Wow, so clearly this has become an abandoned blog. In part because neither Neb nor I have anything interesting to say longer than a twitter-length sentence! (Which I tried to hook into this blog via the Twitter Tools plugin, but it’s lacking features — the post titles are awkward and only one twitter account can be linked. But we’ll see.) Actually, a couple of weeks ago, my excuse would have been that we’re busy but then I had spring break last week and I wouldn’t call myself busy unless doing fun stuff or vegetating + eating counts as busy.

In any case, another one of the illegitimate and yet sadly true reasons we’ve been busy is this iPhone Kindle app which has killed my productivity. I’ve already ranted and raved about it in person to pretty much everyone I know - basically, it’s a free application that lets you read books on your iPhone; said books you can buy from Amazon but there are a bunch that are free. I’ve now read 3 novels in fairly short order (this + the 2 sequels), and Neb has read Outliers (pictured above) and he’s reading a novel now, but now I am forbidding myself from starting another until I get some actual work done. But oh goodness, I did so enjoy all my time on public transportation during when I was reading…

We knew Iceland was going to be dark for much of the time before coming. When we arrived at the hotel around 8a, we asked the concierge when the sun would come up. She guessed around 10:30a. It starts getting dark around 3:30p. But the thing is, it’s kind of hard to tell because it’s not ever really bright. At some point, you just have to figure it’s as light as it’s going to be.

I remember this from when I lived here but I think Neb had some difficulty adjusting. Our sleeping hours were completely irregular and unpredictable (well also because of New Years Eve and the Saturday night we decided to see what the famous nightlife scene was all about, which doesn’t even start until midnight or 1a). By the end, he started to lose it a bit.

Today we went for a swim and some hot tubbing at Laugardalslaug, the city’s largest pool facility and the one I went to as a kid. At the facility, Neb finally found some relief:

Finally, I found the Sunlight Machine from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The lamp in question is the Philips EnergyLight. Related, and tempting to neb, the Philips goLite BLU.

I really need to write more about Frost. Image from wordle.net.

Hey, I don’t have cable or a Windows computer or a TV with an antenna. So YouTube is my only source for DNC speeches. I made a quick timeline if there were any you missed and wanted to see.

He should just come out and say, “The best part about putting your computing on a sphere is that nothing can ever be flat, imagine your emails and web pages bowing out at you! You’ve been living with Mercator projection all your life!”

As you may or may not know, I’m from Kansas originally. It seems like lately every week I read stories about severe weather destroying swaths of the Midwest. In fact, I gave my Mom a weather radio for Mother’s Day this year. Apparently it will squawk in the middle of the night if there’s severe weather in your county.

I used Dipity’s Tickr mashup to make a slideshow of severe weather by date and by location in Kansas. There are some pretty cool pics in there that definitely remind me of living in Kansas, where within 30 minutes the sky can go from clear and sunny to pitch black.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/09/timetube-the-timeline-that-youtube-should-built/

Blammmo!

Well here we are 10 months after the beginning of the great “No More Cable” experiment.

Since we aren’t mindlessly gorging ourselves on the fixed-cost TV all-the-time spigot that is cable television, we are spending less money and also able to extract information about our viewing habits. Below is a chart of the number of hours of television viewed, broken down by source.

Average Minutes of Television Watched per day: 55
(We’re probably over-counting here because TV shows without commercials are 42 minutes long. And we’ve assumed for the sake of simplicity that movies are 2 hours long.)

Now, let’s compare the costs. Netflix is a fixed per-month cost at $16.99. iTunes is flexible based on usage. See below:

Apparently, where we live, you cannot get basic cable. The cheapest plan is a digital plan for $57 per month. If you upgrade to a fancy plan with premium channels, you’re paying $109 per month. That’s off our chart so I didn’t even include it.

Quick Netflix queue update:
In May (when the last post was done) our Netflix queue stood at 70 DVDs. Now we’ve got 130 DVDs. That means that after watching 223 hours of DVDs, our backlog increased by 60 DVDs.

Update 2:
Looks like Hulu just came out of beta. This is the service that NBC and others created as a ad-based competitor to the iTunes Store TV Show section. I haven’t used it yet but have read good things about this service. It seems like a non-starter for most people though because I imagine that less than 1% of the population has a computer hooked up directly to their TV. Luckily, we do.

This was made with Dipity on Facebook.
Check it out and tell me what you think.

Well, it looks like Yahoo! is about to be acquired (no wait, taken over) by Microsoft. Oh, it’s certainly in the best short-term interest of shareholders, but it’s foolish to think that Yahoo! couldn’t flourish again on it’s own. I was there in 2001 and we did flourish again in 2004.

Yahoo! is profitable and they are still the biggest single website on the Internet. It seems to me that the company has become rather weak-minded and weak-willed and I wish they could stop that without selling off to Microsoft. All they need is a forward thinking leader, like a Steve Jobs but for Yahoo!. They need someone who can upend the entire organization, focusing in on a set of big future goals. My understanding of Jerry Yang is that he’s a nice and smart guy, but he spent the majority of Semel’s tenure playing golf rather than plotting out the future.

Yahoo! also has to stop rewarding mediocrity. One of the reasons I left was because we had a whole bunch of cool technology for letting users make My Yahoo! modules on their own (Like iGoogle!), but some bone-headed exec would never let us release it. Most of the people I worked with left for greener pastures over the past two years.

Maybe a way to start is to not have a front page that looks graphic-for-graphic the same as the AOL front page. Even when I was at Yahoo!, AOL was considered the lowest of the low.

Yahoo’s Front Page:

AOL’s Front Page: