Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Seth Godin poses an interesting question. A website offers to tell you what common over the counter drug to take to stop vomiting if you pay them $5 via PayPal. Seth asks:

Other than trying to leave a legacy for future midnight surfers, the purpose of this post is to help us think about whether charging $5 for information like this is ethical--and if you think it is, whether it is possible to do it successfully for long...

Of course it is ethical to trade knowledge for money. We all do this everyday. Seth charges people to attend his seminars. They aren't holding a gun to your head to make the transaction, and they probably aren't the monopoly source for such information. In fact when you visit your doctor you pay for their knowledge, assuming by virtue of their medical degree that their knowledge is of value.

The ethical question might be a lot more complicated though if this company was the only source for such information.

Whether it is possible to do it successfully for long is another question. Seth already provided the information in this case, thus making the information free. And a good searcher will probably be able to find the information for free, meaning that this company isn't really providing much value for that $5.

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man 90% The Flash 85% Spider-Man 85% Green Lantern 75% Catwoman 50% Hulk 50% Superman 50% Robin 45% Wonder Woman 45% Supergirl 45% Batman 20%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

A year ago I wasn't working and I was building Bleezer, my blogging software. Then I had the chance to spend a few months working with a fun startup called MusicIP. And in the past month I've had three different offers to start new startup companies, which I'm working on now. This has been an incredible year, and it is only going to get better in the coming year.

Happy New Year and all the best wishes for 2007!

When you are building a new product it is educational to look at what didn't work, such as PC World's list of the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time.

However, it is also important to keep in mind that when most of those products were introduced they seemed like really great ideas.

I often read that desktop applications are dead; that web applications are all that people want to use.

That may be wonderful if you are connected to the net 24 hours a day. But back in the real world that just isn't the case. I'm visiting my parents and my inlaws over the holidays and they have nothing but dialup connections. Believe me, in that situation desktop applications are your friend.

Maybe one day we'll all be connected all the time wherever we go, but until then it might be a good idea to keep in mind that we don't all live in such a rarefied atmosphere.

There still is a very real digital divide.

Several stations are showing yule log videos which are great on Christmas morning if you don't have a fireplace.

Though nothing spoils the image more that the ever present station logo in the lower right corner. Still looks pretty though.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, for whatever holiday you happen to celebrate.

Recently I came to the realization that my house was just too cluttered. So I've embarked on a massive project to de-clutter the place.

That's all about creating more living space.But there is always something going on in my office, and there are always several new and interesting things sitting on my desk. And apparently that's ok:

An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.

My office isn't "messy", but there is a lot going on there. And my life isn't organized; it's flexible and I prefer it that way.

Serendipity has always been more fun for me.

An article in today's New York Times starts with following paragraph:

SO what do you think? Two weeks ago we invited predictions on what 2007 would be “the year of” in media, and the user-generated responses were abundant and wiki-licious. (emphasis mine)

Would user-generated responses be the same thing we used to call reader comments?

I am not a New York Times user.I am a New York Times reader.

Today is the winter solstice - the shortest day of the year.

For a fan of summer such as myself, it can only get better now. I can almost hear the waves crashing on the shore.

No I am not making this up. December 22 is Global Orgasm Day:

WHY? To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy a Synchronized Global Orgasm.

I guess that's as good a reason as any.

Tip of the hat to Marginal Revolution.

Do you imagine that the world is just like the city you live in, or the street you live on?

If you reduced the world proportionally to 100 people:

Fifty-seven of those one hundred people would be from Asia. Twenty-one would be from Europe, fourteen from North and South America, and eight from Africa.

Fifty-one would be women, and forty-nine would be men.

Sixty-eight of those people would not be able to read and write.

Six of those one hundred people would own and control more than 50 percent of the world's wealth. All of those six people would be U.S. citizens. Three of those six people would live on the north shore of Long Island...on the same street.

Thirty would be Christian, seventy would be non-Christian.

One of those one hundred people would be just about to die, one would have just been born, and only one of those hundred people would have been to college.

