I had a chance to interact with "real" people over the last few days.  Gotta tell you, they are strange! 

What I realized was nobody really cares about tech.  In fact it appears as though most people actually despise it.  They are willing to tolorate it because it helps them in their day to day lives but if given the chance I think most of them would be much happier without a computer.  Don't get me wrong, they love their Tivos, iPods, cell phones and HDTVs, but outside of the basic consumer goods, they don't have any idea of the real benefits of technology.

I also realized that everyone is out for themselves.  I know it may sound like I'm a some kinda of wide eyed youth but if you know me you know that nothing is further from the truth.  It's not that I didn't know that people were out for themselves I've seen plenty of proofs over my life, it's more like I didn't want to believe that people always put themselves first.  Perhaps that's why I was drawn to computers in the first place, and in turn, to the ideals held by most people in the "geek" community.

Let's face it, geeks care about others.  That's not to say that we are all completly selfless but for the most part we tend to at least consider the needs and wants of others.  The "real" people talked about their "real" jobs and it got me thinking.  Most of them had jobs that could be greatly improved with some decent software if only they knew what they needed.  A company isn't going to pay for most of the software that would really make a difference in their work... that's just silly.  Companies have to spend lost of money on large and practically useless ERP systems to feel like they're getting the most from computers.  Truth is most of the people who do the day to day work could benefit dramatically with a few very simple utility apps.

I then tried to think about things the way I saw the "real" people thinking about them.  My thoughts jumped from all of the quick little apps I could write that would make all of their jobs easier to the realization that I could, given the knowledge I have of computers and the speed which I'm able to "pick up" new ideas, do their jobs.  Not only could I do many of their jobs, I could do many of them better, faster and with less error because most of what people do is repititous BS. 

"Real" people say things like "My inbox was so full of requests, I couldn't keep up.  I spent all day sending people reports." 

Geeks say things like "People were sending me mail all day asking for reports so I wrote an auto-reply script to fulfill their requests." 

While I was considering what life might be like as a closing agent or transportation manager I thought about what would have happened if someone like Bill Gates had decided, instead of producing software, to start an accounting firm.  Linux / OSX / XP wars aside.  Imagine the advantage for a single accounting firm with the ability to really use computers during a time when everyone was using pen and paper.  I don't know where it would have led, but I could picture MS becoming the one and only accounting firm in the world.  I could also see them branching off into an untold number of industries and dominating them all.  For whatever reason BG decided to stick with simply developing software for others.  I know it wasn't completely allturistic but it also wasn't completely selfish. 

Presented with two options: Win/Win and Win/Loose, Bill choose Win/Win.  From what I've seen most people choose the first/easiest Win scenario.  Most people with "power" choose a Win/Loose or even a Loose/Loose as long as their loss isn't as bad.  I always try for the Win/Win and even the occasional Loose/Win if I think it's the "right" thing to do, but I wonder if I'm not just making things harder on myself for no good reason. 

I wonder what it would be like if I played by the same rules as everyone else? 

I wonder what would happen if the geek community decided to hold "tech" closer to it's chest like the Freemasons did? 

Alas, it will never happen.  We are, for better or worse, predestined to give what we can and take only what we need...  Damn!

TTFN

I just found out LonelyGirl15 is a fake and I'm devistated.  I just can't understand why someone would create a vlog about a naive 16 year old hottie who's into reading and likes geeks.... ahhhh.  I get it.

A lot of people had their suspicions long ago.  In fact, I would argue that anyone who, by the third episode, didn't at least consider that it's fake has their head burried in the sand.  Still, a lot of people are upset because they feel as though the've been duped.  Maybe, but we've all been asking for it. 

Actually knowing that LonleyGirl15 is fake is a bit of a buzzkill, and for it to become so obvious so quickly is even worse, but they (whoever they are) still managed to draw me in.  I'm still rooting for DanielBeast to win the girl and save her from the tyranny of her satanic parents.  But I'm a hopeless romantic.

Flag this vlog.  This may be one of those that people will point to 20 years from now and say "that set the stage for things to come."  In much the same way the Soap Opera revolutionized daytime television.  Imagine, instead of watching an hour long show with an array of characters, some that you care about and some that you don't, you get to pick and choose a few dozen shows with characters and stories that interest you.  Each one running a few "MTV Video" style minutes, being release every few days with a built in feedback loop with you and the rest of the audience.

Maybe there aren't as many young, smart, hot, innocent girls in the world as I thought there were just a week ago.  And maybe complex but clear sub plots don't appear in the wild as often as you would hope.  But even reality shows pick the cast to fit a certain mold and edit the hell out of the footage to make each person appear to take on a particular role and intricate alliances.

Ultimately LonelyGirl15 will loose a lot of their audience including myself but not because I feel cheated.  The opposite is true.  It feels like getting lost in a live performance.  I know it's not reality but I'm willing to accept it for the entertainment value.  But it doesn't last long.  My concern for this little satanist will soon fade and like a live performance, I'll eventually walk away with nothing but the memory. 

In the end, it's worth it.

