Saturday, November 16, 2013

Why Google Should Acquire...

Yelp, Open Table, Snapchat, Tripit, Amazon, Netflix, UsingMiles, Yapta, Scottrade, and every other data/service/content platform. Alternatively, "Google Subsidizes Your Life" or "Should You Be Afraid of Google?" or "Should the NSA Acquire Google?" or "When Should We Shut Google Down?"  And since I now sound like your crazy bipolar ex, let's just throw in "I Love You Google."

I'm a futurist.  I dream of days when we will have seamless electrochemical to digital conversion, allowing for two-way pseudotelepathy.  All I have to do is think of football and voila, set top box menu populates with live football games.  Eye movement tracking = auto scrolling. 'call' [contact].  [begins speechless conversation].  Direct content delivery to your brain?  I want to wake up, be 'online,' have my coffee ready just as I step out of the bathroom, and have an Uber car waiting 30 seconds before I step out the door.  You're excited about Google Glass; I'm hopeful for Google Glass retinal implant edition.  It knows everything I'm looking at and feeding in.  It'll know I'm about to trip before I do.  Forget about 5% ad conversions.

I like for everything to be intutitive.  GPS, email, news delivery, shopping aggregation, tailored travel, etc.  Most of these technologies don't even teeter on the brink of AI.  Predictive AI requires complex (blackbox) algorithms and the ever so nebulous and evasive 'big data.'

Google knows almost everything about me.  It's terrifying to think about so I choose to blindly revel in its free offerings.  It's a little like Halloween.  You get all that free candy and you know you'll probably end up obese with cavities and diabetes, but in the spirit of carpe diem, oil drilling, and other unsupervised revelry, wheeeeeeeeee.  White people haven't paid yet for everything they've done, so why worry about sucking on Google's teat for another century.

Free email, free calendar, free search engine, free maps (and now, Waze), free blogging.  If I were reduced to 1s and 0s and lived in a cyberworld, I would essentially be living off of Google, all subsidized by advertising revenue.

If you look at a map or globe, it's a quick visualization of all 196 countries (give or take some territories, political instabilities, unacknowledged dark corners, OFAC sanctioned states, communist states, and whatever permutations there within.  Even resource visualizations are just superimposed on the same images. Diamonds, gold, oil, copper, etc.  The web is a bit more of a vast expanse, almost like the universe, constantly expanding.  If you map out the internet the same way you do the world, you end up with a lot of real estate.  And of course you can superimpose different themes or memes on this map.  By sector, by ecommerce, by cats, by porn, by dinosaurs, by Reddit categories, and so on.  But truly, the internet and its real estate valuation is driven by commerce.  And commerce is driven by advertising.  Ergo our syllogism, internet = advertising.

The entire web can be mapped out in terms of advertising space.  And the draw is basically cats, I mean content.  And how much of that advertising space does Google own?  A lot.

Let's go back to what Google knows about you.  Where you've been, where you go, where you'll be. What you read, what you type, who you talk with, how you talk with people, when you poop.  Google knows what you buy, who you call, who you text, calls you ignore, messages you ignore, your collaborative and private docs, things you like, your stock portfolios, your calendar, and maybe even your coding projects.  Oh, and Google knows everything you search for.

With minimal NLP, Google could differentiate the levels of relationships from my email communiques.

Now, Google + you = digital pimping.  Imagine all the ads they could slap in front of your Snapchats.

Strangely, we're not all that afraid or, at the least, wary of Google in the way we are of Facebook.  Is it because of Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg?  Or because it's blatant?  Everything Facebook does is mostly visibly under one roof.  While Google is a bit more diversified, sort of like Amazon.  But if you scroll to the bottom of Amazon's homepage, they're not really hiding their holdings.  The last time we flipped out at Google was when they decided to peruse email for ad embedding.  Blew over fairly quickly.  When pimp is also sugar daddy, we're alright.

Is Google a ninja like Akamai?

Sure, Facebook is a bit subversive about their methods, but who knows more about you?

The downside to all these acquisitions, aside from Google knowing more about you than the NSA or you know about yourself?  Skynet.  Damn auto correct, Google Now.

Friday, October 18, 2013

greatest strength

i finally figured it out.  my greatest strength is figuring it out.

whatever the 'it' is, challenge accepted.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

thoughts on principles

principles are important to guide you in times of adversity, but toting principles that haven't weathered adversity is like flying a plane that hasn't been checked for airworthiness.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

install CM10.1 on hp touchpad

if you already have CM installed, open your browser in your touchpad and dl:



and bob's your uncle:

ECC life

for as long as i can remember, i've periodically done random parity checks on my life to make certain i still exist...at least in the same timeline and universe.  clearly the thinking and therefore syllogism doesn't hold much metaphysical water in my books.

i try to track things i've done with particular scrutiny on gaps in consciousness - namely sleeping - because how can we really know that when we close our eyes and disappear into our wild subconscious that we rematerialize into the same 'physical' existence that we left before we closed our eyes and drifted off into who the dooze knows where?  we've made up all these quantum theories that fit the bill, but the earth was once flat too.

why do drugs when my brain trips on its own?

