Everymoment Counts

Everymoment Now is providing a new view of the 2008 general election. Excellent graphs shed some light on the media trends surrounding the general election a little more visible. The graph on the home page caught my attention for a minute or two. Plans are in the works to make use of the technology and ideas behind the site beyond the general election.

The current version of Everymoment Now is focused on the 2008 US General Election. When the election is complete we'll have 100 days of data leading up to November 4th. We feel that being able to look back over the election, to see where media shifts occurred and what stories had the greatest impact on the final outcome is pretty important and powerful.

 

Executive Ecucation and Spelling

I'm can be a terrible speller and average wordsmith so I try to make the effort to always run the spellchecker and have my more important documents edited by somebody other than me. A poorly prepared document can reflect badly on you or your organization. Below, is a good example of a document that should have received a little extra attention before it was sent to thousands of people. I'm sure I'm not the only one that was surprised to see a misspelling like this from the U.C. Berkeley Center for Executive Education.

 

 

My Wife's Brain

Well, this isn't the kind of picture of a loved one you get to see everyday. My wife is about to have surgery for an ear condition and a CAT Scan was part of the pre-opp. Wow. Weird. You can even see her hair in this. A picture like this should be in every family photo album.

I Love Dogs - Young and Old

I just love dogs - old dogs and young dogs - handsome dogs and even ugly dogs just like this one. I pulled this off a post on IH8MUD Landcruiser Forum in a total state of disbelief - this just has to be a movie prop of some kind. What would you do if you saw this K9 running for you down the sidewalk?

I told you that if you to come over to try to steal my 45 my dog would probably go for the ride with you. You just have to watch out for the creppy neighbor dog. - Leaping Deer

followed by ...

Looks like my ex. - jsaltlick

Update: My friend Jake Weatherly just informed me that this dog is in fact the real deal. Apparently, it won some kind of "ugly dog" competition at some point. A Google image search turns up all kind of ugly dogs. I had no idea.

Cars in Eugene OR

The Country Fair is coming to Eugene this month and with it come
interesting people and their cars.

Only in the bay area ...

Tivo powered Prius

On a jet plane ...

I'm on a jet plane headed for San Francisco. I'll be at Stanford for
the week attending a b-school program designed to promote innovation
in teams.

Sturdy Chest by Studley

One of the presenters here at the Webvisions conference today used this image in his presentation. A master carpenter and stonemason named Henry Studley built this to carry his collection of tools. Excellent bit of craftmanship - really impressive. It was used illustrate the Rails framework. Read more about it.

Obama Ads

I really don't like the fact that Google Adsense is dumping "Obama Exposed" ads on my blog. I'm an Obama supporter and I'm about to pull Adsense from my blog because of this. Is there anything I can do in my Adsense setup to solve this problem? Maybe the new Ad Review Center will do the trick for me. Maybe I can switch out the "Obama Exposed" ads for the "Impeach Bush" ads ; )

Webvisions

I'm at the Webvisions conference in Portland Or today and possibly tomorrow if the sessions don't bore me too much. I typically stay away from conferences like this because I think they just don't go deep enough but this was close to home so I thought it was worth a shot and the $250 registration fee.

New York

Last week I had an opportunity to visit New York - it was my visit so I made the most of it. I was in New York promoting Email Center Pro at a CrunchGear meetup. We had a great time at the event and had some time to visit a few of the more popular attractions. Things like the MOMA, the MET, Central Park, and the Empire State Building.

Shero

Just heard a cool new word for the 1st time - shero, a famale heroin. Dr. Steven Rogers used the word during the Microsoft Small Business Summit.

Last Lecture

Sabrina Parsons, CEO of the company I work for, pointed me towards a YouTube video this morning that I want to share with all of you. In this video Dr. Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, gives his last lecture and in doing so creates a very real gift that's both inspiring and motivational. Best wishes Randy.

Trunk Monkey

I love the Trunck Monkey series of advertisements developed by Sean Sosik-Hamor and Subaru. Guaranteed to make you laugh a little. Here's a complete list of "monkey" videos.

Suburban Auto Group released a series of Trunk Monkey Super Bowl commercials for 2003 and 2004. The ad agency that produced these commercials is R/West. Although the Suburban Auto Group popularized the Trunkmonkey with their Trunk Monkey commercials, Sean Sosik-Hamor and the Subaru community were responsible for creating the concept back in 2000. -- trunkmonkey.com

Drug-Resistant Staph

Drug-Resistant Staph is getting a lot of attention these days. The recent death of a 17-year-old high school student in VA pushed the nasty bacteria back into the spotlight. MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is now an enemy of the state, like a Bin Laden, and on the minds of most anxious parents and primetime news show producers. The New York Times put together a good MRSA overview yesterday - Drug-Resistant Staph: What You Need to Know.

