Apple seems to be trading in productivity for flash … here is how to disable the “reflecting mirror” effect from the Dock in Leopard:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then send kill -1 to the Dock process.

Link to the blog I found this on

Filed under: no code, osx | 0 Comments

I used the email gateway to upload the photo below but my email text didn’t end up on the blog :-( …. the smilely face is built out of my anti-depressants and I think that’s hilarious. I’m packing for Tokyo, leaving tomorrow AM, super super psyched!! :-)

Filed under: Uncategorized | 0 Comments

I thought I would share a couple of helpful GPL command lines that really get the job done if you want to animate a sequence of images.

First (via Mike) is news of the jhead project. Unbelievably the ImageCapture.app application that ships with Mac OS X cannot handle more than several thousand images. ImageCapture.app will copy all of the image files, but the number sequence wraps around and it overwrites thousands of the earlier images in the sequence!! jhead fixes all that by renaming all of the image files based on the EXIF timestamp in the JPG file. brilliant! Here is the commandline he recommends:

Now you have a nifty sequence of hopefully hi-res images. One of the cool things about timelapse is you can shoot 5 megapixel images and then scale them down to NTSC (720×480) or HD (1920×1024) resolution. In fact if some crazy 5 megapixel video format comes out 10 years from now, you will be able to support that as well! (As an aside, the Digital Cinema releases that are dribbling out to theaters these days are at 2,000 pixels wide. Eventually that will go up to 4,000 pixels wide, but there are not currently projectors that can support that resolution!)

So anyway, megapixels. How do you scale the images without fudging it up? A little known fact is that most video that looks crappy because of “the video compression” actually looks crappy because of the way the video was scaled down to its postage stamp resolution. So here is what you do: Use the fantastic ImageMagick “convert” command to scale your images down at even higher quality than photoshop! for free! and without using a dumb GUI scripting language. You can read about image scaling in laborious detail or you can just use this command line:

I put the following bash script into a makefile to process my timelapse library:

And finally I would like to share the “ghetto HD” format that VJ Science came up with for doing 16:9 format on an XGA projector. This command includes cropping to get my 1600×1200 images into 16:9 aspect ratio … if you have a different source resolution, I’m going to leave it to you multiply your image width by 9 and divide by 16 to figure out the how many pixels to crop on top and bottom. The idea is to crop first and then scale down. Although I guess in terms of quality it doesn’t matter the order.

Now you’ve got a nifty sequence of beautifully scaled images. Time to make video! Which of the 7 bajillion video codecs are you going to use? My recommendation is to use ffmpeg to make an mpeg-2 “master” that you can distribute by uploading to youtube, archive.org, and so on. ffmpeg understands image sequences! So here is a quick way to get your mpeg-2 video (no audio). This command assumes your images are named like “IMG_0001.JPG” and so on … I know that doesn’t jive with the jhead naming I’ve outlined above, but you are a big unix haxor and can figure that out.

For my purpose I am building up a video library for doing VJ/video mixing stuff. In this use case video quality and decode speed is much more important than bitrate. Since decoding mpeg-2 “I” frames is about 3x faster than decoding “P” or “B” (difference) frames I use this command to get a high quality I-frame only mpeg-2 stream:

You can get higher quality by dropping qscale down even lower, but I think if you do qscale=1 your video basically won’t be compressed at all :-) rajbot?

So there you have it! The basics of an Open Source timelapse production pipeline. I use these tools on Mac OS X. Of course they are available on GNU/Linux. And you can also get them working under windows using Cygwin … We need more timelapse!

Link to jhead project
Link to ImageMagick project
Link to FFmpeg project

Filed under: photos, video | 1 Comment
Tagged: commandline , ffmpeg , ImageMagick , jhead , timelapse

After 9 months of putting it off, I’m creating new folders and filing everything I have in my “To Be Filed” inbox …. I don’t know what happened but … 9 months … geez.

