flingingText

Avoid like the plague --> CitiBank

2008-07-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

Bye bye Citibank, you lost your account with me.
You can thank your other mangled tentacle, CitiMortgage.

Luckily as recourse, consumers have options:

1. Take you money out of Citi group
2. Give it to their competition
3. File complaints against their deceptive practices: delaying receipt of documentation to exhort late penalty fees
4. Tell all your friends and protect them from fraud.

How to file a complaint:
Federal Reserve Consumer Help: File a complaint

Also see http://www.consumeraction.gov/

You can file complaints through the Better Business Bureau

log:
doubled fax confirmations for 7/1, 7/3, 7/4, 7/9, 7/14, 7/15
sent 1st class USPS 7/9
CitiMortgage ticket escalation 7/14 with 2 supervisors.

Salones de antaños, bailarines de hoy

2008-07-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

Muchos Gracias, bailarines de Sin Rumbo, todos

Courtesy de Teo Richardson

Journo, another pretty face

2008-07-02T23:57:00.000-07:00

still waiting for searchable e-paper...
-be light
-be searchable
-mass storage
-dataPortability

I've tried a few and have found myself switching between the interfaces, shifting my attention to and fro. Why should humans adapt, it's time for the software to do more lifting: Jourknow

Palm diddleBug/Bugme/Actioneer/Coola
PersonalBrain
Mindmanager
TiddlyWiki
vim, plain text
camera
moleskine/miquelrius
Paper and Pencil y & c grip500
Kindle

WonderWeb

2008-06-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

Posted some notes on TiddlyWest that left me with a lasting good feeling of witnessing incredible feats of web wonder.
It was enjoyable to see open source developers showcasing their work

FireFox3 + TiddlyWiki + goosh = my new toy

2008-06-17T23:03:00.000-07:00

enjoying the fiddling, tiddler an iframe whose src is goosh.org

TiddlyWest at Wharton West (Wednesday, June 18, 2008) - Upcoming

2008-06-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

TiddlyWest at Wharton West (Wednesday, June 18, 2008) - Upcoming

meet the nicest, coolest, web remixers this side of the planet

Yes, that is right Osmosoft is coming to town.

TiddlyWiki in the haus.

tiddlerOn!

log me

2008-06-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

Organize your life in a few lines:

#!/usr/bin/bash
echo `date "+%F %X %a"` $* >> foo.txt

I WANT TO BELIEVE - iTablet WWDC 2008

2008-06-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

Hey Steve,

Marketing forgot the other banner: iTablet OS

HP's TX have garnered good reviews for a 'Tablet PC', but in reading some of the reviews of
HP TX1420 Tablet PC , I came to realize that Apple needs to clean MS's tablet 'clock' by announcing some crossbred iPhone/Macbook lovechild to kick Vista out of its collective consumer misery.

Granted I don't think the nichy Air is faring as well as expected but "please, Apple don't do a Palm and rest on your iPhone laurels." I'm really hoping some of those FCC exposures prove fruition.

Friston and numenta FTW

2008-06-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing quest to filter the signal from the noise here was an interesting link I've come across:

http://reverendbayes.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/bayesian-theory-in-new-scientist/ - informs a new unification conceptual framework based on Bayesian inference that may be applicable to understanding a diverse range of brain functions. A bit more from the source: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:17097864

My take on the reading is that the brain's mediation between sensory input and its predictive models of thought or action can someday be inferred through a mathematical model based on Bayesian inference.

I find it interesting that numenta's work with bayesian based HTMs may possibly be validated through this model and show fruitful application. Perhaps we are coming closer to that singularity where Intel and AMD can drop ship a Friston based HTM into a chip so my GoogleAibo can start teaching me how to properly filter fetch cogsci rss feeds.

Hoo wah!

wii is kaizen for fitness

2008-06-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

We're having fun with the wii fit tracking our:

bmi
wt
yoga
strength training
aerobics
balance

Wii Fit follows the principles of Kaizen, 'change-good/better' aka improvement:

incremental and continuous
small changes
systems approach covering most aspects of fitness
the 'tools' are neat and in place so its accessible and available

in short, wii've made fitness more habitual, ritual and fun.

