Ramblings of a Technology Addict

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Baseball Quote of the Day

The Baseball Quote of the Day goes to Jim Van Vliet of the Sacramento Bee.
With pitchers still ahead of hitters, the only home run hit in 5 1/2 innings was a bullet by Double-A catcher Jeremy Brown off Cats pitcher Justin Duchscherer. Brown, an Alabama native who hit .310 at Visalia last year, has the worst body shape this side of the late Burl Ives.
Gotta love it.
5:04:01 PM  comment []

Arrogance and Loathing

Johnathan Rauch talks about introverts and extroverts today.
Johnathan, let me please just say, you aren't welcome at any of my events. You're arrogant, you're dismissive, and quite frankly, more than a little offensive. You seem to think the extroverts are only blowhards who aren't listening. You seem to think that they lack any inner reflective tendencies, that we can't conduct ourselves in a fashion that's acceptable. Well then. Would you like us all to go about our lives without interaction? With a clinical world that lacks emotion, it's more difficult to inspire passion, which is why we have music, why we have art, why we have literature. Without extroverts, it's not likely you'd have much of a community, with people instead just keeping to themselves.
So, when you see the web itself, when you see the communities that build there, that have caused software like blogs and web publishing and the internet (driven for community and communication). You mock the extroverts, surely, but you cannot live without us.
2:47:09 PM  comment []

Some Links.

It's Wednesday, which means it's snowing here in DC. And that I've lost my voice. But here are some links.
...An octopus in Germany has figured out how to open a jar of shrimp. So cool. Now, I gotta get one of these for the kitchen.
...some thoughts on banning robots
...Here's a concept I could get used to...it's sex week at Yale!.
This last link is one I've got some personal perspective on. Smart Mobs reported on GPS being used by a TV station in DC to track company cars. And worse yet, the people in them. We had a meeting with our Nextel rep this past week and we were asked him about various things that were coming down the pipe from Nextel. He mentioned that they've got a GPS tracking service debuting this summer.
So, I stopped him and asked him to explain. He said that since most of their clients were companies, they wanted to be able to track the locations of their assets. Okay, fair enough. Except that this tech is ripe for corporate abuse. The GPS chips in the phones can be tracked to a degree of precision that is astonishing, we're talking less than 8 feet here. So that means if you've got a phone for work that you carry, Nextel knows where you are within a distance of 8 feet. Before, they could track you within a distance of several miles, depending on which cell you were calling from.
While this tech will likely go unchallenged, God forbid that a company use this technology to monitor its employees on their off time. That's just plain wrong.
12:12:01 PM  comment []