How about a Hugo Award for Science Fiction?
As some will know, I got heavily into the Hugo awards 13 years ago during my efforts at becoming an eBook publisher in the SF field. The Hugo award is voted on by the fans who attend the annual World...
View ArticleNew BCEC convention center, yet unwired
Attending a convention in the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) I found one thing very surprising. The show organizer had to install wireless APs all around the building on poles, with...
View ArticleAmazing new economics of the search bar
There’s lots of buzz now about IE7 and the “search box” at the top of the window. Microsoft says if you download IE7 that box will use the search engine you used in IE6, which is normally MSN search....
View Article1999 2.0
So over the last 2 weeks I attended 4 nicely catered parties, starting with a dinner for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference and ending with one for the SuperNova conference.By the last party I made up a...
View ArticleBrad's principle of customer service
When I’m having a problem with a company, I try sometimes to remind them of a principle of customer service I worked out when I was running ClariNet. Namely that when a company screws up, it should...
View ArticleThe strange story of eBay Playstation 3 auctions
I’m not a gamer. I wrote video games 25 years ago but stopped when game creation became more about sizzle (graphics) than steak (strategy.) But the story of the release of the Playstation 3 is a...
View ArticleRebate experiences
I wrote earlier about the controversial topic of discriminatory pricing, where vendors try to charge different customers different prices, usually based on what they can afford or will tolerate. One...
View ArticleHow well do university reunions work?
I’ve just returned from the 25th reunion of my graduating class in Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. I had always imagined that a 25th reunion would be the “big one” so I went. In addition,...
View ArticleRIP Jim Butterfield
In 1978, after finally saving up enough money, I got myself a Commodore PET computer. I became immersed in it, and soon was programming all sorts of things, and learning assembler to make things go...
View ArticleWe don't live in a 3D world
Ever since the first science fiction about cyberspace (First seen in Clarke’s 1956 “The City and the Stars” and more fully in 1976’s “Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin”) people have wanted to build...
View ArticleReal Estate thoughts
A friend asked for advice on selling real estate. I’m no expert, but I thought I would write up some of my thoughts in a blog post for everybody:The national average commission is 5%, though agents...
View ArticleIrony in the TV writers' strike
I have sympathy for the TV writers, because I believe the 3 most important elements of a good TV show are story, story and story. You need more than that, but without them you are toast.But my reaction...
View ArticleTwitter didn't cause the SXSW audience revolt
While it’s stupid that the biggest story to come out of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive was the gossip over the interview of Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy, the one “hook” that has kept the story...
View ArticleUnconference notes
Just returned from BIL, an unconference which has, for the last two years, taken place opposite TED, the very expensive, very exclusive conference that you probably read a lot about this week. BIL,...
View ArticleGift Guide: Being better to give than to receive
Who writes a gift guide in January?This one is not about specific gifts but rather a philosophy of gift giving. Every year at Seasons I run into the problem that decently well off adults have with gift...
View ArticleMaking volunteer grunt-work and unconferences sustainable
This weekend I spoke at BIL, a conference that was created to play off of the famous and expensive TED conference. BIL began as an un-conference, which is to say an ad-hoc conference created on short...
View ArticleOlympic sports and failure
I wanted to post some follow-up to my prior post about sports where the contestants go to the edge and fall down. As I see it, the sports fall into the following rough classes:You push as hard as you...
View ArticleHaplogroups, Haplotypes and genealogy, oh my
I received some criticism the other day over my own criticism of the use of haplogroups in genealogy — the finding and tracing of relatives. My language was imprecise so I want to make a correction and...
View ArticleJapan, and nuclear disasters
The images from Japan are shocking and depressing, and what seemed at first an example of the difference between a 1st and 3rd world earthquake has produced a 5 figure death toll. But the nerd and...
View ArticleA John McCarthy story
They say that famous deaths come in threes. That’s no doubt just an artifact of our strange sense of coincidence, but after Jobs and Ritchie, tonight we learn of the death of John McCarthy, AI pioneer...
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