I’m trying to ā€œWeb 2.0-izeā€ a friend who is a primary care (family) physician.Ā  The big plan is to give him a site he can easily update, and that will build up some Google juice over time – surprise, surprise, that’s a blog. :-)

He WILL blog, but not too often – so this should not look like a blog, more like a traditional website with just a section on the main page for the refreshing content – or in Wordpress lingo, a theme that has several buckets for static content, and just one smaller area for blog posts.

Can you recommend a good theme?Ā  Thanks.

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I’m receiving congratulatory notes – in the age of Facebook and Plaxo there is no hiding.  Oh, well, I’m happy to have reached 21smile_wink, at least I can get a drink now.

But June 5th is a memorable day for other reasons. This year it is the 20th anniversary of the of Tiananmen Square  crackdown in China.   June 5th is also World Environment Day, which this year has the theme:

Your Planet Needs You – UNite to Combat Climate Change

On this day an amazing film, simply titled HOME is released.  Directed by internationally renowned French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, produced by world famous director Luc Besson and narrated by five-time Academy AwardĀ® nominee Glenn Close (Dangerous Liaisons), Home aims to change the way people see the planet and their impact on it. Shot in high definition in 54 countries and 120 locations over 217 days, the unique and first-time ever all-aerial filming style highlights the Earth’s wonders as well as its wounds and provides a necessary perspective to approach the changing environment.

The World Premiere will take place in more 100 countries and in 23 languages, with free screenings  at the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, in New York’s Central Park,  London’s Trafalgar Square and Omaha, which is North America’s host city for the United Nations World Environment Day.

And now we can share it here, as the film is available in full length, amazing quality on Youtube until June 14th, 2009.

Update: apparently the film itself is not embeddable, so all I can include here is a a video on the shooting itself.  But the real film is worth clicking through and watching on Youtube – in full screen mode, ideally HD.

Enjoy. And Think.

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This is the third slide of the Opening Keynote from Atlassian’s Summit this week.  Amidst all the celebration of success, product and partner announcements, and just about a windfall of information it was a nice gesture to spend a minute with Atlassian’s first US employee, President Jeffrey Walker, who could not be at the event, having just received his chemotherapy a few days earlier.

Other than an Atlassian, Jeffrey is also a hacker artist and musician. And Cancer Dude.  His words, not mine.  He wrote them two years ago:

In preparation for this upcoming surgery, I’ll be working out every single day. I’ll be leaving work at a reasonable hour. I need to point my Type-A personality at Atlassian at something more important right now.ā€

I am Cancer Dude and I am going to kick it’s ass.

In March Jeffrey dropped a bomb: his cancer was back, bigger and uglier than ever before.  I don’t want to repeat the story, here’s my wrap-up, and his own post: Living with Cancer in Silicon Valley.

Today Jeffrey’s back online: Living with Cancer in Silicon Valley II: Survival Tips from a Hardened Cancer Dude.  It’s a must-read.  There’s no excuse not to find the time to read it.   His Seven Survival Tips are a testament of strong will, the kick-ass attitude that makes him invincible, and gives strength to many others.  Literally.

This time around the battle took more focus than ever before, so Jeffrey took a 6-month leave from Atlassian.  But he doesn’t rest.  Between two chemo treatments he played guitar at the recent Stanford University Relay for Life:

 

Now for the important part: he has 3.5 weeks left until surgery.  He is offering to play (free) at a local benefit in the San Francisco Bay Area.  If you need a musician who can identify with your cause, or just know of a benefit event, ping me below in comments or via the contact form.

