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Todd Hoff
This information is unavailable. It has been classified as a national embarrassment.
The Myth Of Original Creators | Techdirt - http://techdirt.com/article...
Alex Scrivener, Paul W. Homer, James Fuller and james reilly liked this
"Law professor Peter Friedman recently had a few interesting blog posts that helped highlight this. First, he noted that the very notion of an author as the originator of a new work is a relatively recent phenomenon, and part of the Romantic Movement. However, prior to that, the view was much more akin to what we're actually seeing today with online tools of creation: "creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing." "
- Todd Hoff
Considering going landlineless. Oddly scary proposition. One concern is during an earthquake it's the landlines that stayed up as cellphone towers melted under the load.
Alex Scoble and i80and liked this
Calling AT&T seems to get you a better deal. Same with Dell too. They really shouldn't be bicameral though. We've had an account for like a billion years with AT&T yet the wireless hemisphere must still do a credit check. May I suggest developing a corpus callosum?
- Todd Hoff
2 iphones on order.
- Todd Hoff
I hadn't considered the earthquake thing, but it's nice not to be constantly spammed by telemarketers. Been landlineless since 2007.
- Flitcraft
I think that during an earthquake, all bets are off anyway.
- Andy Bakun
I got rid of my landline after Hurricane Ike last summer when we lost power for over a week, had no landlines but I never lost my cell signal.
- Trish R
Nobody wants to really help me buy a new ergonomic chair. I've searched using several different methods and here's what I didn't find.
Jay Clark, LPH™ and his dog P™, Mike Chelen and Alex Scoble liked this
FriendFeed real-time search - searched for "best egonomic chair". It didn't know I really wanted to search on ergonomic. Lots of results. Generally OK. Some dead links, spam from classifieds, lots of links going to the same product. No closer to my goal. On the plus side this post showed up in the search results very quickly.
- Todd Hoff
Twitter didn't correct. It only had two results! Neither of which were that helpful.
- Todd Hoff
Yelp tried to correct but went to economic. It gave me a mixed list of stores. One was a chair store. One was hotel with chairs in the description. One was a massage place. Lots of spas. No joy.
- Todd Hoff
Eopinions corrected correctly and went right to the corrected version of the search. First 3 results are ads. Actually their results seem to have nothing to do with their reviews at all. No ratings, no discussion threads. Just a bunch of buy now links. Not what I was hoping for.
- Todd Hoff
Google corrected correctly and went right to the corrected version of the search. Lot of informational sites, which I'm not all that interested in as I've read it all before. Lots of stores. Nothing all that helpful.
- Todd Hoff
Googls Squared. Didn't correct and gave bad results. Using a corrected search the results were basically just chairs from stores.
- Todd Hoff
Wolframalpha. Didn't correct and when corrected it "isn't sure what to do with your input."
- Todd Hoff
Bing. Corrected correctly. The results weren't that much different from Google.
- Todd Hoff
Amazon. Corrected correctly. I set it to search from office furniture. It gave 3 choices, none of which had reviews. And there weren't any related products to browse through either. Which is strange. The problem was using "best." Removing that gave a lot more results with reviews.
- Todd Hoff
Todd, isn't "best" at best[sic] unqualifiable, and at worst relative. Also "e[r]gonomic chair" is very much abused by practically every company making office chairs. You'd be better off with searching alongside the office-supply route, then validating the results with user reviews (why not Amazon's? - I see you already got there). Everybody will tell you the Only Ergonomic Chair By Computer Hacker Consensus is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... ;-))
- ianf ⌘
My Aeron croaked so I'm looking to be unfaithful :-) Best is relative but isn't that what is wanted? It's a subjective metric. What do people think is best. Anyway it's a search strategy that has worked pretty well for me. You are right that Amazon is the "best" route. I was just curious about how different options would workout. The social search wasn't as useful as I would've hoped. Maybe people don't talk much about their chairs.
- Todd Hoff
I would take a look at Office Master's chairs http://officemaster.com/product... That's a good one that I've used in the past. Very comfortable. You can get it here http://www.ergodirect.com/product...
- Alex Scoble
Thanks Alex. Very reasonable price.
- Todd Hoff
very interesting thread - both on process and topic. for xv years i have been using opsvik's <http://www.opsvik.no/> balans kneeling chair. alas, his works are very difficult to find in usa.
