't have the disposable time to play games anymore, and when I do pick up games, they don't keep my interest.

So now games no longer force me to upgrade my computer. Neither do applications, my office 2000 sweet works just fine as it is. There are a few pieces of research software that could be zippier, but mostly everything works fine on my Powerbook G4, which is over 4 years old. But I find what is slowing me down these days is not software or games, it's the internet! and I have a fast DSL connection.

80% of my computing time is on the internet, and I have high-speed broadband internet. But the internet is not fast enough for me. if you add up all those times waiting for pages to load, installing plugins, loading javascript, downloading movies, loading everything that is on web pages and web applications these days, it's a big chunk of my day. I want a faster internet. So I need to upgrade. But I can't. Upgrading my powerbook will only get me marginally more speed. I have the fastest DSL line I can get.

So I want to upgrade the internet. I want my google apps to load faster, my web pages to be quicker to load, and my video to be faster. The content on the internet is forcing me to upgrade just like those Ultima VII did years ago, except this time, upgrading my computer does little good. What I'd like is a faster browsing experience and a faster internet. Although just like with computers and games, as the internet gets faster, the content catches up to take advantage of the faster speed and everything slows down again.

Online Social Networking. Why is it so successful?

MySpace. Facebook. Friendster. etc. What makes them such internet successes?

The internet primary uses are what I call the Internet's Big Three:

1. to Inform, Communicate, and Connect

2. to Distract and Entertain

3. to Waste Time (see number 2)

Most of your online activities probably fall in some way into these three things. News, blogs, online stores, videos, gossip, email are all ways of getting information, communicating and connecting, or just plain being distracted. Social networking sites are really no different. They inform you what your friends are up to, what your favorite bands and other groups are doing, they let you communicate and connect and have an online presence, and they give endless hours of distraction, entertainment, and wasted time.

But the real question is, why are MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster so popular. Why do so many people spend so much time browsing around on these sites, "poking" people, messaging, posting photos. In reality, everything you can do on a social networking site, you could do before a single piece of code for Friendster was written. You can still do all these things on the internet without a social networking sites. People were sending emails to inform, communicate, and connect with eachother, building personal websites, posting photos, and of course wasting time well before anyone had heard the term online social networking. Of course the internet and email let's you do all of this, without creating a Facebook account. But you won't see me sending my friend's an email message which says "poke".

So why is online social networking so successful? They are successful because they organize, integrate, and present all this content and features that already existed on the internet into a way that people can digest, understand, makes sense, and feels comfortable and seamless. It's akin to what Apple sells in their computers, which don't do anything different than you can do on a Windows machine with the right software. But Apple integrates all your digital tasks into a seamless environment, that is presented in a way that makes sense and is easy to use. The best social networking sites do essentially the same thing. They are a hub for your social networking activities, things like sending messages, posting photos, keeping updated and connected with friends and colleagues, and the most successful sites do it in a way that is as seamless and easy to use as an iMac or an iPod, and with a lot of ways to waste time.