Status-Q

Dan has departed from the San Jose Mercury News after 10 years. I've enjoyed his writing there and will follow the news of his new venture in his blog.

Despite being one of the founders, I've been very bad at posting stuff to Living Without Microsoft in the last few weeks. But some of the other guys have been doing a much better job, and there has been some interesting news there recently. If you're interested in alternatives to the Monopoly, check it out...

Oh, and please send in your contributions!

Interesting - if you have a GMail account, you can subscribe to it as an ATOM feed. (ATOM is very similar to RSS and accepted by most things that accept RSS). More info in the Gmail Help Center

And there are plenty of RSS feeds available. One thing that's good is the option to download AAC files instead of MP3s. These provide better quality for a given file size, but the main advantage on iTunes/iPods, when playing long talks, interviews, audiobooks, is that the system stores a bookmark which remembers how much you've listened to. If you go and listen to something else and then come back, you carry on where you left off.

Now, this would be very interesting if true...

The EcoBot II is a robot which powers itself on a diet of dead flies and similar yummy stuff.

Wonder if they're also doing a VeggieBot?

The numbers which are coming in of the casualities in south-east Asia are just incomprehensible. I have tried in the past to put the September 11 attacks, terrible as they were, in perspective by pointing out that twelve times as many people die every day from starvation. Current estimates are that nearly 40 times as many died last Sunday.

Now, I'm very proud that my country has pledged more than any other country to help with disaster relief for the tsunami victims. The UK, at nearly $100M, is offering more than twice as much as the rest of the EU and nearly three times as much as the US, for example - astonishing in itself.

But it's still a small amount of money in global terms. Estimates of the cost of the ongoing Iraq conflict run to more than that per day. Wouldn't it be good if our governments spent even a tiny fraction of the amount of money on saving innocent people that they spend on killing them?

In my new company, we're using blogs internally as a sort of lab notebook; it seems to be working quite well. I call it a 'Klog', short for 'worklog', though that word has been used by others for 'Knowledge Log', typically meaning the same sort of thing.

It's catching on. From this Fortune article (which may now need a subscription):

Google's public relations, quality control, and advertising departments all have blogs, some of them public. When Google redesigned its search home page, a staffer blogged notes from every brainstorm session. "With a company like Google that's growing this fast, the verbal history can't be passed along fast enough," says Marissa Mayer, who oversees the search site and all of Google's consumer web products. "Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist's notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened."

In a silly mood, the other day, after listening to some of Adam Curry's 'Daily Source Code' podcast [?], I recorded a bit of audio on my iPod while I was in the bath, and sent it to him as 'the first ever bathcast'. Sure enough, he included my silly comments, with appropriately silly responses, about 25 mins of the way through his podcast on the 27th. So I have now been heard by hundreds, maybe thousands of people, broadcasting from my bath. Which sounds like the sort of thing decadent emperors might do. Please don't listen to it... it will spoil that picture completely.