Sunday, July 14, 2013

rebirth

hearing your heart beat is an incredible thing.  and feeling it, even more so.

of course we take it for granted and learn to ignore it.  the average heart beats 72 times a minute.  so 4,329 times per hour, 103,680 times per day, and 37,843,200 times per year.

by exactly a year ago, i had been breathing for approximately 14,538,240 minutes so my heart had beat about 1,046,753,280 times, give or take the moments of my life that had my heart beating out of my chest or the times of deep meditation during which i'd managed to slow my heart.

i could probably revisit all the momentous occasions in my life based on my heartbeat.  almost all of those, racing.  the time i beat my personal mile time.  the time i fell in love.  every time i've had an incredible laugh.  the times i've jumped out of planes, jumped dunes on ATVs, bungee jumped, caught a great wave, flipped out of a raft, and on.

but for the first time in my life, i had an immensely unusual sensation.  i was stricken with typhoid and had severe bouts of diarrhea that started 15 hours before.  somewhere in those 15 hours, my life had hung by threads and i wouldn't have known or cared had i died.  by evening, i was sitting at dinner and slowly both my arms went completely numb.  i dozed off at the table a few times.  suddenly i had a strange sensation in my chest.  my heart was failing.

i had a strange premonition about the trip and i took out a million and a half in insurance.  somehow i made it back.  alive.  and the past year has been quite a ride and i've crossed off most of what remains on my bucket list.

and tomorrow is 24 more hours i should be grateful for to enjoy to my heart's content.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

mirage

all day every day we are sold mirages.  empty value.

what's the last thing you purchased?  did it truly make you happy?

what value did you exactly receive for your money?  warmth?  fashion?  status?  respect?  intellectual property?  the fact that you employed 0.002% of an 11 year-old sweatshop worker?

what's something you bought 5 years ago?  do you still use it?  is macklemore right?

we are all eskimos buying ice.

are we all wasting time earning fabricated currencies, investing it in fabricated industries, all so we can constantly buy into fabricated idealities to further propagate this cycle?  sure we're creating more and more people which means we need to create more and more bullshit services to sell these people in order to create more money.

total global currency in circulation in 1990 was $1 trillion and by 2002, $2 trillion, and by 2008, $4 trillion.  so if the size of the global finance industry is $955 trillion, what is everyone really selling?  yes, this game of monopoly is getting bigger so we need more monopoly money because i can't buy a house with cheetos, but it's not like i wanted a monopoly house anyway.

clearly i'm an utilitarian rationalist.  if you need me, i'll be chopping wood while seeking enlightenment in a forest.

emotional escape velocity

escape velocity is equal to the square root of 2 times the gravitational constant times the mass divided by the radius.

my metaphysical corollary is the square root of thoughts times emotions all divided by time.

of course, time has a way of making you a prisoner of emotional gravity, so i do mean time spent moving forward rather than living in reverse.

Monday, May 13, 2013

google glass

"But even he, the tech-obsessed gadget fiend, admits it’s difficult to wear. The first time he set foot outside the house with it on, he immediately stepped in dog shit because he wasn’t paying attention to the world outside the screen. And he adamantly refuses to wear it on public transportation for fear of being mugged.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/google-glass-hands-on-review/#sBuABVEDEBspFCui.99 "

Friday, April 26, 2013

fence post

i've spent my entire life being compassionate.  and i can see myself slowly becoming a cynic.

i've tried to live by king's words that "a strong man must be militant as well as moderate. he must be a realist as well as an idealist."

each step i get closer to deciding that i'd rather become a ball of unstoppable fury, i stumble upon something like chandler's "if i couldn't ever be gentle, i wouldn't deserve to be alive."

but how far could i take this boat if i wasn't constantly worrying about its wake?

update: i think i've always been a ball of fury and worked hard to keep mr hyde at bay.  now i'm more curious what mr hyde can accomplish.