Here’s a little tip when real life presents a bulk-insert task like this … when you’re trying to find something it really helps to have the papers sorted chronologically. On the other hand you know that you will probably never look at these statements and receipts again … this is a good case for using Lazy Evaluation. I just dump everything in the proper category (e.g. Bank Statements, 2007) and then don’t order them chronologically until I actually have to find something like a specific charge on an old credit card statement.

Link to some interesting GTD stuff

Filed under: lifehacking, no code | 2 Comments

Check out this awesome art piece being created right now right next to my sister’s room at her new residence in Rome, an artist/loft studio. It’s like the Ranch except cleaner.

Rome is a interesting mix of provincial, urban, snobby, boring, emotional … and of course, the Roman Ruins. More later.

ok, the embedded video isn’t working, hopefully rajbot can fix it :-) … here is a link

(click play to start) (link to other sizes)

Update: I added the video!

Unfortunately, archive.org doesn’t provide a cut-and-paste blob that works with wordpress. You have to manually remove newlines, add autoPlay:false and maybe autoBuffering:false, and add urls to the playlist yourself. ugh.

I’ll work on making a webapp to automate this process..

I tried to add this as a comment, but WP throws an error that says ‘Can not open socket’. I wonder if that is a captcha plugin issue. I’ll look into it later! -rajbot

Filed under: video | 1 Comment
Tagged: rome , soundart

I think definitely wins the award for Funniest Thug Parody of the Week.

Read A Book

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Link to Read a Book on MySpaceTV

Filed under: beats, books, video | 1 Comment

No technology has transformed commerce and the way we live our lives as much as the 20th century shipping container. And compared to other technologies (e.g. internal combustion engine), it’s drop dead simple … it’s a just a metal box. I’ve always enjoyed watching ships roll under the Golden Gate Bridge. And on occasion I’ve enjoyed the Port of Oakland in some ways that involve loud music and the cover of night.

So I was interested to read that the Port of Oakland is considering some of the biggest changes to the industry since deregulation in the 70s. At the center of debate is trucking, traditionally contracted out and held and arms length. But now the Port is owning up to the fact that each crappy truck driving through West Oakland dump 127,677 times as much toxic soot as a regular car does. As the trucking industry phrase goes, ports are where “the trucks go to die.” So-called “independent” truckers serving the port are almost exclusively poor immigrants making about $8/hour after expenses. Naturally they can only afford older used trucks, pollution spouts on eighteen wheels.

The Port is considering proposals as radical as granting employee status to all truckers, which is a breath of fresh air. Besides establishing a more reasonable wage and health benefits, the Port would take responsibility for cleaner vehicles. About 20% of west oakland residents have asthma, and the proportion is rising. The asthma is linked directly to the diesel pollution.

Here’s to the Port of Oakland for trying to make the right thing happen, a move that will force all the other West Coast Ports to follow, if not the entire US. And while we’re at it, let’s open up the port to the public so they can see all the amazing stuff that happens there. Crazy container cranes moving huge loads, massive stacks of containers that form mazes the size of small cities …. it’s some crazy shit.

Link to Death In The Air at The Bay Guardian.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Hola, hello from Peru!! Some people think I came here to see Machu Picchu but no, I came here to blog.

UCSF Physical Therapy offers an ingenious program where they engage their ergonomics staff in some very helpful side jobs. At Bakar Gym just past the weight area they have a fully decked out physical therapy room complete with funny looking exercise machines. Weird straps make the machines look like torture devices. Anyway, stop by from 5-7pm for a free consultation. After the consult I signed up for four one hour sessions at the ridiculously low price of $140 (total). Given my experience with wrist, knee and now cervical (uh … neck) pain, I was easily willing to pay five times that amount. Stefanie, the physical therpist, has 30 years experience in physical therapy.

This service from UCSF is more or less perfect for me: I need someone with some occupational experience that can tell me what I’m doing wrong and what exercises I can do to fix my problems. I’ve got a set of six neck stretches that are helping my undo 10+ years of bad posture.