We're waiting for more!!! Wii Fit2 or Brain Fit2

ever evernote

2008-06-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

The smart ones at ritescript did some nice text recognition for Evernote.
As you can see my screenshot of a search on evernote web of one of my faux moleskine journal pages reveals a nice match. This is promising as one of the killer features of my e-paper holy grail is image pattern recognition. Livescribe Desktop has it and now under Beta so does evernote, fer FREEEE, mind you.

Unfortunately, like all things complicated, the reading of text from images is not perfect. I tried using uniball vision fine red marker, ball point red and pencil using my best high school A- drafting block letter penmanship skills and evernote mismatched hazy for lazy. Sometimes there were false positives and text that is written askew from rotated camera shots or scans zonk their al gore rhythm.

They hope to make a business model on subscription, so if the kinks work out, I may just sign up to off-load my mind, moleskine, miquelrius onto ever ever note land.

If evernote is to succeed they have 2 things going for it besides its great functionality:

blogbuzz
cross-platform: Mac Leopard (no tiger :-( Grrrrr...)), XP, Vista, web and soon mobile (doesn't work on Kindle's netfront browser though)

As We May Think

2008-06-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

As We May Think

e-ink, iPhone, Livescribe and all that jazz

2008-06-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

The Miquelrius + Sun Developer schwag moleskine-knockoff + pocketmod analog GtD back to basics system is still holding on.

There's a wonderful review of the Livescribe post JavaOne pre-SDK launch.

So what are the options now?

The Epos / DaneElec z-pen was also considered but they use the same MyScript ocr that is used on the Irex Iliad (heck the Palm had it too, I remember installing and playing with). The reviews have not been favorable on Amazon so it must still be Wowing France!

Pros: NO SPECIAL PAPER, heck you can write on anything.
Cons: gotta clip receiver for every page, don't block the ultrasound less your scribbles won't come out, watch batteries in a rechargeable world

IRex is hedging bets on a cheaper sans Wifi version of their Iliad, dubbed the 'Book' edition it has pretty much the same firmware as version2.

Palm, yes ye 'old' TX running Garnet. Wow, VM Garnet on Nokia tabs + StyleTap trying to sneak into the iPhone. If that happens maybe there is a bit of life yet. The vital signs are near critical for Palm and I wish them all the best.

Numenta needs to come out with a HTM for OCR that will knock off Anoto's socks/Vision Objects socks and will catapult them out of silent mode and into the public arena.

Apple?... hmmm iPhoneDev team you are our only hope...
Well I guess we'll see at WWDC in June.

Google Android - is interesting for the cross-platform ubiquity aspect and traction with devs coming onboard the app engine and other web-friendly APIs. I still Notebook on occasion along with delicious and scrapbook but really I'm a constant garbager of loose random data and I hope the Goog will resolve some of this.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out with e-ink, this new rebirth of the Anoto platform in the form of LiveScribe and all these other players.

All I want is searchable digital paper in the form of a 8.5 x 11 or half size

e-ink or solar to extend battery life
open format ie ocr Abbey-type conversion to txt
and 'search'-able content

My Kindle is close but I hate typing on chiclets.

Wii Taii Chii, we'll be waiting...

2008-05-28T23:21:00.000-07:00

unboxen:

Where is it?

Where's my flowing Tai Chi game?

Argentine Tango?

Aw, just this lame yoga?!

Wii Humor:

"An unbalanced lifestyle can lead to FAT accumulation.."

ME <-- unbalanced
ME <-- FAT

We're giving it the old college try:

My kindle review just lost a star. :-(

2008-05-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Kindle Team,

Your one day shy of $40 price difference early adopter speaks:

Stop losing ebook sales:

Add a zoom feature and/or landscape in the next firmware update or get on your publishers cases.

I have found a few more books with unreadable content in their samples:

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Kindle Edition) by Jeff Warren

The Back of the Napkin (Kindle Edition) by Dan Roam

Can't buy them even if I wanted to read them.

Have a forum/community mechanism to report poorly formatted books.

7 days is simply too little time for proofreading a book to check for table, image, diagram errors made by the Publisher.

Thanks for the $5 promo for proofreading your publisher's errors but I work in the industry and proofreader get paid more. <-- SEE 'proofreaderS' get paid more... i is a no proofreaders

Amazon gets the bad rep and has lost sales for publisher's poor quality.

Give Kindle customers ability to 'update' or re-download corrected book.

