Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer. The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video: Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub,... Continue reading

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again. Some choice excerpts: On his first experience in Roblox: In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and... Continue reading

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered. Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie). It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too... Continue reading

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on. In no particular order: Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits. 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have... Continue reading

Kirk's dik dik (which is not pronounced xylophone, nice one guys) is a new Bay Area band that just released the summer 2020 album jam: Bestiary. Bestiary by KIRK'S DIK DIK It consists of the guy I get my fish from, Kirk Lombard, and a guy that apparently used to be in the same band as Simon who built our bedroom shelves and dated our daughter's nanny a decade ago, Cary Kirk. That last sentence was terrible. Simon did the building and dating, not Cary. I don't actually know either of these two, but I've enjoyed both of their other... Continue reading

Like Mad Max rising from within the desert floor, a bit of the old San Francisco arts scene appeared unexpectedly the past week when I found an old forgotten camcorder tape in a box. It contained footage from June 2001 at Ace Junkyard featuring, among other entertainments, Survival Research Labs and the debut of their new pitching machine which fired two by four studs at 200 mph. Continue reading

Uber has announced intention to deliver meals via drones. Since Federal law requires drones to be operated by human pilots with clear line of sight, it makes me wonder if a new job role will call for gig workers that are stationed in strategic positions to form a mesh network to pilot these drones. One can imagine them handing off control of a particular drone from pilot to pilot. Since a pilot can presumably operate only one drone at a time, will it be necessary to rent space on flat rooftops in order for drones to "rest" as they wait... Continue reading

Well I finally found something worthy enough to bring this blog out of its 7 year hiatus. YOU GUYS, DID YOU KNOW SHARKS GET GOOGLY EYED WHEN YOU PET THEM? This is a GIF-grab from S02E04 of Tales by Light on Netflix. This episode is part of a two part series where the Bay Area's own Eric Cheng sidles up to a couple of fearsome animals and show they are beautiful in their environment. E03 was about anacondas. We only watched these two eps, as we're fans of Eric after we bought one of his earlier prints in 2006 of... Continue reading

The Singularity Summit is an annual event put on by the Singularity Institute ("bring[ing] rational analysis and rational strategy to the challenges facing humanity as we develop cognitive technologies that will exceed the current upper bounds on human intelligence"). In a nutshell, it can be rationally conceived that in humanity's near future artifical intelligence will be created that is smarter than us, and after that, all bets are off, hence the "singularity". You might say to yourself, just like surely there are some scientists making sure we don't get hit by a giant asteroid or that some bioweapon doesn't decimate the planet, surely there are some scientists or policy thinkers out there who are considering that and preparing for it, just in case, to make sure we don't end up in some Terminator-esque dystopia. These are those scientists and thinkers. The following is my brief recap of the event. Continue reading

I think I have a new favorite cinema trilogy. Lush and sensual visuals, soundtracks, imagery... Continue reading

I made a music video thingy using footage from our recent houseboat weekend for Tripped and Fell in Love, my favorite YACHT song from their new album Shangri-La. Continue reading

Tesla was watching Blue's Clues this morning and I got to wondering what Steve, the show's host, was up to these days. Starting with the default two step of Google -> his Wikipedia page, I find that There were apparently enough rumors going around that he died of a heroin overdose that he has his own snopes.com entry. He quit the show because, in his words, "I knew I wasn't gonna be doing children's television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid's TV show, and it was happenin'--fast." After quitting he concentrated on... Continue reading

Turntable.fm may turn out to have pulled the most epic Odeo since Twitter. Despite serious problems with stability, the service has practically erupted in users with average engagement times that surely beat out even Facebook. I'm not going to bother typing up a description of the service as it is ably described here at Signal News, and I'm thinking of writing a more in depth analysis of their engagement mechanics (based on Amy Jo Kim's Smart Gamification patterns), but here is a brain dump: As my friend Todd Siegel pointed out, at a basic level SecondLife has been offering something... Continue reading

I suppose people are going to freak out about the privacy issues concerning the recent revelation that since iOS version 4.0 your device has been keeping a record of where it has been. Personally I just thought it was awesome to see the data using this great open source tool cooked up by the researchers who discovered the recorded data. This reminds me, I should spend more time in Vegas. And I should go sailing more. Update: Note that the granulaity of the visualization is artificially aggregated into a grid cluster (and weekly cluster) by the visualization tool. I altered... Continue reading

A new group chatting app Yobongo launched recently, just in time for SXSW. It is an iOS app which uses your location to throw you into a simple chat room with other people in the same location. I've been semi-obsessed with it since it launched last week so I thought I'd note down some thoughts about it. Here's its well produced but nauseatingly-hipster intro video: The reason for my interest is that back in 1999 I was working an a product idea in a similar vein. Instead of pursuing that idea I instead co-founded a chemical informatics company and have... Continue reading

A little over 16 years ago I was living in the Durham/Chapel Hill area, surely a time and place that would rank highly in a list of the densest concentrations ever of rabid indie music hipsters. Being 1994, the Internet was just starting to transition from a mostly a college kid phenomena, and the vivacious online community dedicated to the local music scene had long been the alt.music.chapel-hill Usenet group. One of my favorite local bands of the time was Pine State, a country band with the punk ethos of doing just fine with more attitude than talent (aka Psychobilly,... Continue reading