- jacek walicki
I don't know what is your scale for reasonableness but, at $370 a piece, the Office Master 7780 looks anything but reasonable by my Euro standards. Instead I'll give you two more vectors for research (as opposed to advice) in your quest for the perfect "best" ergonomic office chair. Both are of analog type, though limited representations of each may be found online. First is the Vitra...
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- ianf ⌘
Really you just need an Eero Arnio ball chair. After that the Eton or Mao jacket and optional lap cat are trivial.
- Flitcraft
Yeah, Opsvik's Variable Balans, and That's it Balans are pretty good, better in my view (and from experience) than conventional ergonomic office chairs. Main problem with them in typical office space is that you'll risk being considered weird.
- ianf ⌘
Tried a kneeling chair it's just not comfortable for me. I love their site though. Rizzoli looks like an awesome store, but Ianf, what would Euro standards be for a chair? So far it looks like it has to be an expensive work of art :-)
- Todd Hoff
I'm not talking about one-off, or "Designer Executive" Euro chairs (<http://hermanmiller.com/>, etc.), but of ordinary office furniture, what this UK company calls "operator chairs," say: <http://www.officesupermarket.co.uk/c...>. Presumably, however, items of this simple type are not imported (widely) into the US, only high-margin ones - which are then sold with...
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- ianf ⌘
Here's a nice setup with a Herman Miller Mirra http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009...
- Todd Hoff
Do yourself a favor and stick with a comfortable office chair that works, not some poorly conceived designer piece from companies that wouldn't know ergonomics if it was sitting on their lap purring.
- Alex Scoble
"what works" is always the hard part :-)
- Todd Hoff
See if there's an Office Master store near you where you can try them out. I was the ergo guy for a law firm in Palo Alto and that's what we used based on the recommendations of our ergo consultant and they are very good. Even if I was a millionaire I'd buy one instead of a Herman Miller.
- Alex Scoble
look for something with adjustable height matching your body, good back support, and arms that comfy or adjustable. also recommend variable-height keyboard
- Mike Chelen
via IM
Tsk, tsk, Alex, that's pretty anti-intellectual an argument ("some poorly conceived designer piece from companies that wouldn't know ergonomics.") Whatever makes you assume designers do not pay heed to ergonomic knowledge? If you knew anything about physical product design and development process, you'd soon realize that not only do such big-name chairs represent the latest in...
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- ianf ⌘
I would like to thank porno videolar for sending me 40 spam comments all at once. Thank you. Thank you. You really like me.
First day of beer making class. Our goal is to make a nitrogen infused amber beer like Linda had in Ireland. The malt smelled exactly like ovaltine. Interesting bit: the teacher said yeast are smart. No matter the volume they know exactly how much to reproduce to eat all the sugar.
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emrah gök, vijay, Carlton and 7 other people liked this
Cool! Looks like fun
- Lindsey is Fierce!
You go to school... to make beer... why was I not told of this???
- Johnny Worthington
I am still looking for a pizza school :-) ,,, Hey, there is a pizza school relatively close by http://www.npr.org/templat.... And a coffee roasting school http://www.allbusiness.com/consume.... Oh my!
- Todd Hoff
Wow, just realized I didn't link to the class, doh: http://www.cabrillo.edu/service...
- Todd Hoff
Finally made my own. It's a Scottish ale from a kit. As a test I had a bottle the first day after bottling and it's not bad. The little yeasties are producing carbonization and there's already a noticeable head on the beer.
- Todd Hoff
More pictures from the last class: http://www.flickr.com/photos... You can see the teachers incredible tower of power brewing setup. It's quite the outfit.
- Todd Hoff
"teacher said yeast are smart" - how much smart does it take to figure out hey! let's eat all the sugar we can while we can.
- ianf ⌘
It's they way they do it. It's not like 5 yeast eat everything. And they don't over produce. They make as many as can be fed by the volume.
- Todd Hoff
On the third day after bottling my first batch of beer it resembles real beer. A nice head, less sweet as the sugar is being consumed. If I ordered this beer in a microbrewery I would be unhappy with it, it's kind of boring, but it's really not that bad. I heard on the radio this guy talking about using redwood tips instead of hops. We have plenty of those so I'm anxious to give that a...
