fighting the lack of good ideas
Years ago, my mom and I would routinely try to catch episodes of Square Foot Gardening (SFG) on PBS. Hosted by Mel Bartholomew, a retired civil engineer, SFG was a program whose aim was to enable gardening by the masses in confined spaces (though, naturally, if can be implemented in larger settings as well). Mr Bartholomew’s…
I was in Provo UT this week for Moab Con 2011. It was a great week – got to meet lots of interesting people, learn how different companies and institutions are using Adaptive’s Moab product, and see where the roadmap for the product should bring it over the next 1-2 years.
On 21 May I am presenting at the BGLUG meeting. The topic will be Haiku. I was an ardent BeOS fan/user for a while during their early Developer and Release days, and was among the saddest* to see them disappear as a company, and then even more saddened when Palm totally blew their chance to…
Max Brooks is likely the world’s foremost authority on zombies – how to survive them, what to do if there is an uprising, etc. In “World War Z – An Oral History of the Zombie War”, he tackles the issue of reporting on what happened by interviews with those who survived. From first-hand accounts from a…
Most manufacturers will list an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) on their products – at least in the computer hardware industry. A typical number might be 1 000 000 hours. For those keeping track at home, that’s about 114 years! Now, since no harddrive has been running for more than a century, how could they…
I enjoy histories – especially when delivered in the format that Gavin Menzies employed in “1421 – The Year China Discovered America”. The only other history I have read in the past 5 years I can recall reading so fast was Gideon’s Spies. Gavin makes a compelling presentation, interpretation, application, and conclusion of a host…
Rodale Press published a collected works book entitled “Producing Your Own Power – How to make Nature’s Energy Sources Work for You” in 1974. There are a host of now-humorous segments of the text: “The US government estimates that by 1980 1 percent of our country’s land will be covered with utility companies’ equipment” {viii}. The contiguous…