PS if Amazon NowNow answerers can't answer the question, please have another option for responders to reply.

enable right click in opensolaris within macbook

2008-05-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you click a Macbook trackpad with 2 fingers after enabling a secondary click under the System Preferences?

Right Click enabled under OpenSolaris running under VirtualBox on the Macbook, that's what!

I tried asking Amazon's NowNow via the Kindle, but sadly the underpaid minions could not figure it out. My question was: "How do you map the right click in a Mac under OpenSolaris?" The first answer from an 'experienced' user said, the right click on a macbook is ctrl-click. Duh?! and if I just mapped the ctrl-click then I'd be golden. Needless to say, I rated that answer poor. The other answer sent some planet opensolaris urls that ended nowhere.

It took me a moment to realize that if I can post this blog under OpenSolaris (meaning my network connection is passing through well, why not the Mac's system preferences?)

it worked.

How to get right clicking in OpenSolaris running on a Macbook:

open up system prefs in the Mac
set the secondary click to 2 fingers on the trackpad
when you launch OpenSolaris from VirtualBox, enjoy your right clicking.

todo:
-learn howto save sessions in OS (I'm sick of that Sun disclaimer)
-configure bash in OS
-learn howto share a volume between Mac OS X and Sun's OpenSolaris.

Spatially localized distortions of event time. [Curr Biol. 2006] - PubMed Result

2008-05-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

"Is it May already?
Time is flying!"

Spatially localized distortions of event time. [Curr Biol. 2006] - PubMed Result: "We conclude that there is a peripheral, spatially localized, essentially visual component involved in sensing the duration of visual events."
This seems contrary to a recent study I read on inaccurate time estimations from subjects viewing events at 2 distinct temporal intervals.
I had lost hope on the eternal of the moment as experienced in ritual or flow.

But this reassures my personal anecdotal experience(s) with eiko no ken or working on wari ccahua.

Save money, use cash

2008-05-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

Mom was right.
Use Cash.
Like it or not, it's unwise to use credit: "In their groundbreaking research, Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester of the Sloan School of Management at MIT found that study subjects paid more when instructed to use a credit card rather than cash. In fact, they found people were willing to pay up to 100 percent more with plastic."

Yeondoo Jung

2008-05-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

Yeondoo Jung is an artist of different mediums. These realist reproductions of children's drawings invoke whimsy and return us to that innocent perspective.

'Modern Wedding' - seems really timely now. Congratulations to my old friends and acquaintances who can love and show that commitment to the world.

i miss you

2008-05-15T23:25:00.001-07:00

Last look before we left on August 2007. Little did I know how much I was moved by the memories.

hmm.. blogging from OpenSolaris on VirtualBox

2008-05-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

I don't know where I am anymore, but I got OpenSolaris going and posting from it.

OS works with Macbook 2mb RAM. yum. Now can someone please tell me how to map the ctrl-left click == right click?

Hey Sun, if you want to make OS more popular, get more documentation and buzz out there.

zfs, here I come.

doctype - Google Code

2008-05-14T20:02:00.000-07:00

doctype - Google Code
hub of pages for web learnings: js, dom, css, html and all that secur'ty stuf

renumber sorted list resetting at every new group

2008-05-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

I'm so happy I figured out how to do this.
It took a while as I don't know how to program but the concept has saved me a great deal of manual labour.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#a loop example
myList = ['t','t','t','c','c','f','f','f','a','a','a','g','g']
#print all in list
print myList
print "myList[-1] is " + myList[-1]
print "len of myList is " + str(len(myList))
c = 0
for i in range(len(myList)):
  c = c + 1
  if myList[i] == myList[len(myList)-1]:
      print i, c,myList[-1]
      break
  if myList[i] == myList[i+1]:
      print i, c, myList[i]
  else:
      print i, c, myList[i]
      c = 0
      continue

update: original script didn't take into account the last group of elements. If the last group consisted of just 1 element then the renumber worked, but if the group was > 1 then it stopped prematurely since it compared the current value to the last value and didn't consider all the duplicate values in between.