• turn head to the left as far as you can, hold for 30 seconds. Repeat towards right. Repeat 3x, both sides.
• lean head left, ear towards shoulder. Repeat towards right. Repeat 3x, both sides.
• This is harder to explain, but a great stretch. Lean head forward, while forward lean head left 50%, now while holding all that rotate head left 50%. My PT describes this as “putting your beak beneath your wing like a bird” … repeat on RHS, repeat 3x.
• Anterior Scalene: lean ear towards shoulder, now rotate your head so you are looking at the ceiling. Repeat RHS, repeat 3x
• Posterior Scalene: lean ear towards shoulder, now rotate head so you are looking at the floor. Repeat RHS, repeat 3x.

So doing all of that is going to take about 15 minutes. But if looking over your shoulder has gotten annoyingly painful, it’s totally worth it.

I also received some useful suggestions for wrist stretches and strengthing muscles around my knee to keep the patella up off of the knee joint area. Yay for UCSF!!

Link to UCSF Physical Therapy

Filed under: lifehacking | 2 Comments

“Sent from my iPhone” … That’s the somewhat snotty default signature that iPhone tacks onto your mail messages. So what’s it like?

I’m typing this post using the I screen keyboard I safari in horizontal mode. Making a blog post on my sidekick caused me convulsions, on my iPhone it’s slightly less painful. Punctuation is a pain. You will note there is no picture for this post: the file upload button is disabled I safari despite the fact that this is an 8GB iphone. And the is no select/copy/paste in the text system, so I can’t even paste in a URL from google images. But I’ve successfully reached the end of this paragraph. I would guess I could have typed this in about 5% of the time on my macbook. I don’t thing mobile devices are ever going to he better than a computer.

the biggest annoyance is the lack of a system-wide on screen “back” button. Clicking a link in your email takes you to safari. The only way to get back is to go the the main screen and then mail. And getting to the main screen involves pressing the only mechanical button on the front of the iPhone which for some reason requires about a million pounds of force. Dancing your fingers on the multitouch screen and then havinf to slam the home button is literally painful.

so does the iPhone live up to the hype? In a word, hell yes. Antialiased fonts. Animations everywhere. Nifty one finger scrolling with auto-dampened deceleration. This is a phone that makes it *fun* for me to scroll through my contacts. For those of us that were wondering what the heck was the point of LayerKit (CoreAnimation) last year, iPhone is the answer.

Even rickety old QuickTime gets an iPhone makeover. Much fuss is made over the lack of flash support. And yet there is YouTube right on the home screen. And the YouTube videos are somehow higher quality on my iPhone than on my $2000 MacBook. How do they do it? Apple is taking their classic walled garden approach here. The message couldn’t be louder: dear web 2.0, you will not get jack on the iPhone unless you partner with us and re-encode all you video. Oh and you have to use QuickTime. Not a bad strategy. With 99% penetration on the web, flash appeared to be the hands down winner of the web multimedia race. Now with Microsoft and Apple entering the consumer electronics arena, we can expect to see a genuine rematch between Flash,Silverlight, and QuickTime.

unfortunately this also means i won’t be able to make a decent blog post without custom iphone apps for wordpress. This post took me about an hour.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I’m afraid these images speak for themselves … gotta love Vegas.

(more…)

Filed under: cartography | 0 Comments
Tagged: wtf???

They say a picture is worth a thousand words … it’s closer to a million for this map I made illustrating where my college friends live:






I’ve known forever that I’m somewhat bicoastal, but I’ve been lazy about flying and I hate airports. But looking at this map a few times reveals the undeniable truth: I’m bicoastal forever and there is no way for me to be happy without traveling a lot. In terms of center-of-social-gravity, it looks like NYC is the place to be. Luck you New York friends! That’s where we’re gonna party ….

Link to Friends map on google maps

Filed under: cartography, lifehacking | 0 Comments

Web 2.0 companies lined up for a mass start at the Facebook F8 Launch this past Thursday. Facebook has 24 million users, set to have more than MySpace’s 150 million users by the end of the year, and an unprecedented empty application market. Just a few days after launch the dust has yet to settle, but iLike is clearly the shot heard around the Facebook. Less than 72 hours after launch of the F8 platform, iLike has over 200,000 users, almost 1% of the Facebook user base and ten times higher than the second place contender picnik, a Flash-based photo editing widget.