A little bit of perspective for the Christmas season from The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly.

I don't always agree with Dave Winer, but he certainly has a point today. Given the plethora of protocols like XML-RPC, SOAP, and the like, do we really need yet another data format?

JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, may be easy to use from JavaScript within a browser, but are we going to start creating specific usage APIs? Will we have one API for JavaScript use and another for Java or C++ use?

There are already enough development problems with the standards we currently have, without going around and creating new ones.

According to the UN World Mereorological Organization, 2006 is the "sixth warmest year since records began 150 years ago". What they don't mention is that except for a deviation in 2005, each year is actually colder than the previous one.

Lubos Motl notes that there actually seems to be a cooling trend:

According to the most recent data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the year 2006 is set to be

• colder than 2005
• colder than 2004
• colder than 2003
• colder than 2002
• ... and, most obviously, ...
• colder than 1998,

despite the new El Nino that has been warming the Earth again for a couple of months at the end of 2006 and that will probably continue in 2007. Yes, right now it seems that 2006 will become the coldest year among the most recent five years, and it will belong to the colder half of the years in the last decade.

The phrase "sixth warmest year" creates an impression. But it doesn't tell the whole story. Wouldn't more information be useful in making educated decisions?

Tip of the hat to small dead animals.

Based on the number of emails I have received about this, it must be a hot stock:

Physicians Adult Daycare, Inc.
Symbol: PHYA
Current Price: $2.23
Short-Term Projected Price: $4.25
Long-Term Target Price: $10.20

So I'm hoping that these folks will realize that I know about it and stop sending me hundreds of emails every day.

Remember though, you didn't hear it from me. And if you are stupid enough to actually buy this stock you're part of the problem too.

According to Wired, Archie Comics are getting a new look. While it certainly looks more modern, it also looks just like everything else. There was something so retro about the look of Betty and Veronica; especially the economy of the artwork.

I grew up reading Archie Comics and I occasionally still read them.But the new items look a lot more like Mary Worth than Archie. Given the likely demographic reading Archie Comics, was a redesign really necessary?

Via Digg.

It seems that in the past month the volume of spam email I receive that gets past the spam filters in Thunderbird has increased tenfold. And virtually all of that increase consists of penny stock scams.

I can only guess what kind of drain this is on the internet as a whole. And what a complete waste of time.

Update: According to SiliconBeat, there is a service called Boxbe that lets you create an inbox and then marketers will pay you to let them spam you. As noted, they don't explain how that will stop everyone else from spamming your existing inbox.

Boing Boing notes an Australian copyright ruling that linking to copyrighted content constitutes infringement:

Ms Sabiene Heindl, general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), said similar action could be taken against individuals who, like mp3s4free, used the internet to link to copyright-protected material.

[...]

Ms Heindl's message to Australians is clear: "If you are linking to copyrighted material in an unauthorised fashion, then you can be held liable for copyright infringement."

So it all comes down to intent I guess.I suppose that you could link to music on a record company site, but not to anything else. I guess that means all search engines infringe unless they examine all of the content they index for copyright.

But how exactly do you link to something "in an unauthorised fashion"?

Several months ago I bought some SkypeOut credits. I still had $12.27 left when Skype announced free calling within the US and Canada. So I was unable to use the credit, by their website said that wasn't a problem; the credit would remain.

Now that they have announced their Unlimited Calling plan, I figured I would just apply that credit to the plan. Apparently not though. It appears that there is no way to do that. And now my acount says that the credit will expire on March 18, 2007.

So Skype assumes that their existing customers - the folks who got them where they are - are just out of luck. That doesn't seem like a very good attitude.

I've sent an email to their billing department, though they haven't responded to previous inquiries. We'll see what happens.

If you've ever been bothered by people who seem unable to park properly within a space, something I see constantly, then this site is for you.

Hugh at gapingvoid has posted The Career Manifesto. It provides some excellent rules to live by if you want to more than just tread water in your career. For example:

If you plan on showing them what you’re capable of only after you get promoted, you need to reverse your thinking.