Here is the revised script now less complicated using just the index for comparison for the last value in the list:


#!/usr/bin/env python
#a loop example
myList = ['t','t','t','c','c','f','f','f','a','a','a','g','g']
#print all in list
print myList
print "myList[-1] the last value is " + myList[-1]
print "length of myList is " + str(len(myList))
#initalize the counter
c = 0
#start a loop across all elements of myList
for i in range(len(myList)):
#add 1 to the counter
   c = c + 1
   if i == len(myList)-1:
       print i,c,myList[-1]
       break
   if myList[i] == myList[i+1]:
       print i, c, myList[i]
   else:
       print i, c, myList[i]
       c = 0
       continue

Palm, please turn to e-ink and get me a numenta HTM agent

2008-05-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

There's a thread on MobileRead from the Post's article on Palm's life support

Garnet OS nor ALP has had any consumer initiatives.
There is strong contraction on development particularly with the independent software vendors.
Palm still has a bit of enterprise with WinMob, but RIM has made significant gains. With focus shifted to web services and RIAs a la android, iphone, adobe flash, silverlight the domain of the disconnected standalone PDA world has crumbled.

Palm has rested on the mobile space and slow to convert on their transition to smartphones and as we have seen from Moto, that is a no go.

The irony is Hawkins is the father of the smartphone, I still remember Handspring visor phone module, omnisky and motient wireless sled add-ons, then the treo progeny soon after. Heck my web clipping Palm VII was a primitive web appliance but as effective as Kindle today. Netfront, kindle's browser was on the Palm years before.

Garnet bashing aside, the good ol' palm still can email, has a full office suite, databases, play mp3s, display ebooks, handwrite pims, etc way b4 ipod touch,iphone, Nokia ITs.

But reality s(t)inks, people don't install 3rd party apps, and we live in iTunes/Amazon walled gardens where only early adopters jailbreak or saavy NIT users find comfort with debian repos.

As a long time Palm devotee and enthusiast, I can't help but feel saddened for what could have been...

There is a vaporous wisp of hope with Palm linux and sustained enterprise but it is fading every second.

I admit, I'm really enjoying the convenience of iTunes, kindle store, Hadrian's Feedbooks, manybooks, and the superlative efforts of the MobileRead community. And while I enjoy monkeying around with perl, python, installing scripts, plugins, hunting workarounds for format conversions, it is not a sustained effort. The price of convenience and laziness.
My hope is the infopad that was described by Michael Mace, formerly of Palm.

My consultation is free. I've signed more NDAs than I have fingers.

We are almost there.

I went to Sun's communityOne dev conference.

They talked Java
Amazon Kindle runs on Java
Kindle stores on the cloud.
Sun loves the cloud.

takehome: Collaboration is GOOG, opps GOOD.

Listen Palm, get some e-ink.

Sprinkle with PalmLinux
Remember, support and grow a new developer base (think eee, Maemo,iphoneDev)
toss in some Numenta HTM secret sauce.
Stew with web services and open those APIs
Bake in some foxconn or huawei oven

I'd like my Palm Kindled.

It has standard ink like BugMe, DiddleBug or NinerPad.
My virtual scribbles make Livescribe jealous.
It alarms me like GTD reminders
I got the best of Palm PIM: pick one- Agendus, Datebook, etc
Quickoffice covers corporate needs
Since it's linux, the geeks play and innovate
Since it's Sun and Amazon connected, the thin client is secure, reliable and friction-less.
Be friends with Sprint EVDO, fa$t is not always desired.
Leave the eee home, e-ink runs for days
I don't want youTube, TV or other mindless idiot carrier junk; I want a useful tool to engage the intertubes
Numenta's smarterchild HTM agent will assist, reminding, querying my feeds and locally collected debris, filtering the noise and give me a personalized Signal amidst the cacaphony of the Web

I'll be waiting for the NDA.

:-)

BBC - Brain smarts in 1 week

2008-05-10T17:10:00.000-07:00

the list
# Eat three healthy meals, always including breakfast
# Take 30 minutes of physical activity, even if its just a walk
# Get at much sleep as you know you need – you should be able to wake up on time without an alarm
# Drink 1.2 litres of water, that’s about one large bottle
# Never exceed the recommended daily allowance of alcohol
# Reduce your caffeine consumption – this includes coffee, tea and fizzy drinks
# Eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables
# Take two relaxation breaks of 10 minutes
# Complete 1 hour of brain exercises spread across the day
# Have a conversation with someone you wouldn’t usually speak to
# Think of three things you did well each day
# Break two habits, like your usual route to work
# Fill in your daily scorecard and alertness rating