So much life, so little time…

Not often this happens (and the first time I’ve seen it)…from the lounge at Zurich airport today.

tilting

It’s funny how trails of information flow across different media.  Today, on the train home, I picked up a (now free) Evening Standard and caught an articleabout how fashion designers are trying their hand at architecting buildings, mainly interiors.  In that article it mentioned someone called Paul Virilio and his book “The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers” which sounded intriguing.  Getting home I googled for it and found a bunch of pictures, leading me to this site with stunning pictures and a translation of Virilio’s preface to the book.   Some have an other-world, almost Star Wars, like quality of the structures embedded and strewn over bleak landscapes – as if pushed in by gods.  WWII era constructions some have an intensely modern feel – finding them as moon base structures wouldn’t be any more surprising.  This one, “tilting”, evokes a crashed space craft, chunky as it is!  Great to find art and philosophy in surprising places.  And the possibly final link from newspaper to search engine to website exhibition to blog via a tweet is made.

The UN World Food Program’s October 2008 update said that it is going to end need $6.7b to feed 97m people.  Thats $69 for every person at risk.

Where could that money have come from?   How about all that money NASA spends on space exploration.   A scientist by education, it strikes me as exhorbitant that we should spend such extremely large sums of money on achieving things that should matter less than saving lives.  The space program to land a man on the money cost, at today’s money, cost $145bn.  The money alone spent by the US on this program would have funded the World Food Program or 20+ years.

If the world was one household, then would there be any disposable income, whilst it’s children were dying?  And if the world was a prosperous, healthy and happy village would non-essential spending be accepted in that village, whilst it’s children were dying?

ICANN, after years of planning, recently announced that full IDNs are a go, so that an FQDN can theoretically be completely internationalized with a selection of around 100K characters, outside the 37 available now for TLDs (26 alphabetic, 10 numeric and 1 punctuation mark – the hyphen).  The limitations on the extent of a language’s characters will be down to the internationalization of the first level TLDs and the subsequent IDN naming efforts of the gTLDs and ccTLDs at the second and third levels.  Here are some examples of existing, working FQDN IDNs ( <a href="http://例

Here are two well-documented stated goals that can be considered S.M.A.R.T.  - one considered a great success the other a great failure, both coincidentally from the US.

• Successful goal: NASA getting a man on the moon and back again alive. JFK in 1961: “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.“
• Un-successful goal:  General Motor’s fixation on getting back 29% of the US market-share

An email thread I was on recently with thousands of smart recipients questioned the value of setting specific goals at a high level; that they can damage an organisation more than they help.   Are S.M.A.R.T. criteria enough?

Read more…

At the LA Times some great ideas about Wave applied to a specific work activity…

……”For the last two months, while we’ve been testing the Google Wave developer preview, we have been talking amongst ourselves about how this thing could change (or add to) what we do. So, here’s a list of a few wild ideas we had for using Wave.” Covering…

• Collaborative reporting
• Record and archive interviews
• Live editing
• Smarter story updates
• Discuss while you read
• Transparent writing process
• Instant polls
• Wiki news aggregator

Back in March in Beijing, I decided to stay in a Hutong house, not a conventional western-style hotel.  It was relatively easy to do, just settle on one (4 Banqiao), find the best deal online, then call them up to negotiate directly.  It was about an hour away from the office and 3 metro trains, but I liked the commute seeing how Beijingers got to work and not just by taxi or a short walk from the most local hotel.   It also meant my rooms was near “food street” (Dongzhimen nei da jie) where I ate a few times at bustling restaurants, eating hot stuff and, once, Beijing duck.

Read more…

So the US gov has gone into the (private) cloud business (ref: 1 , 2).  With all the regulatory, security, complexity and scale issues inherent in the government space that a major gov (and there is none bigger in terms of annual IT spend than the US) can commit to making a cloud and making it work is remarkable.  Soon the complexity of building a cloud will lessen, it will become easier, and perhaps even a commodity to deploy in cloud units.

This is a huge opportunity for OS vendors. Whilst some got rich on “commodity computing” that was just for openers. The real commodity/utility computing is now:

- millions of of very cheap computers in the cloud
- millions of of very cheap computers in the hand (netbooks and cellphones)

Read more…

Noticed today that the plastic retainer on the end of strap is broken on my laptop messenger bag – which means using the strap is effectively unusable. Really surprised since Timbuk2 has a great reputation for messenger bags, and one designed for laptops should really have a sturdy strap mechanism. It is plastic which mildly concerned me. Have raised a ticket with their support for a replacement - will see what happens.  Update: Timbuk2 have offered to replace the strap and one is on it’s way already! – should get here from the States this week.  Update 2 : delivered today for free was a new strap with an updated retainer, so all fixed.  Great customer service from Megan at Timbuk2, thanks

Today Sarah, Romeo and me went for a Ramblers walk today over at Ash ranges starting at Pirbright which has a military history and shooting ranges, which was not a red flag day so there was a high level of expectation that we weren’t going to have to dodge bullets and shells.  The day started off cloudy as English summer days often do then ended up nice and sunny.  We stopped at a nice pub in Ash called the Lion where about half the folks picnicked on home food, whilst the rest had to wait a bit whilst a very nice barmaid had to also make all the food in a cheerful manner.  The pub trade is not an easy one these days.  En route we took quite a few pictures with our new camera, a Samsung WB500 which I am happy with but have not got the hang of manually focusing it well yet.