Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Images from in and around Austin, TX at SXSW 2007. Segway tour, gee-tars, parties, state capitol, glowing beer, hairy-est rainstorm ever, robots made fuzzy by phone cam.
Index of SXSW panel coverage on this site.
Loose notes from SXSW 2007 session: The 4-Hour Work Week with Timothy Ferriss, author, The 4-Hour Work Week
If you work a 9-5, your boss isn’t going to let you get away with a 4-hour work week no matter how productive you become. But this session was packed with great advice for trimming inessential, repetitive and drop-able stuff from your daily schedule. Ferriss actually has accomplished the 4-hour week. Doubtful that you or I can, but some great advice for streamlining here. Room packed with people who, like me, feel like they can never get out from behind the 8-ball.
Technorati Tags: sxsw2007
If you’re reading this via the Birdhouse Updates mailing list, apologies – you’ve caught me mid-stream at SXSW/Interactive 2007, live-blogging (or near-live anyway) the conference. Birdhouse will return to the usual stream-of-whatever in the middle of next week.
Update: I’m going to delay a day on SXSW postings — too beat to wreet. Look for a double whammy soon.
Loose notes from SXSW 2007 keynote: Phil Torrone and Limor Fried
Phil Torrone is an editor and chief hacker at Make: Magazine; Limor Fried is an MIT electrical engineer and hardware hacker extraordinaire, responsible for, among other things, open source plans for building home-brew cell phone jammers. In this conversation they discussed approaches to building open source hardware, and the many ways in which the process differs from OSS.
Technorati Tags: sxsw2007
After a few years of wishin’-and-hopin’, finally got a chance to spend quality time on a Segway today. Had a few hours before SXSW conference stuff began and took the opp to do what I wanted to do last year but couldn’t find time for – a six-mile Segway tour of Austin, TX with Seg City. Got super lucky and was the only one on the tour, which gave the guide and me more flexibility to go wherever.
Was amazed at how easy it was to ride. Absolutely intuitive — seems to read your body’s mind, if that makes any sense. The sensation is what I imagine hang gliding must be like – effortless and free and silent, as if you were born with wings and wheels. Was totally comfortable on it in under five minutes. Totally addictive.
The distance I live from work would make for an ideal Segway commute. Unfortunately, the infernal things still cost more on the used market than most people would be willing to pay new (think “as much as a decent used car”), which slows adoption and leaves them in the realm of the novelty. High cost of R&D and a bazillion patents supposedly to blame for the high price. Shame too. After you’ve ridden one for a while, it becomes easy to see why inventor Dean Kamen thought the device would “revolutionize urban planning.” But stupid reality got in the way.
Forgot to bring a CF reader with me; will try and get pix up before week’s end.
The US radio frequency allocation chart and a visual inventory of your hard drive.
J-School professor Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and others, boils it down for the New York Times. Just what can we eat, anyway?
Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
The piece is very long, and very good. All about the rise of “nutritionism” and big science in food. Amazing the way he ties it all together. If you haven’t got time, cheat and skip to the bottom, where you’ll find his nine rules of thumb, tthe most concise of which is embedded in #1: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Easier said than done.
From a camera mounted on a rocket booster on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, as it’s jettisoned and tumbles to earth. This is so… human without humans, if you know what I mean.
via Squublog
A little after the fact, but this tans my hide:
The league’s long-standing policy is to ban “mass out-of-home viewing” of the Super Bowl except at sports bars and other businesses that televise sports as part of their everyday operations…
Which means that bars can show the ‘bowl to a group of people and profit from it, while church and other large groups cannot. Your old friend Copy Right at work.
via Milan
Designed by Sander Mulder & Dave Keune, Buro Vormkrijgers. This is functional kitsch; the wrong becomes the new right. By adding a function to an otherwise grotesque object, it acquires new aesthetic values, becoming an object of desire. Pun intended, this woofer holds the mids between an addition to your sound system and your loyal 4 footed companion. Available in a co-axial two way speaker system version [two dogs].
Fun as they are, somehow I just can’t see giving over my audio to a visual gag certain to wear thin after a few weeks. Or to have to repeatedly answer the obvious next question: “Are your tweeters shaped like birds?” Especially for 600 Euros.