Apparently Facebook users like them some music.

Link to iLike Application on Facebook

Filed under: all talk | 0 Comments
Tagged: crafty

As noted a few weeks ago I went to an awesome seminar by Dr Clyde Wilson about nutrition for endurance athletes. Though I’m not much of an endurance athlete myself, I found this material pretty useful for day to day life. I’m typing up my three pages of notes so I can recycle the paper.

Energy Storage. We can store:

• about 2,000 Calories in our muscles. Muscles can absorb only glucose sugar. Maltodextrin is broken down to glucose in our saliva and is the only sugar form that can go directly to muscle.
• about 500 Calories in the liver. Liver breaks down larger sugars like fructose into glucose.
• about 200 Calories in our blood/circulatory system. Blood sugar is down to about 80% after waking up in the morning.

Burning Fuel

• Before training, stock muscle with Calories
• Muscle can burn up to 1,000 Cal/hour (intense running) but can only absorb 250 Cal/hour
• Proper hydration is critical for digestion and converting glucose into energy. Sugars need to be surrounded by layers of H20 molecules.
• The rate at which fuel enters the body is critical. Even eating the proper foods, if it is eaten all at one sitting in a day whatever cannot be converted to glucose immediately will go into fat storage.
• Body burns fat at 1/3 the rate for sugars: up to 4 Cal/minute from fat
• Compare with 10 Cal/minute for maltodextrin (direct to muscle) + sucrose (liver, then parallel delivery)
• Taking in Calories too fast will cause upset stomach.
• 250 Cal/hour works out to 4 Cal/minute. Consuming 40 Cal and then waiting 10 minutes is close enough.
• Every 1% of dehydration is a 5% decrease in performance.
• 50% of glycogen is gone from muscle after a workout

For Peak Performance

• stable blood sugar (no spikes, corresponding insulin spike will put you to sleep)
• stable fatty acid levels
• muscles fully stocked with glycogen

General diet

• We must eat protein, body can’t make it (doesn’t have to be meat though)
• Only need to eat protein 1-2x per day
• Caloric absorbtion rate: excess Calories are directed to abdominal fat (vs. subcutaneous).
• monounsaturated fats send 20% more Calories to muscle (vs saturated?)
• Fiber helps slow down digestion, this is the key to rate-limiting Caloric intake
• Spiking blood sugar -> Insulin rises to suck blood sugar out of bloodstream
• consume unsaturated fats
• consume (moderate amounts of) protein
• eat whole grain starches -> direct to muscle
• eat fruits + vegetables -> liver, then muscle
• 1/3 of Calories should come from (mostly unsaturated) fats
• dried fruit is better than nothing, but take advantage of fresh fruit whenever possible
• cook vegetables a bit to soften cellulose etc, but just a bit they should still be crunchy
• bananas are great in the AM, but get small ones or eat only half (see insulin, above)
• primary ingredient in a sports drink should be maltodextrin
• optimum is 3:2 ratio of maltodextrin to sucrose

Post Workout

• Best to take in Calories within 15 minutes after exercise
• recovery window is very important
• It takes a lot of water to digest food
• We need 1 Liter of water for 1,000 Calories
• We sweat 0.5 - 2.0 Liters / hour when training
• Need about 1/4 teaspoon salt per Liter of water
• sleep is very poor if you are dehydrated (neurons)
• Omega-3 fats, highest concentration is at synapse
• get your DRI for Omega-3 (1.5 grams/day), limiting factor for recover is the nervous system
• breakfast should have as much fiber as sugar (grams)

phew! Ideally our dietary economy and/or my cell phone would keep track of all of this stuff for me. Until then, I find Clyde’s tip sheets to be extremely helpful. Using them enables me to get relatively close to the above without thinking too much.

Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s Blog
Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s website (check the downloads)

Filed under: cycling, food, science | 1 Comment

I’ve always been looking for some way to store, display, see and manage my maps so they were stored out of the way but not hard to get to. And no folding. I hate folding. This has been for years and last week I threw up my hands and just decided to order the first thing I found on the internet.

