Month: July 2008

Repurposed Freeways

I don’t know if it’s the $5/gallon gas prices, but freeway life here in southern California has become more surreal of late. Granted, traffic volumes are down, at least a little, so freeways are no longer in that perpetual state of criticality where a butterfly crossing through the 3 lane causes a 6 km backup. Yesterday I saw no less than 3 warnings about people walking on the I-5 freeway — which is a 10-lane high-speed monstrosity — and just now I saw this in a live CHP incident report near me here in La Jolla. Someone is bicycling in the dark in the fast lane of a freeway? Dear God, people. I know gas prices are high, but this is getting deranged.

Airlines complain

12 airlines including Jet Blue, Delta, American, AirTran and others pinged their frequent flier constituency egging them on to get politicians to crack down commodities investors or speculators who have caused crude oil prices to soar, hitting $146 a barrel last week.

lol. how delusional can you get? blaming “speculators” for your broken business model.

Iran sucks At Photoshop

Turns out bad photoshop skills are responsible for the oil price.

2013-02-04: While the US is staffing up cyber command to 5000 personnel, Iran is hiring lots of photoshoppers. Experience building toy models in balsa wood a plus.

all the reasons why we can affirm that Iran’s new stealth plane, at least in the form that was showcased on Feb. 2 during the Ten-Day Dawn ceremonies held in Tehran, is nothing more than a mock-up.

Pew Broadband 2008

Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007. Poorer Americans saw no growth in broadband adoption in the past year while at the same time 33% of broadband users pay more to get faster connections.

study has a bias for people with landlines. worthless

Family Meal

My dining experience was very different than that of any Chanterelle regular later that night — or likely any other night in the restaurant’s previous 30 years of service. There was no ordering or waiting for the next course; I didn’t sample the artisanal cheeses or foie gras. In fact, what I ate wasn’t even on the menu. I had arrived at 16:00 to experience a daily ritual that takes place in 100s of restaurants across the city, and in 1000s more across the country: family meal. Chanterelle was the last stop on a month-long, 8-venue culinary tour of Manhattan. My mission was simple: to see how a restaurant, with seemingly endless talent and resources in the kitchen, nourishes its staff, and how that 20-minute meal impacts the 7 hours of dinner service that follows.

The meal restaurants serve their staff.

Diane Greene

Sadly, being open and playing nice has often been a recipe for losing against Microsoft. Even within VMware, some people observe that the co-operative approach often boils down to waffling. Others worry that VMware has not yet decided what game it is playing. Ms Greene’s plans for VMware do not sound terribly ambitious. In a nutshell, the company wants to turn virtual machines into “containers” for software and data. Firms can assign quality-of-service and security requirements to these software containers, and have them run wherever they want, be it on their premises or out in a computing “cloud”.

shark jumping moment for ms greene: write up in the economist, ousted a week later