Now would be a good time to invest in companies that deal in anti-bacterial hand wash products. Now would be a bad time to be a Pediatrician or a school custodian. Wash your hands, don't touch the door handle in public bathrooms, and don't touch other people ; ) Most don't wash their hands in the bathroom.

I'm still alive ...

I'm still alive and well - but this blog is almost 6 feet under.

I've been busy with my life, not a Second Life, my life. My career and my family have both been keeping me busy lately. We have our 3rd in the oven and I was recently promoted to Vice President of Product Development for Palo Alto Software. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this blog doesn't get a lot of love when life takes over.

I was doing some house-cleaning in Google Reader yesterday and I noticed that I'm not the only blogger that has a hard time keeping up - a lot of blogs have gone dark since I last cleaned house. You can draw some parallels between this blogosphere ecosphere and the rain forest ecosphere - the hard woods (Engadget, LifeHacker) are here to stay for a while but the forest floor plants (my blog, and blogs like it) are constantly appearing and disappearing as the forest evolves. It feels very organic - healthy for the blogosphere in many ways. By the way, the hard woods do eventually come down.

With that said I'm still committed to this blog. Why? Because I love the notion of blogging, the written word, and the way the Internet makes it available almost instantly across Planet Earth. I also believe technology professionals, like myself, need to maintain a presence in the blogosphere. We need to support blogging because the information exchange it supports speeds innovation along.

I'm going to be focusing my posts more on technology and less on popular culture and the other things that amuse me as I move this blog forward.

Additionally, I'm a regular contributor over at the Bplans Blog, where you can read what I have to say about startups, small business, business planning, and strategy.

More to come!

Coffee Withdrawl

image: the verve:already there by Flickr user visualpanic

Starting today, I'm making yet another attempt to rip coffee out of my life. For me, this isn't an easy thing to do. I love coffee. I love coffee houses. I love Starbucks. I look forward to my morning cup in the evening and it's the 1st thing I think about in the morning. And I only drink a 16oz cup a day - it's not like I'm drinking 3 cups a day. Why am I doing this?

• Coffee contributes to dragon breath
• Coffee is turning my teeth yellow
• Coffee is ripping up my stomach ** main motivator at this point **
• I think coffee makes my eye twitch
• I don't like the headaches that come with missing my daily dose
• Sometimes it feels like I'm working for coffee when it should be the other way around
• To save money
• To prove I can

So... wish me luck. I thought it might help to blog about this attempt. I promise to update this post if I fall off the wagon. Let's see how many days I can go without the brown stuff. Wish me luck.

Related: How to Give up Coffee (enjoyed the Why Give Up Coffee at All? section and Teeccino's Top Reasons to be Caffeine-Free list.

Update 12/22/06: I fell off the wagon today and had a 12oz cup of jo - 10 lashings.

Update 12/27/06: Fell off the wagon again on the 24th and 25th.

Update 01/05/07: Back on coffee off and on - at least I'm not drinking it everyday.

Happy Halloween!

IMG_5734
Originally uploaded by cale.

Happy Halloween! I took this shot with my Canon SLR while out trick-or-treating with my kids. Halloween night offers a lot of really cool low-light photo taking opportunities - I always enjoy it.

Comments Enabled

Comments enabled. Comment spam ... grrr.

Comments Disabled

I temporarily disabled the commenting system. Why? Comment spam fatigue. My blog is attracting hundreds, no thousands, of spam comments a week and I’m sick of cleaning up after the buggers. I’ll bring comments back on-line after I have some time to make it a little more difficult for spammers to take advantage of this system. I’ve been considering SCODE1 – a CAPTCHA security code plugin for the Movable Type platform.

Hybrid Shirt

I want one of these : ) Size: Large
Hybrid Shirt BUY now [via] Mule Design

Take great notes

[via] Geek to Live: Take great notes / Lifehacker

I'm a manager so I spend a lot of time taking copious notes. Microsoft OneNote 2003 is my primary note taking tool - take the OneNote tour if you're interested in learning more about OneNote.

Bumped into a great article on Lifehacker about methods for taking great notes. I especially liked this simple system for using symbols to mark specific types of notes.

[ ] A square checkbox denotes a to do item
( ) A circle indicates a task to be assigned to someone else
* An asterisk is an important fact
? A question mark goes next to items to research or ask about

Baths in Japan

I clicked-into this post (The Electronic Bath Water Cleaner) on Engadget today and it inspired me to write this post for PalmIt.com. The Japanese do a lot of things differently than we do - that's expected, it's an ancient culture. Some of the things they do differently just make sense in a "why didn't I think of that" kind of way. For example, they almost always bathe at night - not in the morning like we do here in the States. Your typical Japanese bathroom features a shower and a tub but the tub isn't used for bathing, it's used for soaking after the shower. The bath water is used by the whole family before it's drained and replaced - the Japanese are very good at recycling just about everything. Modern Japanese bathrooms are very high-tech - TOTO is the dominant brand. The tub water is automatically kept at a specified temperature and sometimes there are even monitoring stations throughout the house that let the occupant know when the tub is ready.