Ten simple points to improve your attitude toward your job.

I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness at the theater this evening. I arrived about half an hour before the posted 7:00 start time of the show. The actual movie didn't start until 7:30, which means that I sat through about an hour of advertisements. If I had shown up on time I wouldn't have been able to get a decent seat, but I would only have to sit through 30 minutes of ads.

Now I'll admit that a couple of the ads were quite good, especially the Vaseline ad that spoofed a horror flick and actually drew applause. But theater owners complain about box office receipts being down, though if they actually had to sit through their own non-stop commercials they might understand why.

Every once in a while there was actually a MasterCard ad that proclaimed "Seeing a movie before it comes out on DVD: Priceless." Let's think about that though. I had to line up for tickets - $20 for two of us. I had to line up to get into the theater. We had dinner first, but otherwise we would have had the pleasure of paying upwards of $20 for soda and popcorn for two. And then we sat through an hour of ads and previews in moderately comfortable seats until the movie actually started.

Or I could wait a couple of months, rent the DVD for $5, and sit in my very comfortable chair with my home theater, eating my food and having a nice glass of wine. I could pause the movie when I wanted to, adjust the room temperature of necessary, and generally be much more comfortable.That's priceless.

And really, what movie has Hollywood produced lately that you just couldn't wait a couple of months to see?

Okay, besides Pirates of the Caribbean. But that's about it.

This video by David Pogue goes to great lengths to show that Windows Vista is not just a lame copy of Mac OS X. Or is it?

Via Digg.

Google has introduced Patent Search. And it is a whole lot easier to use than the USPTO search.

For the past few days NetNewsWire, my RSS reader of choice, hasn't been returning many new posts at all. Until this morning that is, when it seemed that the logjam broke and it found thousands of posts.

So how exactly do RSS feeds get stuck on the internet?

But they weren't always a girl's best friend. Though they are an incredible example of marketing and advertising.

When I go to a Forbes article, I am first taken to a "Welcome" screen, and I can click to skip it. There isn't anything welcoming about it though; it is just a big advertisement.

Why don't they just skip the pretense and ask if I want to skip the ad?

As of January 1, the free phone service has been providing will cost $30 annually:

Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, said Tuesday that as of Jan. 1 it would begin charging $30 a year for unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada. Those calls had been free since last spring.

The new annual fee for unlimited calling, while still nominal compared with other Internet calling plans, is part of a broader strategy by eBay to expand Skype’s product offerings and revenue.

Now that you're hooked on the free service, are you willing to pony up the cash? Since I use SkypeOut before it was free, I probably will. I would expect that any SkypeOut credit still remaining could be applied to that cost.

Or is this a good time to evaluate other services that are coming along?

Members of the Ontario, Canada provincial government plan on voting themselves a 25% raise:

It's the first significant hike, apart from modest cost-of-living increases, since former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris increased basic pay to $78,007 from $56,378 in 1996. At the same time the Harris government eliminated a $14,160 tax-free allowance and wound down the MPPs' lucrative pension plan.

Basic pay for MPPs stayed at $78,007 until April 2002, when it was increased to $82,757. Increases since then, including one of almost $2,000 in April this year, brought the basic wage to $88,771.

The Legislature had planned to rise for the winter break on Thursday but instead the session will be extended into next week to pass the pay raise.

Oddly, I don't recall any candidates running on a "increase our salaries" platform. They knew what the salary was when they campaigned, but apparently they are now underpaid compared to other politicians. Pity the poor taxpayer who, unable to increase their own salaries, still get to pay for raises for these folks.

And they're even considerate enough to extend the session to ensure that the raise happens, a Christmas present for themselves.

If you're a Mac user like me, you've been waiting patiently for TiVo to release TiVoToGo for the Mac.

Wait no longer though, because somebody else has.It works just fine.

Via Engadget.

