I am here today to chew bubblegum and write about technology, cake, and death. I appear to be all out of bubblegum, however, so it is time to move on and write about why I think the question of “Cake or death?” is not only related, but relevant to, a discussion about technology.
First, let me give credit where credit is due. One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Eddie Izzard, does a great bit that asks the question, “Cake or death?” I caught one of his performances the other night, tuning in right about the point where he did his “Cake or death?” bit.
“Cake or death?” That’s a pretty easy question. Anyone could [...]

Imagine if you will, that it is three o’clock in the morning and you are sleeping peacefully—until your mobile phone rings. You fumble for a moment as you wake up enough to answer the call. Even though the CallerID says “Unknown”, it must be an important call as it is three o’clock in the morning, right?
Did I forget to mention that it is Saturday morning?
You say “Hello?” and are greeted by a robotic sounding woman’s voice that replies “Your Velocity Credit Union” ATM card has been de-activated because of fraud, Press ‘1’ to re-activate your card.” This was my recent experience.
I pressed ‘1’, in the hopes of reaching a real operator, who could [...]

I was reading over some blogs this morning, trying to stay current on technology trends and such.
One blog that I keep up with is I, Cringley. Cringly used to write for PBS, his blog on PBS was also named “I, Cringly”. So maybe the new one should follow suit “I, Cringley 2.0″, but I digress.
He is known for as a technology journalist, but lately has also put on his “economics blogger hat”, Cringley’s latest post is an interesting mix of the two subjects. Everyone is just waiting for the day the US economy turns around, because it can’t get much worse, right?
To be honest, I hope it doesn’t get much worse, but I wouldn’t bet [...]

I do not follow many blogs, nor do I repost or comment on others blogs here much. I guess I am a bit anti-social even on the web. I am endevouring to change this, but that is not the topic of this post.
One of the few blogs I follow, Anil Dash, had a really good post yesterday, the title was ‘re:Vision’.
“…is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off? My sense is that we’re more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.”
Those closing lines of Anil’s re:Vision post, are what made me feel compelled to [...]

Ok, strange title for an entry. Here is an even slightly stranger title for a conference session I attended at Web 2.0 Expo.
“How to run a startup like Genghis Kahn.”
I had to attend the session, just because of the name.
Even though there wasn’t tons of content, there were some very good principles in the session.
One of which was the idea that you should “Put yourself in uncomfortable conditions.”
The presenter was basically talking about how the Mongols were better in battle because they regularly subjected themselves to harsher conditions than the people they conquered. He used imagery of a professional football team that trains in a tropical climate, to explain why they always seem to lose [...]

As part of my regular morning routine I was reading the latest Penny Arcade webcomic.
It was about Sony and the PSP, in general Sony is always good to take a potshot at. But today’s potshot was based upon lots of ammunition and comes with some weight from the FTC to boot.
The FTC has ruled that companies engaging in Word-of-Mouth marketing that compensates the word-of-mouth participants, that the participants must make the compensation known. This has typically been defined as “shilling”.
Tycho points out the important distinction between Viral Marketing and Guerrilla Marketing. The fact that an ad agency cannot create Viral Marketing is extremely important. Word-Of-Mouth, a form of Viral Marketing is supposed to be organic. [...]

This is an age old debate.
I think that overall the Best of Breed way of building a company or an internet service or anything related to technology (mainly software) was the way you had to do things. Because when the phrase was coined OpenSource wasn’t around or in such a state of infancy it was considered crappy free software that only “propeller heads” or geeks would use.
Well, some OpenSource software is still pretty much for only experienced developers and power users. However, there are many big named OpenSource software systems that have become a Best of Breed within the OpenSource movement.
But my thoughts was not really about the issue between say RedHat vs Suse or [...]