Category: Uncategorized

Another experiment with iStopMotion, this time with the kids, and we have two (very) short films to show for it on YouTube: Race car goes fast (stop-motion) and Batman gets in the Batmobile.

Each one is two seconds long. It was hard to keep their attention this long. Remember, 24 frames/second. What did help was turning on voice activation, so I could say (and say again) “capture one” rather than reaching back to the computer to take each frame. It wasn’t foolproof, but a timesaver all the same.

To my annoyance, YouTube actually clipped the last frame of the “Race car” video, probably to put their Share / Watch Again frame on there. Frustrating, since the final frame had the kids entering the picture (deliberately).

I’m using my blog as a testbed for something new cooked up by Aaron and Noah. If you visit my blog at http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/ (instead of just reading via the RSS feed), you’ll see a yellow button on the right-hand side of the page, under the heading “Are you using OpenDNS?”

The button has two states: one for OpenDNS users, one for those yet to become OpenDNS customers. This is one of the “fun with DNS” hacks we can pull off. And, yes, fun and DNS can go in the same sentence.

Go ahead and get your own. Aaron will announce more publicly very, very soon.

Oh, and for those of you who haven’t visited in a while, yes, it’s a new theme on clock.

24:00 on the run to work this morning.

Sloooow run home in 27:30. (Blame the lights!) But in time for some Scrabble with the boy before bedtime.

Although I’ve read David Brin a few times before, I first learned about The Postman from the Kevin Costner movie of the same name. I haven’t seen the movie yet. Here are Brin’s thoughts on the film, which ran 177 (!) minutes. I won’t rush to see it, but I won’t avoid it, either. Still, awareness from the movie is why I checked this book out of the library.

The book is excellent, despite the awful movie reviews.

Like all the best science fiction novels, it’s more fiction than science…and the fiction feels real enough. It’s an apocalyptic vision, set mostly in Oregon. The Postman, though, focuses its attention on those who preserve communities, rather than those who destroy them. Having now read Brin’s brief personal ideology, I see the thread of wonder that despite ourselves, human society can continue and achieve great things. Daily headlines focus on the tragedies and potential for disaster, but the rule of law (for instance) is a pretty amazing background that we should all treasure.

Oregon

Random thoughts about the book’s strong sense of place:

• The plethora of placenames made me long for a map of the state.
• I had stray sad thoughts of James Kim, solely because of the locale.
• I did enjoy welcome memories of the 2001 edition of Hood to Coast, my only personal exposure to Oregon

Slow run to work took 26:30. Can’t blame only the traffic lights.

Steven Berlin Johnson’s Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (Hardcover) was a Christmas gift, straight from my wish list. (Thanks, Alexis.)

Mind Wide Open covered much of the same ground as the other recent book about the brain I read. Only better, and more interesting. Still, the concepts of the limbic brain or the triune brain were nice background for Johnson’s book. He explains them, but doesn’t belabor the point. His examples and anecdotes are more personal, more curious, and generally more interesting.

Page 184 of the hardcover edition had this summing passage:

The argument of this book has been that modern neuroscience presents us with a new grammar for understanding our minds. You don’t need a Ph.D. to speak this language; with the right tools, and the right translations — some of which I’ve attempted over the preceding pages — you can get to a level of fluency that will make you a more informed, more self-aware inhabitant of your own head. For a hundred years, much of Western society has assumed that the most powerful route to self-knowledge took the form of lying on a couch, talking about our childhoods. The possibility entertained in this book is that you can follow another path, with equally insightful results: going under the fMRI scanner, or hooking up to a neurofeedback machine, or just reading a book about brain science.

Hmmmm…I wouldn’t have claimed this book as therapy. But I do feel like I’m learning more all the time, both about myself and others.

I certainly look forward to reading The Ghost Map, Johnson’s most recent.

Run home in just over 24 minutes.

Hilly run down to Crissy Field and back, just over 36 minutes.

Back in my early days online, AOL went from the rising upstart (behind Prodigy and CompuServe, which it later bought) to the behemoth…before the Internet wave swamped most of the pre-Internet online services. A few of the early folks with content areas and services on AOL rode the wave, kept building their audience, adapted to the Internet, and continue to thrive.

Motley Fool is the best-known example that comes to mind. However, Kim Komando is another online media entrepreneur from the early 1990s who still has a notable audience, both online and in other media. Her biggest asset, beyond her newsletters, is her weekly radio show…which is also a Fool characteristic. I don’t know radio that well, but I’ve seen a lot of folks who come from radio really thrive online, and vice versa. (Podcast, anyone?) Not sure why that is, but speculation for another time.

How do I know Komando still has an audience that matters?

Yesterday, January 20, 2007, OpenDNS was named the Komando Cool Site of the Day, with the headline “A safer way to access Web sites.” The writeup gives a basic, brief intro to DNS, and goes on to recommend OpenDNS with these words:

OpenDNS provides improvements over other DNS servers. It offers protection against phishing attacks. Plus, it will correct spelling mistakes you make when typing addresses.

Cool Site of the Day sounds very 1997, but we saw a notable surge of visitors to the website yesterday. Right on!

We saw a corresponding rise in support requests, too. Because of the size of Komando’s audience, and her early & heavy exposure on AOL, there are several newsletter subscribers still on AOL and other dial-up providers. That highlights our need to keep explaining DNS, and why a better DNS matters, even as we focus on features for the tech-savvy. Our business can grow nicely with both audiences, fortunately.

This is also a reminder to me that delivery matters. Yes, I’m an RSS fiend, but I didn’t give up email newsletters. All those who have yet to adopt RSS are still reading email newsletters regularly, even in a world where inboxes are never empty and spam/phish/junk are a fact of life. A trusted newsletter is a tremendous asset. Keep your content and frequency below the annoyance threshold, and it’s easier to delete the ones you don’t want than to unsubscribe.