…even if it sometimes means getting up at 2:30AM to sling dough and effect impromptu rearrangements of the fridge:
‘Nuff said.
I have never flown a plane. On instruments. With a failed artificial horizon. But Bill Whittle has, and in the midst of his stellar essay on civilization, he has managed to write about doing so in what amounts to the single most-inspiring piece of literature I have ever read.
After too-long an absence, The Web of Trust is back online. Go. Read. It.
While I may not have ever had a life-and-death experience like the one Bill describes in his essay, I have encountered plenty of scarily-stressful times, many involving others’ life-and-death experiences. Times when I could feel those “tearing claws of panic” working their way into my shoes, threatening to derail whatever endeavor I was pursuing unless I took control. In each of those times, recalling The Web of Trust has helped give me the resolve to press forward. The words of Bill’s flight instructor – “Kick Its Ass.” – echo in my ears, simultaneously providing focus and motivation. There is no ambiguity, no subtlety of strategy, simply an imperative: You know what to do, you have the capacity to do it, so Do It. Now.
As of about 90 seconds ago, Wordpress.org and Automattic have announced their official Wordpress app for Android!! Yay!!!
Check it out over at http://android.wordpress.org/ … and watch here for more info soon.
If you want a cookies that makes you want to close your eyes, chew slowly and say “mmmmmmmmmm” for a really long time, go to Levain Bakery in Manhattan, and order one of their Chocolate Chip Walnut cookies. Unless you’re this [very disturbing] guy, one will be enough.
If you don’t happen to live in New York City, or would perhaps like to make such a cookie at home, then take a gander at My Brother’s Interpretation of these taste-bud-gasmic cookies. And do rate it highly, won’t you?
And, if reading his instructions and making them for yourself just isn’t enough, you can watch him prepare them – in 3 different shirts – over at Veoh.
I know I’m just one guy, in the next state over, but I’d like to say thanks. Thanks to Scott Brown, and thanks to his supporters in Massachusetts. As a conservative living in New York, I’m pretty much guaranteed that my values have a pretty slim chance of being represented at the federal level – and it’s reassuring to see that someone has stood up and pledged to bring integrity back to a Senate where that value is sorely lacking.
A lot of people bought into the mantra of “hope” and “change” about a year ago. Now, “hope” is taking on a new connotation – people who love America and are proud to call this exceptional nation home are hoping that November 2010 will pull us out of the political tailspin we’re in. And the election of Scott Brown to a US Senate seat from one of the country’s bastions of progressivism is a big dose of hope, indeed.
One of the less-publicised but more-interesting product announcements to come out of this year’s CES conference is the Airnergy Wi-Fi energy harvester, brought to us by (surprisingly) the folks at RCA. Priced at $40 and planned for sale this summer, the little gizmo supposedly plucks wi-fi radio signals out of the air, then uses the energy to charge an internal battery which can then charge your mobile phone / MP3 player / etc.
Image source: ohgizmo.com
While the gadget enthusiast in me wants to say “sign me up!” the electrical engineer in me says, “hold the phone…”
In the US, the maximum legal power transmitted from most wi-fi devices is 0.1 Watts. If you plug that into this RF power calculator and assume a distance of 5 meters with no line-losses and 3dB of gain in each antenna, the maximum harvestable power at the Airnergy will be about 0.00000157 Watts. This is plenty of energy to sling bytes of data through the air, but even if the charging circuit were (quite impossibly) 100% efficient, this input power is an order of magnitude less than even the self-discharge rate of most Lithium Ion batteries.
Even though RCA of-late seems to be more interested in selling their branding to marginal, no-name OEMs, the appearance of their logo on this gizmo is just about the only thing that gives me any hope that it might not be smoke and mirrors. The physics doesn’t add up, but who knows – 15 years ago, most folks probably wouldn’t have believed that 0.1 Watts at 2.4GHz was enough power to carry data at 100MB/s – yet you can happily do so at your local coffee shop. From your cell phone. Along with a half-dozen others.
In our home, we’ve got nearly the entire technology spectrum covered… Kelly happily carries a simple flip phone, and I rock the Droid – and I secretly enjoyed being able to claim the latest-and-greatest until today. Laptop-wise, we’ve got my beastie HP business laptop on the large end, Kelly’s svelte netbook on the small end. Our tech fits us (not the other way around, I might add) and for good measure (and good backup) we’ve even got a server humming in the office. Experience-wise, we’re no Gizmodo, but I think we’ve got a decent-enough handle on where different form-factors work.
Which is what confuses me so much about yesterday’s newly-announced Lenovo Skylight:
The Lenovo Skylight - Source: Lenovo Press Release
Fifty-two weeks for the year, and fifty-two posts to go along with them – that’s the plan for DaveRea.com at least, and with a little luck, a few reminders and at least a handful of marginally-meaningful 11th-hour postings, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to handle it. With the goal set, then, I’m just left wondering what to write about…
For ideas, I figured I’d take a look at what’s popular in DaveRea.com’s 497 existing posts. To start, that meant reviewing the site’s stats via the stellar Wordpress.com Stats Plugin. By a pretty large margin (read: by a factor of 10-to-1) content like reviews and how-tos wins the page-view popularity contest. My review of the Lumiquest 80/20 takes the crown, with over 1,400 page views since I started collecting data in January 2009. Shortly behind, my info page for running Linux on my HP 6710b notebook tips the scales at 1,300 visits. You have to inch down to the #7 position before reaching an opinion piece – my commentary on the idiocy of Rochester’s gun “buyback” programs, which weighs in with 130 viewers.
So apparently y’all like information. But page views isn’t the only metric of what’s popular – in fact, I suspect it’s a better indicator of which content sits at the confluence of popular search terms and the portions of the site that are easily-indexed. Comments, I suspected, might give a better view of which DaveRea.com postings are most interesting – or at least which ones motivated you to saddle up to the keyboard and talk back. As it turns out, I must not motivate you all that much!
There are a shade over 300 comments spread across the posts and pages here, and it seems the majority of those comments are nearly-evenly split between informational pages (the 6710B post wins here, 10 comments), opinion pieces (such as my rant on Apple’s iPod access restrictions, 14 comments) and posts about life events (such as when I went to work for GM, with 10 comments).
So in the end, the message I take away is that info-posts, reviews and how-tos are good, and make for a good fit with the search engines. As hesitant as I am to post opinions on controversial things, those posts seem to earn some popularity too. And since there are at least a few readers here who care about what’s going on in my little corner of the world, throwing in some life updates for good measure doesn’t go unappreciated. That said, what do you want to see here? If you have a preference, hit me up in the comments (tchyeah, that worked real well last time, huh?) and let me know.
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