TTFN

I don't have alot of contacts outside of my own little world, so sometimes I think that I may be way off base with some of my thinking.  This doesn't stop me mind you ;-}  But it is good to occassionally see that I may not be the lone voice.

One of the (many) projects I've been thinking about starting is the Johnathan Coulton inspired App a Week (JoCo what evil have you sewn!).  It seemed like a pretty ambitious goal to develop something useful every week, and I've been trying to set myself up for it (ideas, algorithms, concepts, snippets etc...)  Well, I'm a wimp.  Dana Hanna has taken it to a whole new level.  Kudos and good luck.  I'm not abandoning my personal App a Week (yet) but I will be interested to see how much hair Dana looses ;-} 

Episode 2x02 of Hak.5 had an interesting segment about a USB Password Recovery Tool.  The USB device is from U3 which provides pen drives that look like CD drives.  This tricks windows into executing the autorun.inf file.  While this isn't quite the final concept I had in mind, it is a piece of it.  The idea of being able to walk up to a machine, plug in a pen drive in order to purpose that machine is just cool.  In this case the drive pulls login information from the target machine as well as some other useful info.  It takes a few seconds, then you can use this information back at your own computer to "crack" the password etc...  Change the concept from passwords to emails / IM's / documents etc... and it could be even more interesting ;-}

It feels good to know that I'm not totally out in left field ;-}

TTFN

It's been a full week since my last entry.  That officially makes me a slacker!

I havn't had much "tech" time over the last week.  My wife went to NY for a few days so I had the kids.  That didn't leave me much time for doing much of anything.

I'm currently working on writing a full featured ASP.NET commerce system.  It's an upgrade for an existing customer, but I'm throwing in everything including the kitchen sink.  This will be the commerce starter kit that will make all the others look weak ;-}

Also working (half heartedly) on a variation of my "Geek Trading Card" diversion.  It'll be more of a "design your own trading card" webservice type app.  It won't have any of the fancy stuff that was intended for GTC, but it should be robust enough for an average person to create a  cards for their kid's team ;-}

I've also been kinda busy at my day job.  It's not that there is really a lot to do or that it's difficult, but a bunch of last minute changes have come up (surprise, surprise, surprise) and because of the way things have been "designed" it creates some ugly implementations... and I just can't abide ugly.  So, I'm digging deep into my SQL resevoir and pulling out all kinds of stops to create at least a semi-elegant solution.

I'm also trying to learn a little about Pirate (micropower) radio / tv.  I've thought the idea was cool ever since I saw the movie "Pump Up The Volume"  Podcasting kinda fills this niche, but not with quite the same target.  The idea of a global community is great, but in the end, most of my life takes place in a very small geographic area.  I think it would be interesting to setup some sort of micropower radio station with information relevent for the neighborhood.  If you could allow feeds from multiple sources (ie. broadcast a Gizmo Project conference room)  then you  could allow for both one-way and two-way audiences... more gears turning ;-}

I havn't moved forward with my "Free Tees" campaign yet.  I hope to clear some of the stuff off of my plate and get a little more focused.  Now that summer is over and kids are back in school, my schedule is a little more full (Soccer, dance, girl scouts, bowling etc....) plus a bunch of volunteer time.  I will get it back under control (I hope)

TTFN

I'm back from vacation and my head is all a flutter.  Even tho I have only been blogging for a couple of weeks, and inconsistently at that, I missed it while I was on vacation.  It's almost theraputic to be able to take a few of the things crashing around inside my head and release them on the world.  Ready world?

Immigration - Holy burger flipper batman!  The news has been talking about border patrols and the surge in Mexican immigration into the US.  If you're like me and discounted it as media hype, take a quick trip through Virginia, Washington DC and North Carolina.  Every person working at every single restraunt and gas station in those 3 states was Mexican.  I'm not exagerating or condeming it just saying... Dang!

Ugly People - I know I'm no beauty (glass house meet stones) but IMHO America is getting uglier.  On my trip to OBX I looked around.  On streets, in cars, at malls, everywhere and in a whole week I gotta tell you, I could count on one hand the number of attractive people I saw.  I'm not talking beauty queens either, just above average in the looks department.  And it's not a case of averages either because the other extreme had an overabundance of hideousnous.

Laser Cutters - Went to a cool little puzzle shop.  Lots of jigsaw puzzles.  I got to thinking about a small little kiosk sitting in a mall around xmas time.  That took me to selling custom jigsaw puzzles (you provide a picture we mount, cut, box etc...)  That took me to the pursuit of laser cutters and that took me to a number of sites and some really cool services.  First I discovered that a CO2 laser cutter is pretty epensive (> $3K) I also discovered places that you can send a CAD file to and they will laser cut the material you choose.  Most importantly I discovered that they will do this at a reasonable cost.  Now when I have an idea for a little gizmo or some such thing I know that I could take it to the next step and actually have it materialize... not that I will, but it's good to know I could ;-}

Free T-Shirts - My wife threw away my 1999 .NET tee shirt simply because it was a bit fadded had a couple of small holes in it (and a few paint stains and was missing most of the left side under the arm)  I'm the master of the free "T."  In fact all of the shirts I wear at night or on weekends are free tee shirts.  Thing is I havn't been to a conference for quite a few years and I'm starting to run low.  My wife suggested I go online and sign up for free T shirts at some of the sites, and I thought "That's a great idea!"  I am officially announcing the start of my latest quest "100 Free Ts"  That's my goal.  Finally my life has purpose!