Friday, April 12, 2013

cannot wait for

google glasses, corneal implant edition

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

if you ever

work with or for me, i expect creativity, intelligence, perfection, and initiative.  please.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

israel-palestine

"It is like two people arguing over a slice of pizza while one of them is eating it," said Muasher, vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace

maktoob, almost

i like to think that everything happens for a reason, considering that there are trillions of possibilities; and when you map out a tree with the different permutations, the number goes into infinity.

there's a reason for why you are where you are when you are. trillions of pieces react and settle into place paving the way for what comes next.

it's been a tough past year and i've dealt with deluge after deluge of frustration. to top it off, my new laptop completely crashed leaving me sans 4 months of data, which i failed to back up.

earlier today, i prematurely (conclusively, at the time) arrived at the decision that i'd like my moniker to be 'the steamroller.' i can be incredibly demanding, but fairly few - fewer than half a dozen - people have ever really seen me irate. i thought, for the sake of performance and accomplishment, why hold back?

i picked up my laptop 6 hours ago from the fedex office and have been working since.

some random thought triggered by spontaneous nerve firings led me to google something which led to something else which led me to a door: om mani padme hum.

and so here i am thinking that i need to not be a steamroller, to look deeper and seek enlightenment.

the universe is either trying to tell me something or i'm reading too far into this.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

burnt out

so i purchased a new laptop 4 months ago and i just burned out the hard drive, and this one was the first solid state.

seeing as how i'm coming up on the dozenth drive, i need something that can keep up.

anyway, i tried like hell to recover all data and came up on some great resources.

first, i didn't have an optical drive so i had to make all my files usb bootable.

utility score comments
Rufus 5/5 Rufus will make a properly bootable USB drive given that you have a proper Windows based ISO file.
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool 1/5 Not much better than your built in Windows format tool.
ISO to USB 1/5 Finicky tool; constant error messages. Used Rufus, and was done in no time at all.
Win32 Disk Imager 4/5 This only gets a 4 out of 5 because it does what it's supposed to well: slapping ISOs onto removable drives. I used this for putting Debian Wheezy onto a SD card for the Raspberry Pi and it worked like a charm.


as for the recovery utilities, look no further than UBCD. UBCD is a DOS wizard and contains just about every utility you need from TestDisk to Parted Magic. it includes BIOS, CPU, boot management, data recovery, device info and management, diagnosis, disk cloning, disk editing, disk wiping, installation, partition management, memory, peripheral, and system utilities.

try it; trust me. i bet geek squad, ontrack, and even nerd herd uses it.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

nintendo child

so my brand new acer aspire s3 crashed on me.  i put it in hibernate as always, but this time, when i opened it, i had a conniption and started overusing commas.

but really, it rebooted and posted an ominous message: no bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key.  odd considering it's a solid state drive and the only moving part is the fan.

i started troubleshooting and dismantled the whole laptop.

shortly thereafter, i started bugging brian, my other half.


Brian:  oh ohhh ohhh did you try blowing into the ssd nintendo style?
 me:  lol i totally did
 Brian:  hahahahah
 me:  that's how you know i'm an 80s kid
 Brian:  hahaha

Saturday, March 2, 2013

brain

this is what my brain does with most decisions, except with more branches and subbranches.  permutation after permutation.  i should get the windows or mac thinking/processing symbol tattooed on my forehead.



Friday, March 1, 2013

Today, I am grateful

that my generation has not had a mandatory draft.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

passive aggression

i love passive aggressive notes so here's my address and email address so you can send as many as you want:

1600 pennsylvania ave nw
washington, dc 20500

apparently, i'm a bigger fan of sarcasm.

Friday, February 22, 2013

homework

ruining friday nights since 1999.

chocolate snob

i'm not a snob about anything really.  i'm so easy going that you could vomit on me and i'd probably get you some club soda and then mop up.

i have a palate for great food and great anything for that matter, but i could just as easily go for taco trucks and mcdonalds.

but when it comes to dark chocolates, i can get persnickety.

i've had neuhaus, mast brothers, michel cluizel, leonidas, vosges, soft milk chocolates in japan, truffles from all over, and everything in between.  but i recently discovered something in my own backyard.

compartes chocolatier.

try it.

favorite reparation

"In a nationally publicized incident, [Mark Cuban] criticized the league's manager of officials, Ed T. Rush, saying that he 'wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen'Dairy Queen management took offense to Cuban's comments and invited him to manage a Dairy Queen restaurant for a day. Cuban accepted the company's invitation and worked for a day at a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, where fans lined up in the street to get a Blizzard from the owner of the Mavericks."