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- Todd Hoff
I don't know, Todd, our long-gone ancestors had no evening classes to go to, and yet they managed to brew some pretty strong ales by trial-and-error alone. You should go for that rather than spend time with some authoritarian wannabe-Bierkeller Hitler telling you how much hops and spinach to add, and WHEN EXACTLY. Be creative, nobody ever died of an imperfect batch of beer.
- ianf ⌘
Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I : Columbia Journalism Review Here's Part deux: http://www.cjr.org/overloa... - http://www.cjr.org/overloa...
" Of course there’s a new Luddism! There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. I mean, Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it."
- Todd Hoff
"It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it."
- Todd Hoff
"I mean, really, I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on. It’s in part because I grew up in a generation that benefited enormously from not doing that. Right? The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the...
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- Todd Hoff
The cynic in me rephrases this as "Why question changes when that won't get me book deals or speaking engagements?"
- Flitcraft
"It was only this year [2005] that I realized that we’re in a dying industry.” And I just stared at her, like how could that possibly happen? And she said, “When the dot-com flame out happened, instead of newspapers saying, ‘Huh, we just bought ourselves eighteen months. Right, let’s restructure,’ they all said, ‘Oh good, we were afraid we were going to have to change there for a while.’” But now we see the Internet isn’t actually going to change anything."
- Todd Hoff
"The average quality of something written is going to fall to the floor because of the volume of written material. But the competition will mean that the premium for having something especially interesting is going to rise. And then, over the course of the next ten years, we’ll sort ourselves out into some sort of new equilibrium."
- Todd Hoff
DNA as Platform - http://www.newsweek.com/id... - "Roll over, Mendel. Watson and Crick? They are so your old man's version of DNA. And that big multibillion-dollar hullabaloo called the Human Genome Project? To some scientists, it's beginning to look like an expensive genetic floor pad for a much more intricate—and dynamic—tapestry of life...
Geoff Schultz and .LAG liked that liked this
"The emergence of epigenetics represents a fundamental rethinking of how molecular biology works. Scientists have learned that while DNA remains the basic text of life, the script is often controlled by stage directions embedded in a layer of biochemicals that, roughly speaking, sit on top of the DNA. These modifications, called epimutations, can turn genes on and off, often at inappropriate times. In other words, epigenetics has introduced the startling idea that it's not just the book of life (in the form of DNA) that's important, but how the book is packaged."
- Todd Hoff
"The stakes in epigenetics go well beyond clinical therapies, however. There have been hints from laboratory experiments and epidemiological studies that epigenetic changes in one generation—caused, for example, by smoking or diet—can be passed on to children and even grandchildren."
- Todd Hoff
They don't use "DNA as Platform" in the article but that's what it seems like to me. DNA is just another programmable layer on which richer, more varied, more selectable capabilities are built upon.
- Todd Hoff
The plot thickens how exciting.
- Geoff Schultz
"To everyman is given the keys to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell." -- Ancient Saying
Anoop Mathew Alex, Ahsan Ali, vijay and William Harryman liked this
Several things strike me about this saying. There are only two options. That you must make a choice. There is key of unknown design and it's unclear how you get the key. There are multiple gates. They are all closed. You have access to the gates. There is a choice you can make. Once open there is no going back, there is no redemption. You have no idea what is behind the gates, who built them, or what will happen when opened, if you can leave, or if anyone else is there. There's a lot more here than meets they eye.
- Todd Hoff
Fair to say the iPhone is an excellent content consumption device, but a poor content production device? Writing documents, slide presentations, video editing, etc all seem to be done better on a laptop.
Brian McNely, edythe, RAPatton and 3 other people liked this
there are other content types that may be created better with an iphone, such as pictures or video
- Mike Chelen
Good point Mike. Raw sensor type data can be done well on the iPhone.
- Todd Hoff
Additional interface software continues to expand the capabilities, after playing with Dasher http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher... for a bit, the text entry can almost approach keyboard speeds using only a pointing device.
- Mike Chelen
First of all, it hasn't been designed primarily as content-production device. But OSX Cocoa Touch is full of yet untapped[sic] possibilities. I am waiting for a HyperCard-like picture/ video/ sound/ richtext editor/ front end for generating "pocket stacks" of multi-key sortable index cards; DIY mailable "music postcards;" animated notes, etc. All fully capable within the not-so-narrow confines of the platform.
- ianf ⌘
Uh, I would really hope it would be done better on a laptop......
