January 8, 2008

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Where looks are everything

January 8, 2008 in Art, Fun, Photography | Comments closed

Las Vegas is a crazy place. Picturing CES shows some of that. There’s more to come.

Just noticed I have 394 potos tagged lasvegas here and another 77 here.

The Snowden Effect

January 8, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas | 2 comments

About three years ago I wrote about what I called The Snowball Effect. It included this quotage:

  Tell ya what. I’m fifty-seven years old, and I’ve been pushing large rocks for short distances up a lot of hills, for a long time. Now, with blogging, I get to roll snowballs down hills. Some don’t go very far. But some get pretty big once they start rolling.

  See, each snowball grows as others link to the original idea, and add their own thoughts and ideas. By the time the snowball gets big enough to have some impact, it really isn’t my idea any more.

  Anyway, at this point in my life I’d rather roll snowballs than push rocks.

In Gouge out your eyes with a rusty synecdoche, Dave Snowden follows a snowball I hadn’t realized I had started rolling, here. Not sure I follow it all, yet. (Too busy now and writing this on the run.) But I’ll catch up later. Meanwhile, some fine writing (and snarking) to enjoy there.

Via Euan Semple.

See change

January 8, 2008 in Journalism, News | Comments closed

The Tide Shifts at CES.

Let’s call it a twiver

January 8, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism | 4 comments

I see Twitter as a River of Tweets, which are 140-character posts. The Twitter concept is Evan Williams’, Biz Stone’s and Jack Dorsey’s The river concept is Dave’s. I don’t know who named the tweet, but that’s what matters. Twitter is an easy thing to which anybody can add value.

What makes Twitter so good is that it’s lightweight and not ambitious about running your life. It’s more service than site. It’s part of the live Web, even though you can still find it in the static one.

The latest addition to the portfolio of fun hacks on Twitter (which include Dave’s Twittergram) is Politweets, which Ted Shelton says “brings out the really intriguing aspect of Twitter — the ability to tap into the pulse of some very interesting distributed event (like an election) and see what is happening”.

I’m sure there’s something on Facebook that does the same thing. But Facebook is AOL 2.0. It’s heavy and complicated and wants to run my life. So I mostly avoid it. My loss perhaps, but that’s beside the twin points of live vs. static and light vs. heavy.

Ev Williams did a nice job of explaining The Light Side in his talk at LeWeb3 last month. Here’s the video.

A standout product

January 8, 2008 in Art, Places, Travel | 3 comments

Years ago at a small event the give-away schwag was an portable laptop tripod. We set it up once, couldn’t figure out how to break it down again, and put it the first of a series of storage closets. We’ve lived 9 places in 10 years, I’m sure it’s been transported between at least half of them.

Anyway, during this last trip back to Santa Barbara it occurred to me that this little stand would be ideal for my wife, who likes to use her laptop in the living room of the apartment we’re renting near Boston. So I finally figured out how to break it down and set it up again, then stuffed it in a bag that I carried here to Las Vegas, en route back East.

A few minutes ago I decided to use it here at my hotel, where, as always at hotels, the desk is uncomfortably high, and was giving me shoulder cramps.

Now I wish I had discovered this thing years ago. Yes, it’s a little shaky (it’s very light), but that’s my only quibble. Otherwise it does a great job serving as an artificial lap that stands between my knees while I sit upright in a comfortable chair. (This hotel has one of those, at least.) Since the flat part of the stand that supports the laptop is aluminum and open underneath, it makes a good heat sink and keeps the hot bottom of the laptop off my legs. And it can be adjusted not only for height but for angle as well. Pretty slick.

Even at the $99 list price, I’d say it’s worth it. And I’m betting that there are plenty of discounts out there.

In any case, the insTand may be the most useful piece of schwag I’ve received. Highly recommended.

Safety at all costs

January 8, 2008 in News, problems, Travel | 3 comments

Mike Elgan says,

  The powers that be at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHSMA) have determined that batteries are a potential fire risk. As a result, you will no longer be allowed to bring spare batteries in your checked luggage.

  Batteries actually installed inside devices are OK, and most spare batteries in your carry-on are fine, too. But carry-on batteries are now governed by a complicated new set of rules.

  You can carry batteries with 8 grams of lithium or less in them in your carry on bags. They now, however, must be carried now in plastic bags. Cell phone, PDA and other gadget batteries, plus most laptop batteries, contain less than 8 grams of lithium.

I carry lots of batteries with me. Spare laptop batteries, rechargeables, and the usual disposable kind included. And I haven’t run across any trouble so far. But I haven’t flown since January 1, when Mike published this.

Gordon Haff unpacks the rules a bit more, saying,

 

  The “two-battery limit” applies only to lithium ion batteries with more than “8 grams of equivalent lithium content, (which) is approximately 100 watt-hours.” The Reader’s Digest version is that this limit roughly corresponds to the largest notebook batteries.

  In other words, this limit shouldn’t much affect most travelers because there’s no limit on typical camera, cell phone, toy, and notebook batteries. So what is affected? Things like external notebook and professional videographer batteries. (I suspect that independent videographers will be one of the groups this new rule could inconvenience.)

  One issue is that implementing the rule in the field is basically impossible, unless the screeners are just given some rule of thumb like “no limit on notebook batteries or anything smaller.”…

  Finally, I think it’s worth noting that–much fevered commentary aside–this is not some new inane security rule. It’s a response to lithium batteries being suspected as the cause in at least one cargo plane fire.

In practice, how will the TSA people know what the right size battery is? I guess we’ll see.

Anybody experience problems with this yet?

As it happens I don’t have any big spare laptop batteries with me, this time. But I do have a pile of little rechargeable ones. We’ll see how they do on Friday at LAX.