Electronics - Just got my "Electronics for Dummies" and "Teach yourself Electronics" books.  I've got lots of stuff to read but my plan for world dommination is going well.  Soon there will be millions of robots in my control... girl robots!

Misc - Because there are so many things going on right now, just thought I'd yada yada yada some them.  You can fill in the missing information.

• Yada yada yada People are idiots yada yada yada
  
• Yada yada yada Nine screaming six year olds yada yada yada
• Yada yada yada Late night glue stick run to WalMart yada yada yada
• Yada yada yada Wind, solar and wave energy in one package yada yada yada
• Yada yada yada Mini blimps on guide wires yada yada yada

So much more but really bad headache ;-}

TTFN

Pulled down the source for DasBlog from SourceForge and updated the site to the latest bits.  I'm kinda having fun with this blogging stuff.  I know nobody is reading it and that hardly matters since I can't seem to stay focused on anything anyway. 

5'9" <ba da bum>

I havn't posted for a few days.  I'd like to say I've been hard at work on something wonderful but the truth is I've just havn't felt like writing anything.  Now I have a build up of stuff in my head and free time on my hands so be prepared for much rambling ;-}

Playing on digg.  Found this:


Interesting.  Starts me thinking about bringing SOA to the web arena.  Imagine, instead of using tools like Dot Net Nuke or Community Server to build websites, you simply mash up a bunch of "widgets"  Sort of a website ala collage.

Here are some other things that have been keeping me busy lately:

edubuntu - This is the kind of thing that could really make a difference in the world.  Just bouncing around the concept of an open source, world wide education system has got my head spinning and juices flowing.  IF you could funnel even a small percentage of education funds into something like edubuntu and supporting products, I think you could improve education world wide in ways that small local schools will never be capable of providing.  End the voucher debate.  Level the playing field between urban and rural schools.  ahhh.  Utopia!

So I'm a dreamer, but so was John Lennon, and look what happened to him!

Ok, bad example.

SharpMap - Google maps rulz!  Some of the mash ups are just amazing. Microsoft's version is as good or better albeit with fewer mashups.  SharpMap is simply a way to use exising mapping data to generate maps.  The down side is you have to do a good deal more work to get a map similar to what you can generate with a few Google API calls.  The up side is you can control everything about your map.  Also, the assemblies can be hosted in ASP.Net as well as distributed with a desktop app. 

Dapper - This is an interesting Web 2.0 site which basically "records" how you access a website and then allows you to play it back.  What makes it special is that it converts the output to XML and makes the input available via a URL.... (wait for it, wait for it, Ding!)  This means that any site can behave like a webservice.  Sure it's just fancy screen scrapping, but still it could be helpful when dealing with legacy apps.

OpenCV - Open Computer Vision Library is a cross platform C library developed initially by Intel to help with robotics research.  There is is a C# wrapper project called SharperCV but it appears that it has been stalled.  OpenCV has some very powerful features including tracking and object recognition.  Initially I thought it would be useful for my "Butterfly faces" project (yet another in a long line of stalled projects ;-}) but soon started looking at the tracking features as interesting. 

I started thinking that it might be neat to use the feature tracking to pull out individual frames from a movie, match features across the frames, use motion tracking to locate "actors", remove the "actors" from the foreground then stitch the background frames together to create a panaramic view of the scene. (whew!)  If you saved the "actors" you could layer them back into the newly created panarama and get a fuller appreciation for the size, scope and scale.  Imagine a full view of the mountins in "The Sound of Music!"  You could also replace actors from one movie with actors from another movie (including one you make yourself) which could make for some fun mashups.

And because I have a constant need to take everything to the nth degree, given that you now have multiple frames of muliple angles of the same points, you can (relatively) easily create 3D renderings.  At the very least, the boys and girls at CMU have been busy making that possible with a single image.  Now you have resonably acceptable data to render 3D actors in a 3D environment all in post production... I'm pretty sure that's the holy grail of the Pr0n industry ;-}

And while I'm going all Jack Kerouac over here I may as well spill over into some of the other OpenCV things that were smacking around my tiny head.  How about using it to find licence plates.  Start putting together a database of license plates and relate them to vehicle types and possibly even people.  Use this information to provide 1-on-1 marketing to people as they enter the mall, update billboards on the hiway or just to provide a better service.

So much more to say, so little space ;-}

TTFN

Just a random thought.  By now everyone has heard of the Mosquito tone which can only be heard by kids.  It's a tone in the 18+ KHz range that is to high pitched for adults to hear due to age-related hearing loss.  It was first used to keep kids from hanging out in front of stores, but quickly was adapted by kids as a ring tone that adults couldn't detect.

Just wandering if you could use that same tone to try and "censor" bad language from radio and TV so that kids wouldn't be able to hear the swearing while adults wouldn't have to listen to cut-up emotionless crap.  Not sure if it would really work, but just crossed my mind.

TTFN