I had to back down off of that because the first thing I found costs $1249. It was then that I began to understand that this might get a little pricey. Even finding poster display hardware was a pain. Google search “poster display” and let me tell you … you’re not going to find anything that helps you display your posters.

So I opted for the EB-200 “Econobin” at a mere $200. I know as soon as I post this someone is probably going to tell me I can get the same thing at IKEA for $79.99, but whatever …. I like the industrial look. And this thing is built to last, it’s going to be the only thing left in my apartment after The Big One

The ECONO BIN arrived wrapped in so much packaging I had to play like a field medic and cut it all off. It’s made up of decent square and round powder coated steel tubes.

Here is The BIN assembled with the copious packaging in the foreground. I bet the UPS guy was glad I came downstairs to meet him and drag these boxes up myself.

And here are some extremely organized maps. Shown here are the SFBC Bicycle Map, The NYC Subway Centennial Map of 2004, and the AAA Baja California Travel Map.

Naturally I was kind of smoking crack when I bought this thing. It’s way too big, awkwardly shaped and doesn’t fit anywhere. But I like it and I’ll get to see my maps a lot more now. And I have a map bin in my house !!

Filed under: cartography, lifehacking, no code | 0 Comments
Tagged: toys

From a postcard addressed to RESIDENT:

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directorys & Nathaniel P. Ford, Sr., Executive Director/CEO invite you to join the Community Celebration:

Saturday, April 14, 2007
10:00am-4:00pm
(Official program begins at 11:00am)
K.C. Jones Park
5701 Third Street, San Francisco
Carroll Avenue Station
(Note: The Thunderbird will run every 20 minutes)

Special Guests:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
U.S. House of Representatives
Mayor Gavin Newsom
City and County of San Francisco

Woohoo!! Nancy Pelosi … I’m going to check this out.

Link to Thunderbird on SFMTA
Link to Nancy Pelosi on Wikipedia

Filed under: san francisco, support, upcoming | 0 Comments

I saw an awesome pickup truck this morning … sorry, no picture. But it was an old school pickup, teal colored with “Tiki Go Go” in fabulous Tiki fonts. It turns out to be Chef Kelley Hawks. The food looks super good, but at $350/person for 5 entrees, I think I’m going to stick with almond butter on a whole wheat english muffin. “A thoughtful gift for new parents or newlyweds” … Neither of those are on the horizon but feel free to buy it for me anyway!

Filed under: bay area, food, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments
Tagged: family

via Money Magazine, you can decode the pricing status of items at some retailers.

• At Target, prices ending in “8″ means the item is on its markdown cycle. Prices ending in “4″ are as low as they will go.
• At Gap and Radio Shack, prices ending in “7″ mean clearance price.
• At at “office superstore” an employee says to wait until the price ends in “.04,” which is the lowest price.
• You can learn more about price hacking at consumerist.com

Alas, Amazon.com doesn’t have everything. Until they do we have to deal with these crappy retailers.

Link to Consumerist.com

Filed under: lifehacking | 0 Comments

I went to a nutrition workshop last night expecting an extremely boring and yet slightly motivating remix of the food pyramid for athletes.

Instead I was blown away by a rapid fire how-to-fuel-your-body talk by Dr. Clyde Wilson, and left with that feeling of “living in the bay area totally rocks.”

Clyde is one of those of those OCD professors that is crazy smart, loves teaching and optimizes every minute of his life to making the world a better place while at the same time having as much fun as possible. In philosophical terms, if there is such a thing as “The California School”, Clyde is headmaster. After high school he spent 6 years in the navy as the “supervisor for reactor chemistry and radiation control” aboard USS Carl Vinson in Alameda. His Standford PhD thesis was “Biochemistry in Single Cells Using Microfluidic Systems.” He is now teaching courses on clinical and popular nutrition at Standord and UCSF, and he is Director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Sports Medicine Institute in Palo Alto.