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

sir edmund hillary

was probably not the first man to set foot on the highest point on earth sort of in the way that amerigo vespucci was not the first man to discover america.

there happened to be these natives, but we did away with most of them.

life is simply about making claims and recording them.

should an asteroid wipe out any trace of human existence and another intelligent specie emerge in half a billion years, someone will 'discover' whatever landmass or ocean that this will have become, someone will be the 'first' to summit everest, and someone will again wipe out colonies of natives.

may they be a more considerate, non-warring, intelligent, and unified specie.

the closer

the other morning, i was walking across moscone and i had to use the restroom badly.  i had been drinking coffee all morning and it caught up with me.

i still had my starbucks in hand from across the bay so my conscience figured it would be less impolite if i walked into the starbucks here to use their restroom.

i waltzed in, read "sorry, out of order :(" on the restroom door, went in anyway, fixed the toilet, used it, and walked out.

i may not always be the closer, but i will be the fixer.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Optimal Conditions of Cooler Aging for Beef

i found a beautifully marbled rib eye two days ago and put it in my steak aging fridge.

i threw in about a pound of salt to control the humidity.  recommended humidity is about 80%.

the fridge is still set to 1 C, but i'm considering raising it.  i was at whole foods yesterday and discovered that they have a dry aging fridge also!

i talked to one of the butchers about it for a while and they keep the fridge set at 41 F.

i did a bit more research on aging temperatures and came across this awesome paper.  as demibiologist, it's just what i needed.

it compares dry aging at 30 F vs 38 F, with resulting tenderness measured in shear force with protein degradation confirmed through gel electrophoresis.

the results were fairly surprising.  enzymatic activity decreases significantly below 0 C and ceases below -2 C, yet at 30 F (-1.111 C), both samples reached a similar shear force/tenderness.

i'm considering raising the fridge a degree or two, but also might lean towards cooler in case i have any random pernicious bacteria floating around the fridge.

if it's not

worth your time, it's not worth my time; if it's not worth my time, it's not worth yours.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

life reminder

i was about to enter a grocery store when i saw girl scout cookies.  i thought to myself, i'll buy them on my way out.

by the time i came out, they had already packed up and left.

buy girl scout cookies as soon as you see them.

there will ALWAYS

be something new to discover.

if not, you need to open your eyes, your ears, your nostrils, your mouth, your palms.

bandwidth

CPU Usage: 100%
Physical Memory: 99%

seems my computer and i are in the same boat

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

project updates

finally setup the raspberry pi.  used disk imager to write wheezy raspbian to a 16gb sd card.  still debating what awesomeness will come of this.  maybe a dropbox or pirate box?  def think raspberry pi foundation should host a diagnostic hardware hackathon: building low-cost diagnostic tools for the developing world.  low-cost compact peripherals like life support systems, refractometers, facscount systems, imaging devices, hematology analyzers, and other processor dependent diagnostic and treatment devices.  this is coming up on my list.













as for the dry aged steak freezer, it's about ready to go.  nabbed a 110V willhi digital thermostat on ebay for about $15.  you could hardwire the whole thing to your fridge, but i yoinked out the analog thermostat (red and black wires) and connected it to the digital.  also cut an extension cord to use as an external power source.  i actually drilled a hole through the fridge and remounted the thermostat outside since i think the op temp needs to be > 0 C.  however, there are a handful of ways to do this.  you can connect your thermostat directly to your compressor if you want or if you rewire your fridge so that the electricity is connected directly to your compressor instead of through the internal thermostat, you can just wire the fridge's power source to the switch (red and black wires).














anyway, while the thermostat's control accuracy is 1 degree, the whole thing is in celsius so it's less accurate (by 20 to 180%) than fahrenheit.  i dropped the hysteresis from 5 degrees to one degree.  this means the compressor kicks in when the thermostat reaches one degree above your set temp.  dry aging meat has to be in a pretty sterile and controlled environment with the temperature between 34 and 36 fahrenheit, so i'll update on what happens with this celsius business.

as you can imagine, these fridges weren't built to be this cold so the insulation isn't all that great.  the cooling cycles were about 5 minutes so i put about three gallons of water in the fridge to stabilize the temperature (water has a high specific heat = loses and gains heat slowly).  haven't remeasured cooling cycle yet.

did some testing with paperclips and scotch tape (don't ever try that at home).


















also been told that laminar air flow over the meat should be about 60cfm, but have seen people dry age in stagnant air.  i have some server fans handy, but i might give this a go as is for now.

more updates and photos to follow.

next steps, getting some water softener salt to suck moisture out and finding a well marbled steak.

how very american of us


Tuesday, February 12, 2013

the entire world

revolves around branding and marketing.

the branding of global warming.

the branding of politics.

the branding of commodities.

the branding of governments.

the branding of countries.

the vilification of dictatorships and terrorists.

the perception of companies, people, objects.

what you choose to wear.  how you present yourself.  who you choose to associate with.  the products that you affiliate yourself with.


