Off to Babson to present on innovations in marketing at the Idea to Profit Summit hosted by the Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center. On the cell phone – 508 360 6147 — but won’t see email or IM until late afternoon.
Back. Interesting discussion and the audience (composed of senior marketing execs) had great questions, and no one sneaked peeks at their laptops.
Sheldon Brown’s Journal – Health Issues
Sheldon Brown is the authority on cycling. He works out of a cycling shop in Newton, Massachusetts (Harris Cyclery) and is cited by every bike geek as the authority on everything from Sturmey-Archer hubs to fixed-gear cycling set ups. In fact, there is an acronym devoted to Sheldon: AASHTA (As Always, Sheldon Has The Answer).
The man seems to live and breathe cycling and his site, Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Technical Info is literally an encyclopedia of cycling. He also seems like a really great man gauging from his personal observations and approach to life.
Now it appears he has multiple sclerosis and has to give up cycling. This is tragic. Having made the decision to voluntarily give up cycling as a pastime after my accident in May, I know what it feels like to miss it, but can’t imagine the pain of having it taken away the way it has for Sheldon.
This sort of thing frightens me but reminds me of this:
Just a lot less funny.
I learned to type when I was nine-years old. My handwriting was spastic, the third-grade teacher attempted to convert my left-handedness to right-handedness by tying my left hand to the back of my belt and tossing blackboard erasers to me so I could learn how to catch them with my right. The result was further chaos in penmanship, so my father gave me his old Remington manual typewriter and that was that. No typing lessons, just the order to stop writing things with my crabbed left hand and start pounding keys.
I graduated to an electric Smith-Corona when I was 14; went off to college with an massive IBM correcting Selectric (which I parlayed into some serious cash by starting a paper typing service for desperate classmates) and by the time I finished my first novel (unpublished, don’t ask) in 1980, I was up to 100 words per minute using only my index fingers and thumbs.
I edited that novel on the first Wang word processor — an amazing machine that stored the product on 8″ floppies that looked like old LPs. When I graduated and got a job at the Cape Cod Times, I went back to the Selectric, moving to a Hastech editing system at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. The job interview at the Tribune went pretty much like this. The managing editor grabbed a book, told me sit down and start typing. I started typing. He watched for about 30 seconds and said:
“I see you can’t touch type. Good. I don’t hire touch-typists or journalism school graduates.”
Indeed, almost every journalist I have ever seen types the way I do — two index fingers flying like dervishes, with thumbs whacking the space bar. This method of typing pounds a keyboard like a drum, and as a result I find myself yet again in the market for a great keyboard.
People of my age learned to type on typewriters, where some serious physical effort was required to smack the letter onto a ribbon. Electric typewriters were actuated, so the effort required was a lot less — like power steering in a car — but it wasn’t until I sat down in front of the original IBM PC and its massive, heavy, metal keyboard that I understood bliss.
In the 90s I converted to a “natural” ergonomic keyboard — the split kind — after discovering that moving the keys apart an inch decreased my typo count. I am so accustomed to the ergonomic form factor that I have serious issues with a traditional rectangular keyboard.
Now I love the keyboards on my ThinkPads. I have heard their praises sung far and wide. But when I work at a desk I like to dock the notebook and attach a USB keyboard. Shortly after arriving at Lenovo I went to the local office supply and bought a Microsoft 4000 keyboard. Slick. Black (so it sort of matches the black of the ThinkPad) but covered with useless media management buttons I never use. What I lust for is a Lenovo external keyboard — what we call our “UltraNav” model that has a TrackPoint embedded between the G,H,B, and N keys. Having the pointing device on the keyboard is an immense boon to a fast typist as one’s hands don’t have to leave the keys to move the mouse.
The only problem for me is the UltraNav doesn’t come in an ergonomic format. I went searching last night and it appears external keyboards come down to this:
I need a new keyboard now. Any suggestions?
ImageThief clued me in to the impending end of my favorite China blog — Talk Talk Chine — a nasty, snarky, anonymous slam on life in China from a western pov. On Saturday it goes dark. I’ll miss it. There were moments of high humor from TTC.
“The time has come to say goodbye. In the 1.5 years that TalkTalkChina has been up and running, we’ve had our soapbox to complain – and complain we did. This blog was set up because we just needed to get things off our chest and validate our frustrations. You have helped us do just that!”
For years I have relied on the Wall Street Journal’s emailed new alerts. Who ever owns the “send” trigger knows exactly when to push it. They never irritate me and are always on the money.
Just crossed the inbox. Rumsfield is saying sayonara:
“__________________________________
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal
Nov. 8, 2006
Republican officials say Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down. The move comes amid growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and Republican loss of the House and possible loss of the Senate.”
…and no lockups in the last hour. Fingers are crossed. I was actually reverting to IE 7 for most of the morning and not happy about it. I do have to say Firefox’s crash recovery capabilities are pretty robust, and I’m an expert having go through nearly a hundred in the last two weeks.
Update: The reinstall didn’t work. So I’ve disabled all extensions and will bring them back slowly.
Update 2: stable so far with only the del.ici.ous, FTP, and colored tab plug in enabled. No crashes in 12 hours.
Techmeme was leading with TechCrunch’s take on the Riya relaunch as Like.com — true image search. This permits a user to search for images that “look like” other images.
Arrington writes:
“The Like.com engine takes both text and images as queries, something no one else does. To return results based on an image query, Like.com compares a “visual signature” for the query image to possible results. The visual signature is simply a mathematical representatioin of the image using 10,000 variables. If enough variables are identical, Like.com decides the images are similar.
What this means – If you see an image on the web, like a watch that Paris Hilton is wearing in the picture to the left, and use it as an image query, Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar.
If you enter a text query, like “brown boots pointed toe,” Like.com will convert that query into variables in the visual signature and look for related image results. See screen shot below for the results from this query.”
This is insanely cool stuff. Check it out
E1E Executive Elite® flashlight – E1E-HA available from SureFire
Cousin Pete handed me one of these a couple weeks ago after I admired his while surfcasting for striped bass one night in early October. He had his clipped to the brim of his baseball hat and I had to express my lust for one.
The engineering on this is superb. It is very heavy, uses a 3v Lithium battery (camera size), and the best part is the “pocket” clip — or hat clip. Snap this onto the brim of a hat, hit the on-off button, and where you look there is light. This came in handy last weekend during the ski-house work weekend. A couple years ago my buddy Charlie and I were on the roof as the sun set, trying to screw down some metal panels by the light of my Treo 650. That was not fun. This year, Charlie and I were able to inspect our paint job by the light of the Surefire.
“Ultra compact (finger length) incandescent flashlight for everyday carry and general use. Puts out a smooth, brilliant beam as bright as a big two D-cell flashlight. Light enough to clip to hat brim for hands-free operation. Small size, light weight, and long runtime also make it perfect for travel.”
I am a total sucker for mini gadgets. This one rules.
