Feb
28
2008
I’m off to California tomorrow morning and thence on to Hawaii for a week (I hope to get a chance later to blog on Guy Kawasaki and Anthony Williams’ presentations at the ISA conference but not sure if I will have the time today). I haven’t been to Hawaii for several years now and am [...]
Feb
28
2008
The Merc has a good piece on how willing many Americans are to trade away their privacy in order to do cool stuff on the internet. Many experts agree privacy has eroded with the growth of social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and the spread of behavioral advertising, where ads are fed to people [...]
Feb
26
2008
This is pretty damn funny — bring your own desktop to Starbucks. (thanks gmsv)
Feb
26
2008
I didn’t know the Stanford prof (whom I interviewed way back in 2001) was considering a run for Congress. He’s decided not to – a shame, as I could have voted for him; he’s in my US voting district!
Feb
24
2008
A MacBook Air arrived last week for me to trial; the packaging was that usual dance of the seven veils Apple experience where you slowly undress the boxed Desired.
Out it came, and it is certainly a beaut. So light and slim! As one analyst quipped, definitely the size 0 laptop… Missing a drive [...]
Feb
23
2008
As my grandmother often would quip impishly! That’s the situation right now for me with rescue dogs. The period leading up to and just after Christmas was insane — I had 12 cavaliers over 5 weeks, with several of those being of the ‘come get my dog right now as it is inconvenient to hang [...]
Feb
20
2008
The Blood Transfusion Service says there’s a ‘remote chance’ that Irish donor records on a stolen laptop in New York could be accessed. But if as the director has said, the files were encrypted with 256-bit encryption, there’s remote and then there’s remote to the point of being unlikely to occur within the timespan that [...]
Feb
17
2008
Too bad he isn’t around to read it. But the late great American novelist Richard Yates has the cover story spot in today’s Observer Review section. Like the writer of this article and the eminent writers he interviewed for it, I’d managed to reach advanced adulthood while never having heard of Yates, despite being an [...]
Feb
16
2008
Tonight (Friday) was the launch of the Living Music Festival, which is on all this weekend and features the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. All three pieces at the National Concert hall were wonderful but what a slam dunk job they did on the final piece, Pärt’s Credo from 1968. The RTE choir was [...]
Feb
14
2008
Interesting piece in BusinessWeek on the huge grey market around unlocked iPhones. According to the piece, the majority seem to be filtering into markets that do not have a designated telecoms partner. And Apple and its partners don’t seem to be interfering much — so far. Maybe this is why: While Apple takes in hundreds [...]
Feb
14
2008
Spying on its own board members and journalists, including the New York Times’ eminent John Markoff, that is. But the company has put some of that behind now, thanks to a settlement just announced with Markoff and three BusinessWeek hacks. There’s another group of journos still waiting in the wings, whose phone records were obtained [...]
Feb
05
2008
I got my absentee ballot last Monday and posted back my vote already, so it’s a matter of waiting to see how today’s voting goes now. California now has an option to receive a permanent absentee ballot to an address, which makes it much easier to vote — before you had to apply for each [...]