Friday, June 30, 2006

LIFE IMITATES ART DEPT.: REAL LIFE APPALACHIAN E.R.

MULTAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass light bulb in his anus.... You can't make this stuff up...

Thursday, June 29, 2006

FLASHBACK WEEKEND

Some (IMHO) classics from my past that I'm bringing up for review: CHILDISH. SOBER. ODD. PRESCIENT. PRESCIENT 2. MEA CULPA. MARRIED BY THE MOB. RETURN FROM HIATUS 1. THE IDEA.

ALSO: Shout out to all my peeps enjoying themselves at Savard's Summercamp '06. Burn the candle on both ends dudes. Light my lamp. Raise your cups to Towelie and don't forget to lime (liberally) after use.

HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS

Do you remember the book from when you were a kid? Now it's going to be a movie! (So's Charlotte's Web.)

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

REMEMBER

Russel asked me to pass this on...

DEAR SASHA

An open letter to Sasha Baron Cohen:

Mr. Cohen,

When you inhabit one of your personas, are you totally in character during and after the performance? Do you remain in character in between takes? (In other words, do you get all Andy Kaufman on us?) Where you inspired to do Borat from Mahir? What do you make of the "Throw the Jew Down the Well" episode? I understand there's (at least) latent antisemitism in the room, do you think its more vicious than that? Or is it just good-natured bad taste gone wild? (Case in point: Hadji girl.) When the light bulb goes on in your, ah, victims' tiny little heads, do they realize that they're being played or do they just think that your character's an idiot? Do they then play along or become defensive? For each good clip, are there many "interviews" that don't pan out comedy-wise? Are there interviews that are just plain not entertaining that don't make the cut? If so, what is the average ratio of good to bad that you encounter?

If you're ever in New Jersey, would you come to us for a Shabbos meal?

Regards,
Jake

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

RANDOM

My daughter's friend has a blog. What can I say, Basya's not quite the wordsmith.

Airbus' bad news just keeps getting worse. It's about time the laws of economics and every old saw about free markets comes home to roost at this European make-work project's doorstep.

Read IAGBlog. It's not as good as the dearly departed enplaned, but it will have to do for my daily fix.

The space shuttle's replacement takes shape -and not a moment too soon.

Monday, June 19, 2006

VIRTUAL COFFEE

WTF? If I saw this after drinking my morning cup 'o joe, you can bet I'd wean myself off the caffeine right quick! (hat tip: boing boing.)

Sunday, June 18, 2006

CHASING SKIRT...

Steak, that is. Shout out to my buddy Russel, who introduced us to the wonders of grilling a juicy cut of skirt steak marinated in Jerk or Teriyaki, Mmmm, mmmm, good!

Monday, June 12, 2006

TWO WORDS

Two simple words: root and canal. Benign. Banal, even. Put them together, though, and they conjure up more fear than Al Qaeda. I feel like a series of small bombs just went off in my upper left quadrant. Oy.

THANK YOU

To the dudes that leave newspapers neatly tucked away in the myriad corporate commodes I have visited in my consulting career. You are the wind beneath my wings.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

HOLIDAY

I don't usually celebrate the death of one of G-d's creatures, but when a genocidal, racist and -generally speaking- medieval maniac is finally tracked down and turned into Texas chili by some well placed explosives delivered courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, well, that's a good thing. Finally something to cheer about in Iraq. Rest in pieces Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

UNRELATED: Wanna buy a house? Three?

Thursday, June 01, 2006

CLOUDS

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that "cloud" computing is the next big thing (If indeed it isn't already the current big thing.) What I term cloud computing is the utilization of service clouds for our everyday computing tasks. More and more we turn to Google's cloud for watching and sharing videos, searching (of course,) mapping and such. We also use Amazon's cloud for retail transactions of any kind. (A great many of the retailers we use piggyback on Amazon's cloud to provide merchandise to their customers. Retailers such as Toys 'R' Us.) Amazon isn't just a store, it's a provider of e-store technology to other stores. The other great clouds of our time are Yahoo! and -in distant fourth- Microsoft. Yahoo! is the original cloud and has a hard time defining exactly what it does better than anyone else -the AOL of our time. Still, Yahoo! does many things well (search, mail, pictures and mapping) and is constantly trying to reinvent itself to latch on to a permanent niche -one it hasn't really had since Google took over the search crown so many years ago. Microsoft, via its MSN and Live properties is a poor provider of service -witness its lackluster search and mail offerings- but has the ability to steal revenue from the aforementioned pure web plays by virtue of its desktop markets hare. Also, Microsoft's map service Windows Live Local (who ever thought of that name?) is a brilliant but little known also ran in the mapping field.

What's next in cloud computing? Mashups. Mashups combine services from multiple sources into meta-applications. The services are exposed via public interfaces (API's) and enable sophisticated applications to be developed without purchasing or hosting much of the data componentry that does the heavy lifting of the application. Popular mashups include adding functionality to public mapping services such as Frappr and Cheap Gas which rely on Google's mapping API. A plethora of mashups exist for Amazon's cloud of API's and services as well. Future mashups will make greater use of Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service to provide diskless data hosting services. I, in fact, intend to pursue this option for my next generation of application development research and development.