Let's face it. There is just no "must have" phone. In North America you get a choice of exactly what the few providers offer, on their terms. They change models, features, and price points on an almost daily basis. And the actual manufacturers of the phones seem to have very little control.

But imagine for a second that a new cell phone company decidesto turn that model inside out. To offer a cool phone that everyone wants - like an Apple iPhone. Michael Gartenberg says he is already getting calls about the iPhone, even though it hasn't even been announced yet.

With a couple of exceptions like the Motorola RAZR or PEBL, no phone has captured the consumer mindset. However, Apple can extend the success and ubiquity of the iPod to the iPhone given their ability to create products that consumers love. And it has been suggested that Apple will sell an unlocked phone, allowing customers to go to whatever provider then want to. That would take a lot of control out of the hands of the telecom providers, which they would probably hate.

We stopped letting the phone company dictate what phones we could have in our homes decades ago. Why do we still let that model exist with cell phones?

Healthbolt describes what happens to you if you drink a Coke (or any other caffeinated soda) right now:

In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.

I love Coke, but this might make you think twice. Read the whole thing.

Via Digg.

Kathy Sierra has noticed a trend where we seem to be spending more time talking about what we are doing than actually doing it, using the example of Twitter, which exists purely to capture what we are doing:

For those of you who don't know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life... to be (in its own words)--A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they're doing right then. (Let's overlook the fact that there can be only one true answer to the question... "I'm typing to tell twitter what I'm doing right now... which is typing to tell twitter what I'm doing right now." Or something else that makes my head hurt.)

She eloquently points out that answering the question "what am I doing?" takes us out of the flow of life, since we have to stop doing it to say what we are doing. And then we'll need some time to get back to what we were doing before we interrupted ourselves.

Kathy also quotes Linda Stone, originator of the term Continuous Partial Attention:

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking."

We think we multi-task but we really don't. We stop doing one thing in order to do another, on the assumption that the new thing is a crisis that is important and must be attended to immediately. Which breaks our concentration and keeps us from focusing and completing what we are doing.

We are increasingly getting trapped in a belief that urgency is equivalent to importance; that we must handle each new event as it happens.That we can't concentrate on a single thing until we are done. And in the end we don't accomplish more; we accomplish less or sometimes we don't finish anything at all.

Lately I've taken to closing the computer, turning off the television, and just sitting quietly to think and process the events of the day. A break from constant input, and a few minutes to actually just absorb and filter.

It's snowing where I live now, so it's a given that it's pretty cold. Slightly below freezing actually, and my least favorite time of the year since I prefer warm weather.

So it was completely out of place this morning to see a gentleman zipping along in a convertible Mini Cooper - with the top down. He was of course wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, but I found myself wondering what possessed him to leave the top down this morning.

Seth Godin says the world needs fewer pilots:

Here's the thing: I think (outside of the airline business, of course) that our need for pilots is diminishing, and rapidly. I think the value add of a person who carefully follows instructions and procedures keeps going down. I think the fact that pilots would do well in a job interview at your organization means your organization probably should change the way interviews get done.

We don't need pilots. We need instigators and navigators, rabble rousers and innovators. People who can't follow a checklist to save their life, but invent the future every day.

I agree wholeheartedly and many companies will exhort how much they want to hire instigators and rabble rousers. Don't believe it for a second. Most companies want to hire pilots.

Pilots seem like leaders or drivers. They get you where you want to go. Something companies want. But they achieve that by rigidly following someone else's directions.They don't create the plan.

And the truth is that most companies give lip service to the innovation idea, but they just want you to follow the plan - not create it.

So is it surprising at all that most companies don't achieve greatness? They may get from point A to point B on time, but they never create anything extraordinary.

And yes, I'd be a lousy pilot too.

The RIAA complains endlessly about customers actually being able to do what they want with the music they've paid for, demanding that customers pay more so that the artists can be fairly compensated.

But now that same RIAA wants to lower the royalty rate it pays to the artists:

During the period when piracy was devastating the record industry, the RIAA argues, profits for publishers rose as revenue generated from ringtones and other innovative services grew. Record industry executives said there was nothing strange about seeking a rate change that would pay less to the people who write the music.