The whole bathing at night thing made a lot of sense to me so I've been bathing at night since I returned from Japan and I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner. Oh - and the toilet is usually in a totally different room which also makes a lot of sense to me. More at japan-guide.com - the Japanese bath.

Gundam and Anime in Japan

I spent some time in Japan recently and while I was there I had the chance to see 1st hand the popularity of all things anime. The stores are filled with merchandise based on popular anime series. When I was a kid I loved the Macross series so I really got a kick out of looking through all of this stuff - I even bought a Gundam Fix Figuration model (similar to the one pictured on the left) to display in my office.

Female figures (like the one pictured below) are even more popular than the mechanized (robotic) figures - very serious looking Japanese business men spend more time than they should browsing the aisles at the local hobby/toy stores for the latest GoodSmile (great pictures) collectible - it's a little odd but you've got to give the manufacturers props for attention to detail, the models look great. All of these models are from cartoons that both kids and adults watch.

Danny Choo spends a lot of time taking macro shots of his collection - it's worth a look if you have any interest at all in the mechanized or female anime figures. You can also see quite a few pictures of these figures on Flickr.

Apologies, this post is a little off the tech topic but Gundam and Japanese anime are both popular with the Geek Squad so I took a chance on it. Most of this stuff is available in the U.S. if you look around a bit but it tends to be on the expensive side - a Gundam figure will cost you about $70 and the selection here is poor relative to what you can buy in Japan - the female figures are even harder to find.

 

Japan - 4th Post

Day 6 of our 13-day Japan trip and we've been busy. All of the walking and back and forth on the train between Yokohama and Tokyo is tiring us out so we spent most of the day today tooling around in Kikuna - visiting a local park and stuff like that. I spent the day yesterday in Tokyo visiting Akihabara - electronics central. Akihabara was amazing - I've never seen so many gadgets in one place before. We also spent some time in Ginza at the Sony Building.  To top-off the day we travelled to Shibuya to see the nightlife - Shibuya is a supper popular shopping and entertainment center - kind of like Times Square in New York.

We've also seen: Minato Mirai and the Landmark Tower (great view), Yokohama's Chinatown

 

Japan - 3rd Post

Day 2 here in Japan and we're having a great time. We went into Tokyo last night for a family reunion and the train ride alone was totally amazing. I don't really have a lot of time to write a detailed post at this point - just wanted to let everyone know that we're OK and having an amazing time.

Japan - 2nd Post

I’m in the air somewhere over the Pacific on my way to Japan – flying at 575MPH. We’re flying NorthWest airlines and the trip has been pretty good so far - especially considering that my wife and I are travelling with our two small children. This is the 1^st time (that I can remember) I’ve flown NorthWest and the service and accomodations have been excellent so far. An Aibus A330 with all of the modern gadgets, include AVOD, is taking us to our destination.

We’re flying into Narita and should arrive on the 25^th around 4pm – we left on the 24^th around 12pm PST. From Narita we’ll be driving over to Yokahama to stay in a home with some family friends.

More to come.

Japan - 1st Post

Twas the night before an 11 hour plane flight to Japan. And all ... [more to come]

Off to Japan

I'm off to Japan next week (Yokohama and Tokyo) for some fun - I'm really looking forward to the trip. This will be my first visit to Japan and there are lots of things I want to see and do. I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to think about the trip at all so I'm going without an itinerary. I'm planning to take lots of pictures and I hope to keep some light blogging up while I'm there.

Place I'd like to see:

• Akihabara Shopping District
• Hard Gay Guy
• Sumo Wrestling
• suggestions?

Things I should do:

• suggestions?

I really should spend some more time thinking about this but then again it might be fun to just go. I'll have people with me that have spent a lot of time in Japan so I think I'll just go along for the ride and see what happens. Just being in Japan will be adventure enough. Can't wait to see the gadgets!

Colorado

I'm in Colorado now -- on my way back to Eugene.

Saw some cool stuff while I was here:

University of Colorado at Boulder (runner-up college choice, Dad's school)

The Sink (Dad drank beer here in the 60s)

The Flatirons (Awesome natural wonder)

Places my Dad lived (see Flickr BLOG)

My Cousin, his girlfriend Rebecca and some cool views.

Horses

I'll post again in two months ; ) Who has time for this blogging thing?