- Geoff Schultz
The advantage of quick note taking on an iPhone/Touch, is that you could "doodle" with Grafitti-gestures on it without requiring a desk, or even a free lap - and it's fully conceivable that such an app could be configured for taking notes in the dark, in a theatre, say, with on-purpose barely discernible screen. A laptop is always more to carry and handle; a palmtop is just there…
- ianf ⌘
So Marco Polo would go with an iPhone? :-)
- Todd Hoff
Nah, he had a tablet-scribe-slash-camel-driver at his disposal, why would he bother with a measly iPhone + solar charger for?
- ianf ⌘
Private browsing in FireFox is strange. Instead of just making the current window private it totally closes downs all your other windows and brings them back when you exit private mode.
Mohomed Abdullahi liked this
Brings them back with stored, or updated content? Could it be because Firefox wants to prevent any potential intrusive scripts those other windows might have started from snooping on the frontmost/ private window session while that is in progress?
- ianf ⌘
Does private browsing open up another instance of Firefox? (I've haven't dl'ed 3.5 yet)
- Mohomed Abdullahi
It reloads the content. Interesting conjecture about why they do it, but it's quite surprising. I prefer chrome's approach. It seems to close the current FF and then spawn a private one. I looked at the task manager and under private browsing all the windows went away and when I stopped browsing they came back.
- Todd Hoff
Treat killing like a disease to slash shootings - science-in-society - 01 July 2009 - New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article...
Bruce Lewis liked this
"Shootings and killing fell by between 41 and 73 per cent, with drops of 17 to 35 per cent the result of direct interventions by CeaseFire. Retaliation murders fell by 100 per cent in 5 of the 8 communities covered." http://www.ceasefirechicago.org/
- Todd Hoff
"The key is to change social norms so that violence is seen as "uncool" both by potential perpetrators and their communities, instead of being the automatic way to settle a dispute. Violence gets transmitted the same way as other communicable diseases, so we train 'violence interruptors' to prevent escalation. They change the norm from 'violence is what's expected of me' to 'violence will make me look stupid."
- Todd Hoff
" Send reformed shooters out into the streets as mediators in disputes and mentors for youths. You must work with the shooters, and credible messengers like me need to understand the minds of the perpetrators and have the measure of street-credibility to overcome mistrust."
- Todd Hoff
"The myth persists that boys can't help but be violent. We now know it's the socialisation experience that creates this expectation, nurture rather than nature."
- Todd Hoff
Work for terrorism?
- Todd Hoff
Michelle Obama planting an unabashedly organic garden provides a similar reframing for agriculture. Similar attempts worked for cigarettes, but not drugs in general. I don't think it will work for fast food either.
- Todd Hoff
Something just a little wrong about a pigeon sitting majestically on the tippy top of a gigantic doug fir tree. It should be a hawk or an eagle or something.
Dead Silence, Dave - SustainedEuphoria and edythe liked this
i parsed this completely incorrectly. you really don't want to know.
- Dead Silence
I am kind of curious but you and your inner demons are safe :-)
- Todd Hoff
i accidentally added an 'h' to 'sitting'.
- Dead Silence
It Must be Crap on Relational Dabases Week - http://highscalability.com/it-must...
Yes, I can't spell. Sorry!
- Todd Hoff
Product: Hbase - http://highscalability.com/product...
Hypertable is a New BigTable Clone that Runs on HDFS or KFS - http://highscalability.com/hyperta...
Podcast about Facebook's Cassandra Project and the New Wave of Distributed Databases - http://highscalability.com/podcast...
Cheap or Free Website Status Monitoring | Snipe.Net - http://www.snipe.net/2009...
ianf ⌘, Brandon Mendelson and Rob Diana liked this
An excellent list of free/inexpensive website monitoring systems.
- Todd Hoff
http://site24x7.com - working great, very professional, very quickly noticed the different type of failures I've thrown at it and when the site went backup. http://www.uptimeupdate.com/ - didn't notice a site down. http://www.montastic.com/ - works but took several hours to notice a down site.
- Todd Hoff
monitor.us is pretty good
- Ahsan Ali
I use http://mon.itor.us/ as well. they have a decent free service and I believe some level of premium service.
- Rob Diana
mon.itor.us seems to only do SMS alerts which makes it not work for me.
- Todd Hoff
Amazed how database errors aren't returned as http status errors. For completeness a service needs to look for keywords to see if the content is actually being rendered correctly.