"Mechanical royalties currently are out of whack with historical and international rates," RIAA executive vp and general counsel Steven Marks said. "We hope the judges will restore the proper balance by reducing the rate and moving to a more flexible percentage rate structure so that record companies can continue to create the sound recordings that drive revenues for music publishers. "

So it's not about the artists now?

Via The Digital Music Weblog.

Rob Hyndman asks about the fate of professional photographers:

Whether photojournalist or videographer, immediacy and authenticity are virtues alongside artistic quality, and there are many more events to record, and citizen journalists, than there are pros. It seems clear that many pros are going to get squeezed out - a lot of content that has been created by people with more equipment than ability is going to be displaced, and those 10,000,000 typing monkeys are inevitably going to produce some interesting work.

While he focuses on photojournalists,I've also wondered about the future economics of the portrait photographer. These folks take portraits which they are paid to do, but then those photos become their copyrighted property. If I desire future reprints of a photo I paid for, I am forced to pay them again and again.

That might have been reasonable in a time when there was major work involved in a darkroom processing a print. But in the days of digital photography it is as simple as hitting the Print button and waiting for the print to emerge from the printer.

Why then should we be protecting the considerable revenue stream of the professional portrait photographer forever? Why are married couples held hostage to photographers they have already paid for a service, especially when those photographers have gone out of business?

I went to download Parallels for my Mac so I could run Windows applications on it. In addition to the $79.99 price tag they tacked on a mandatory $6.99 Extended Download Service, which they describe as follows:

Think of this as your digital safety net for those unexpected occurrences - like your hard drive frying or a virus infection. EDS means that with the purchase of your digital product, we'll keep a copy of your file for ONE FULL YEAR. You'll gain peace of mind knowing that we have your program stored and ready for you to download again [for FREE] at your convenience once your computer is up and running again.

A little extra insurance on your order to keep your products safe? Why not!

NowI've seen a lot of cheap tricks to separate customers from their money, but charging almost 10% of the purchase price to "store a file" for them, so that they can download again "for FREE", might just top them all. And of course it is an mandatory fee, so you can't avoid it even if you aren't quite as stupid as the folks at Parallels assume you are.

Of course, if they don't feel like providing the service you've paid for, then they won't (from the terms of service):

RegNow shall have no obligation to provide the Service, and shall have no liability to the End User in the event RegNow is unable, as may be determined in the sole discretion of RegNow: to make multiple downloads of the Product as a result of modifications or changes to the End User's computer system which make it incompatible with the downloading process, changes or modifications to the Product that render the Product unsuitable for downloading, changes in methods of Internet access or operation that make the Product unsuitable for downloading, any other change or modification to technology and/or the Internet that makes the Product unsuitable for downloading, or the unavailability of the Product as a result of the actions of the vendor, publisher, or other supplier of the Product.

At least have the honesty to just increase the price of the product if you intend to screw the customer out of the money anyway.

And today a friend forwarded an email from Parallels offering the Mac copy at the special price of $59.99 to registered customers. The email just neglected to mention that special price does not include upgrades, unlike the regular price. That is some special deal.

Parallels wins my Dishonest Marketing of the Month award for December 2006.

Getting a parking spot in Brooklyn can be fatal:

A 25-year-old man who pulled a knife on another man during a fight over a parking spot in Brooklyn was shot and killed yesterday, the police said.

A good argument for the use of taxis and car services.

I'm writing some code in Java that requires an embedded web browser. The code needs to support multiple platforms, and I develop on the Mac. So this should be no problem, right?

Unfortunately though, the simplest way to implement this would be to use the JEditorPane component, but that only supports HTML 3.2. It doesn't handle Javascript of AJAX.

Another method would be to use Java Desktop Integration, but that doesn't provide browser support for the Mac.

So if I want to continue using the Mac for development I am going to be forced to purchase a web browser component.

Shouldn't this just be a stock Java component?