Listening to: Down Under (Extended Mix) - Men At Work

Found this on Boing
Boing. A table and chair that is 30 ft tall:

>

Awesome! For those of you who live in London… go and check out Hampstead Heath

Listening to: Love Comes Quickly (Blank and Jones Mix) - Pet Shop Boys

Richard suggests that
MS might be making a big move into RSS… I guess we’ll find out on Friday. Hopefully
it will be a little more significant than the very under-whelming RSS integration
with Safari.

Listening to: Otago
vs. The Lions

I have just been watching Earth
Report on BBC World. The topic of the show was the Scientific and Environmental
ROV Partnership using Existing Industrial Technology or SERPENT (yeah…
go figure). The basic approach is that biologists use Oil company ROVs to
survey around oil rigs.

Because oil rigs are surrounded by exclusion zones that prevent fishing vessels from
operating they are incredibly rich in marine life. The operational depths of the oil
rigs also provide regular access to areas of the ocean that haven’t been surveyed
first hand by scientists. The ROVs provide the scientists with a direct and very capable
observation platform.

This approach of viewing the habitat using a remote vehicle struck me (and I’ll admit
it had all the impact of a wet bus ticket because it’s pretty obvious) as being a
great educational environment. It’s no great leap to imagine kids exploring synthetic
environments with software ROVs and experiencing the wonders of the deeps. They might
even explore environments that are based on surveys taken around real oil rigs using
software ROVs.

It seems to me, given the desire for corporate responsibility projects, that you might
even be able to convince the oil companies to foot part of the development bill.

It would be another great next generation console app.

Listening to: Friends - Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

NewScientist has a good overview of
the recent drop tests being done by t/Space (www).
What blows me away is how quickly they are able to get ideas up and testing. I am
also really impressed with the flexibility of Rutans Proteus
platform (*sigh* why do I suck so badly when it comes to apostrophes?)

UPDATE: Wired has an article on
the tests.

Listening to: Let It Ride - Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

Space.com has a well written discussion about
terra-forming and the changing planets vs changing humans debate.

While being more partial to the Gerard
O’Neill school of thought when it comes to colonizing space, I come down on the
‘changing humans’ side of the terra-forming debate. I think increased genetic diversity
in the human race is a more valuable long-term approach.

Listening to: Sweet Illusions - Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

I generally find trade shows tedious and pointless events. This is, primarily, because
I can’t do small talk and as such am never able to move on to a real conversation
(had the same problem with dating). But if I am able to enter into a conversation
with a plan of attack I am sweet.

Rod has as short list of steps for
working a trade show that look decidedly sensible.

Listening to: Fix You - Coldplay

I don’t use Firefox, but I know more than a few of you do… so this might be useful:

Go to the address bar in Firefox and type in “about:config”

Look for the following lines:

• network.http.pipelining = false

• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 4

• network.http.proxy.pipelining = false

Change them to (by click/double-click the line):

• network.http.pipelining = true

• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 30

• network.http.proxy.pipelining = true

This configures the browser to make 30 requests at once and not wait for a reply
to the request before making another request

Then you need to create one new option:

• Right click anywhere on the page and select New-> Integer.

• Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay”

• Set its value to “0″.

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information
it receives.  You need to restart Firefox for this to be enabled. On sites
that support pipelining (not all do) the results are dramatic.

Src: Brad Feld

UPDATE: Not entirely safe it turns out… YMMV

Listening to: Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Jay Z Mix) - Kanye West

Found this site yesterday…. excellent!

Listening to: My Doorbell - The White Stripes

The full text of Jobs’ recent Stanford commencement speech is now available online.

I am linking to it because I think it is important that leaders talk about this concept
of doing what you love… not what you think you should do or what you think you’re
expected to do.

UPDATE: Richard takes the words to heart…

Listening to: V is For Victory - Michael Jackson

This needs to be seen to be believed… A Flash presentation from
MJ.

I figure he’s been through a rough time… but surely there are some victories
you might want to let dissolve quietly into history.