Reading Clyde’s website, which I highly recommend, is a deluge of facts and figures about why and how we should eat and how to make it simple. It is ironic that by following his obsessive regime you actually become less obsessive about reading labels, the right thing just happens automatically. And Clyde jokes that he loves pineapple juice and root beer floats, being healthy doesn’t mean not having fun.

Pinapple Juice!!!!

This guy is one of us …. so check out his

• Vision Statement
• Excellent FAQ on Sports Nutrition
• Crazy Helpful Downloads Page
• Seminar Calendar

Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s Website

Filed under: bay area, cycling, food, medicine | 4 Comments

I got my FlyTech Dragonfly today. I had forgotten I ordered it … opening the box was a brief flash of genuine excitement … A dragonfly!!!!!!

Co-workers were as shocked at the $50 purchase as I was shocked that they couldn’t understand how cool this was … an RC dragonfly that flies by flapping its wings? … dude …. it has blue LEDs for eyes!!!

I found the FlyTech Dragonfly is tough to navigate in the two indoor spaces I tried: my open floor plan office and my apartment. They recommend 16×16 feet minimum for indoor flight, but I found even that to be too little. The ‘fly has large swings of pitch and yaw that I find difficult to control in small spaces. On the other hand, the ‘fly crashes into walls just like a real bug crashes into windows ;-) SMACK!!

But I had a great time just now taking the dragonfly out to the local park. His wings got wet from the dew on the grass. The ‘fly has about 10x more charm than an RC airplane or helicopter. Zipping by, close in, it felt more like a friend swinging by than a drone airplane.

Like the iPod, the ‘fly itself seems to have a non-replaceable internal battery. Interestingly, the way it works is you put 6 AA batteries in the remote control, and then you connect a cord to recharge the dragonfly’s internal recharchable battery. Charging takes about 20 minutes … flight time seems to be about 5-10 minutes. Never enough.

I think with some practice I will be able to launch Dragonfly from my 4th story balcony, fly around a bit, and then turn around for a SMACK!! landing against the sliding glass door. Naturally this will probably annoy my snotty neighbors

Link to FlyTech Dragonfly on Robots Rule

Filed under: design, science, tronix | 7 Comments

Link to Robot Makes Tea on CNN

Filed under: lifehacking, tiki lifestyle | 3 Comments
Tagged: neat

IBM Researcher Frances Allen won this year’s A. M. Turing Award, the ACM’s “most prestigious technical award.” The mainstream news story here is that Allen is the first woman to win the award although as
The Register notes

As Turing himself was famously gay, there are now relatively few inclusiveness milestones for the prestigious gong to pass.

An annoying property of these types of news stories is their bland and tasteless descriptions of a person’s important contributions to an academic field, to wit:

Her pioneering compiler work culminated in algorithms and technologies that are the basis for the theory of program optimization today and are widely used throughout the industry.

And that’s the detailed version, taken from Allen’s bio page.

Don’t hold back guys … where are the papers? I love seeing old scientific papers, thinking back to a time when techniques that are printed in thousands of textbooks we love to hate were just being invented.

I wish I could tell you what Allen did, but our stupid society keeps that information locked up. After over an hour of search, I found an early Allen paper called Control flow analysis … a hearty fuck you to the ACM (of which I used to be a member) for keeping this and all the rest of the Computer Science corpus locked up behind a password protected for-pay-only website. Scientific knowledge belongs to all of us.

Control flow analysis is my favorite topic from my favorite CS class, Compiling Techniques. Control flow is used by compilers to make my crappy code run faster. The idea is to build graph of the various execution paths that are possible in a given piece of code and then using graph traversal techniques to remove redundant code paths or introduce new paths that exploit hardware features. I also like it because debugging control flow (when you are making a compiler) involves making pretty pictures as in this comparison of three different control flow algorithms.

In Figure 5.5 the three approaches are compared using a method of medium size. The start block is marked dark gray, loop headers are red, blocks with loop depth greater than zero are orange and blocks without successors are drawn green. All other blocks are painted yellow. This way one can easily see the differences between the three algorithms.