Sunday, February 10, 2013

benadryl

benadrly, you're my favorite drug
you give my H1 receptors a hug

you're an antihistamine
and go by diphenhidramine

you stick quite well to my proteins
counter reactions to nuts and soy beans

you block my serotonin reuptake
all for happiness' sake

you bring sleep in an hr or two
in counting sheep's lieu

i've yet to encounter tachyphylaxis
so taking you can be a praxis

i can take you when i'm sneezy
or even when i'm queasy


cause you're a great antiemetic
and even good for the frenetic



you've got many an off label use
but not likely to encounter abuse


parkinson's got nothing on you
who makes it easier to tie a shoe

that's why you easily top my list
you're my favorite inverse antagonist

analogy

lotion : skin :: conditioner : hair

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

magento localhost

most days i do something i've never done before.  having gone hang gliding the other day, i'm on a roll.

today, i'm doing a local setup of magento.

1) download magento
2) download ms visual c++
3) download wampserver
4) install visual c++
5) install wampserver all default settings
6) under c: > windows > system32 > drivers > etc > hosts, set 127.0.0.1 to whatever site you want to direct to your localhost setup
7) start wamp
8) put it online
9) run phpmyadmin in wamp and create a new database
10) unzip magento and drag all files/folders in magento into c: > wamp > www
11) click on wamp in your icon tray > php > php extensions > select php curl
12) go to your url you set to your local host in step 6
13) accept terms
14) if you receive a php curl extension error even after enabling it in step ll, replace your php_curl.dll with a fixed extension from here
15) enable rewrite_module in apache > apache modules from the tray icon
16) in your configuration window, enter your database name from step 9 and also check the 'use web server' option
17) create your user account and you're good to go!

Friday, January 25, 2013

current side projects

building a raspberry pi.

building a dry aged meat fridge (potential conversion into a kegerator).

restoring a 1980 honda cb 750.

they say anything is possible.  just not doing all three at the same time.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

triple booked tomorrow. it's possible.


greatest asset

i used to think that my knowledge was my greatest asset.

but it's more my intelligence and my ability to execute.  knowledge - all of it - is on the internet.

intelligence is the ability to utilize that knowledge.  to integrate, modify, and apply that knowledge.  and to execute is to do something with it.

everybody is full of knowledge and ideas.  without pulling the trigger, nothing ever comes to life.

#oxymoron

lesson learned

you can rarely change the work style of a team member.

he or she cannot suddenly become a leader, full of drive and initiative.

likewise, business schools cannot create leaders.

entrepreneurship

turns my greatest liability into my greatest strength, the liability being a lack of risk aversion.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

hypomania

puts the entire world in slow motion.

everyday

...we eat, sleep, and breathe.

so you should probably learn to cook well, get a good bed, and breathe fresh air.

personal life

if you don't readily share, rarely will i pry

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

starbucks' secret

60 degrees will make you shiver in 2 hours (that's a challenge) and make you leave or purchase more hot drinks.

bring a parka and stick it to starbucks.

Monday, January 14, 2013

stress test camp

there should be a stress test camp for team hiring.

the most stressful environment possible.

a week in space + a week at sea + a hike up everest?*

the saw meets survivor meets the office meets lost.

seeking a team of workplace psychologists and executive recruiters.


*without collaboration, death will likely occur.

startup world

"In the startup world, it’s simply survival of the fittest. You have to involve yourself with almost every aspect of the business—and use all skills. I would find myself having to develop and manage budgets; help market and sell; hire; assist in setting corporate strategy; and review legal contracts. As well, I still had to develop technology and deal with all the uncertainties and failures that come with a startup."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/08/is-an-mba-a-plus-or-a-minus-in-the-startup-world/

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Your job is to make decisions.

"What do you make?
Decisions.
You don't run a punch press or haul iron ore. Your job is to make decisions.
The thing is, the farmer who grows corn has no illusions about what his job is. He doesn't avoid planting corn or dissemble or procrastinate about harvesting corn. And he certainly doesn't try to get his neighbor to grow his corn for him.
Make more decisions. That's the only way to get better at it."

Friday, January 11, 2013

the great pee divide

there's a commonplace theory that if a broken window isn't repaired quickly enough, another will soon follow, resulting in the continued vandalism of the building as well as the increase of local vandalism.

i have a similar theory that if a drop of pee in front of the urinal isn't cleaned quickly, the drop quickly becomes a puddle as people urinate from farther and farther away, eventually resulting in the complete dereliction of the bathroom.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I am a leader because

I pull more than my own weight and I stand by my teams.