- Todd Hoff
Todd, I normally get emails from mon.itor.us, but it is possible they changed something. For the database services, you are looking for something larger that almost definitely would not be free.
- Rob Diana
Rob it was my bad, not paying enough attention. There's an email contact. And some services will do a key word search of the output and if a string is not present alert you, so it's not a direct DB check. Kind of a funky interface, but I like that it includes ping times and tests from multiple locations.
- Todd Hoff
Pingdom now offering a free version: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...
- Todd Hoff
Page views required to generate $1M in ad revenue? - Don Dodge - http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/Blogs...
Greg GuitarBuster liked this
"Based on a survey of social network sites let's assume an average CPM of $0.40. You would need 2.5 Billion page views per month to earn $1M in ad revenues. That is 2,500,000,000 page views...and how many sites can sell out all their page view inventory?"
- Todd Hoff
Would your hosting costs drain all the profit? Well, Joyent says they have an application with 2 billion page views a month at $0.00003 per page per or a total of $60,000 per month. I'd look at GAE and AWS but we'd have to know more about the app to cost it properly. But if those Joyent numbers are true there's still a wide arbitrage margin for over advertising and hosting. Markus Frind of Plent of Fish has Facebook's CPM at 17 cents which changes the profitability equation a bit.
- Todd Hoff
Why Saints Sin And Sinners Get Saintly - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...
"The study suggests that people with ample moral self-worth in one aspect of their lives can slip into immorality or opposite behavior in other areas -- their abundant self-esteem somehow pushing them to balance out all that goodness."
- Todd Hoff
"Diplomacy is not a reward for good behaviour. It's how you get people to behave." --Reza Aslan
Bruce Lewis liked this
What do you give me for William Fichtner and Richard Feynman?
Ken Morley and Greg GuitarBuster liked this
He would be a good choice to play Feynman's life story.
- Todd Hoff
or David Strathairn
- Ahsan Ali
Ah, he could work too. Very good actor: http://images.google.com/images...
- Todd Hoff
YouTube - Richard Feynman: Disrepect for Authority - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Greg GuitarBuster, Ken Morley and Amira liked this
It's amazing how much of an impact his father had on his thinking. More in Take the world from another point of view (1/4) (http://www.youtube.com/watch...). He learned from his father without pressure, just through interesting discussions. Completely jealous.
- Todd Hoff
A very wise man
- M F
TAKE THE WORLD FROM ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW - http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/35...
- Todd Hoff
bitquabit - The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News - http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009...
Flitcraft and Alex Scrivener liked this
"The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story."
- Todd Hoff
The Law of Accelerating Returns - http://www.kurzweilai.net/article...
Greg GuitarBuster and James Fuller liked this
"Moore's law is not the first exponential rate of increase that computing technology has seen, but is rather the 5th. There have been 4 previous technologies which similarly met limitations and were soon replaced by another paradigm and we are no where near reaching the physical limits of computing power (though we are approaching limits of what is possible with 2-d transistor based circuits). "
- Todd Hoff
"From the mathematician's perspective, a primary reason for this is that an exponential curve approximates a straight line when viewed for a brief duration. So even though the rate of progress in the very recent past (e.g., this past year) is far greater than it was ten years ago (let alone a hundred or a thousand years ago), our memories are nonetheless dominated by our very recent experience. "
- Todd Hoff
"In exponential growth, we find that a key measurement such as computational power is multiplied by a constant factor for each unit of time (e.g., doubling every year) rather than just being added to incrementally. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example. Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but "double"...
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- Todd Hoff
"The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel--took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding...
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- Todd Hoff
"This is the nature of exponential growth. Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the...
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- Todd Hoff
"Each time one paradigm runs out of steam, another picks up the pace. This law of accelerating returns applies to all of technology, indeed to any true evolutionary process, and can be measured with remarkable precision in information based technologies. For example, when the human genome scan started fourteen years ago, critics pointed out that given the speed with which the genome...
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- Todd Hoff
Seems like basic discoveries flow at slower rates than technological exploitation of those discoveries. And there's no allowance for black swans. Henry Ford, for example, would recognize and be perfectly comfortable with today's cars. No exponential growth in that area.
- Todd Hoff
Hot New Trend: Linking Clouds Through Cheap IP VPNs Instead of Private Lines - http://highscalability.com/hot-new...
Mike Chelen liked this
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