Link to Frances Allen Turing Award on CNN

Filed under: code code | 1 Comment
Tagged: crafty

Last year Business 2.0 published a new yearly listing called “The Next Net 25″. As corny as that sounds it’s a nice list to be on … last year’s list included Digg, Trulia, Technorati, JotSpot, Writely and …… YouTube.

I am reproducing the list here with my comments because apparently Business 2.0 doesn’t know how to use the UL tag.

It’s getting crowded on the Web 2.0 frontier, but there are still some startups that truly stand out. Business 2.0 Magazine identifies the ones most likely to strike gold in 2007.

• SOCIAL
• stumbleupon.com (the next boingboing?)
• slide.com
• bebo.com (These guys are the next myspace, seriously)
• meebo.com
• wikia.com
• VIDEO
• joost.com (the skype guys do napster for video)
• dabble.com
• metacafe.com
• revision3.com
• blip.tv
• MOBILE
• fon.com
• loopt.com
• mobio
• tinypictures.com (will also be built into the Sidekick soon)
• soonr.com
• ADVERTISING
• turn.com
• adify.com
• admob.com
• spotrunner.com
• vitrue.com
• “ENTERPRISE”
• successfactors.com
• janrain.com
• logoworks.com
• reardencommerce.com
• simulscribe.com

Link to The Next Net 25 on Business 2.0

Filed under: all talk, san francisco | 2 Comments

A few months ago I randomly saw an informercial for Hercules Hooks on a TV somewhere, probably at a bar. It’s a bit like a Molly Bolt that doesn’t require any tools. I love it when this “as-seen-on-tv” schlock is actually useful. So I got a few to see what the deal is. I just noticed you can buy them on amazon instead of the the quaint but lame AsSeenOnTV website.

So the deal is they do work, and I think they work well. It’s got the strength of a Wall Hanger but the wall damage is just slightly more than a thumb tack. The problem is they *only* work on straight-up drywall with at least 3 inches of open space behind it. If you are hanging something and there is a stud behind the drywall, or a solid cement backing is the case for about 50% of my wallspace, you would get better results with scotch tape.

Link to Hercules Hooks on Amazon.com

Filed under: gadgets | 0 Comments
Tagged: crafty

We’re all used to to hearing about how “information wants to be free” from Slashdot nerds and other tech weenies that aren’t really using their brains, but Steve’s little bomb on the music industry seems to have caused a bit of a splash. When the economist is explaining in detail how un-protected music will be better for consumers, hardware vendors, online music stores, and even the music industry, it seems pretty likely it will happen.

I think that’s what we all want: an Emusic product experience with a iTunes Music Store shopping experience (I find shopping on Emusic to be painfully slow).

Link to “Music wants to be free” on Economist.com
Link to Steve’s “Thoughts on Music”

Filed under: beats | 4 Comments

I came across this looking at the club happenings in SF:

After college, Shayman moved to New York and began a successful career as a producer with a diverse pallette of urban sounds. He produced “Ski Mask Way” on 50 Cent’s multi-platinum The Massacre and the notorious Kevin Federline track, “Popozoa” which benefited from Shayman’s connection to the Brazilian baile funk sound (he lived in Brazil part-time) but he also continued to collaborate with underground acts such as Spank Rock and the Brazilian group, BRAZA, who record for Shayman’s Gringo Louco label. Shayman was also a perpetual business man, creating and licensing music for commercials and video games. He even oversaw the marketing for aLeda, a line of transparent rolling papers.

Shayman fought manic-depression for much of his adult life. He told URB in April of 2006, “It got to the point where I tried to kill myself. It was bad.”

In 2001, I drove Shayman and another Detroit DJ to an event in Indianapolis, Indiana where he was scheduled to play. Still in college, Dave sat in the back seat of the rental car, smoking a foul dollar cigar and reading an economics textbook with a portable reading light. An hour later, he was cutting and scratching ghettotech classics like “Ass ‘N Titties” to the collected ravers. This mix of high-minded business and down low funk made him a successful producer. It’s unfortunate that despite his incredible talent, his disease kept him from finding contentment.

I think the world needs more lamps.

Link to Dave Shayman obit

Filed under: beats | 1 Comment
Tagged: counterproductive