Focus on the positive. Tell cancer to ā€œPiss offā€

(Cross-posted from CloudAve)

 

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I’m a big fan of netbooks, but they are not the magic device for all one’s needs, and they should not be. PC World has jumped the shark with a bombastic title: Bye-bye Kindle, E-reader Screens Coming for Netbooks.Ā  It’s all about start-up Pixel Qi’s new screen which can operate as traditional backlit color LCD or as a black-end-white e-paper that hardly consumes energy and most importantly reduces eye-strain.Ā  PC World jumps to the conclusion:

E-reader makers have reason to fear such innovation because people will be able to buy devices with more functions for about the same price.Ā 

I beg to disagree. But rather than speculate, I’m challengingĀ  authors Dan Nystedt and Martyn Williams to do a test: hold a 3-pound netbook for several hours, in different positions, not at their desk, while trying to enjoy an e-Book.

Continue reading

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Or perhaps Florida annexed California (never mind that little piece of land separating the two).

Reuters reports:

Space shuttle Atlantis lands safely in Florida

- says the headline. Then the actual article:

The shuttle touched down at the Edwards Air Force base in California.

I let Google decide smile_wink

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…And I am not even talking about TCO, calculating life-time cost with subscription.  No, just plain simply purchase price, with a dirty industry trick: rebates.

The long expected Palm Pre will be available from Spring on Jun 6th, at $199 with qualifying data plan, and after a $100 rebate.   And therein lies the rub – it will cost $299 for many.

Fellow Enterprise Irregular Winnie Mirchandani has a long-going series on business processes that badly need ā€œangioplastyā€œ.  Processing rebates is certainly a most convoluted process – unfortunately often by design.  Why?  It’s simple, 40% of rebates never get redeemed, says Business Week:

The industry’s open secret is that fully 40% of all rebates never get redeemed because consumers fail to apply for them or their applications are rejected, estimates Peter S. Kastner, a director of consulting firm Vericours Inc. That translates into more than $2 billion of extra revenue for retailers and their suppliers each year. What rebates do is get consumers to focus on the discounted price of a product, then buy it at full price. "The game is obviously that anything less than 100% redemption is free money," says Paula Rosenblum, director of retail research at consulting firm Aberdeen Group Inc.

What this old article fails to point out is that it’s often not the consumer’s fault who forget to send in rebates.  Sure, we’re sometimes lazy to do the paperwork for a $5 discount, but you would dot it for $100, wouldn’t you?  Yet it’s often the ugliness of the rebate process with built-in traps (did you cut out the UPC code from the right corner on the box, did you circle the right amount..etc), or just the ignorance of the rebate processing company (yes, that is a thriving business  in itself) that robs you of your rebate check.  And don’t for a minute think it’s only from Tiger Direct and other retailers who thrive on the rebate-scam.  Brand-name trusted vendors aren’t any better.  Since we’re discussing the Palm here, here’s my rebate experience from Handspring (the former Pal-spinoff that later reunited with the parent) from a few years ago:

Sent in not only paperwork, but an actual, working older Palm III as trade-in unit (This condition was so ridiculous, later Handspring changed it to providing serial no’s of the trade-ins.)  The $100 rebate never arrived, not even after numerous phone-calls and emails.  They demanded copies of everything, which I sent – but how do you copy the trade-in unit?  My loss:  $100 rebate, $50 trade-in value for the old Palm (that’s what it sold on eBay at the time), postage and about a full day of my time fighting the bureaucracy.

Did that stop my from buying Handspring / Palm products?  Not when they were the only game in time, so I bought two more Treo’s.  But guess what: Palms are not the only choice if you want a smart phone, and obviously I am still not a Palm-fan…

Back to the angioplasty, one way to streamline rebate processing is to make it an all-online process, removing the intentional hurdles.  I can’t see why in the 21st century this is such a big deal. Costco sets a positive example, with simple online rebate entry, prompt payment, and online audit available for years.

But the real angioplasty would be to kill the the whole process.  Forget rebates, it’s time for true transparency: call it what it is, $299 or $199, if you want to promote your product, provide a temporary discount, but forget rebates, which are just a Big Fat Lie.

(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

 

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When California banned holding a cell-phone while driving, it  unintentionally left a loophole: texting was not specifically banned.  You’d think it’s common sense, but apparently it’s not, and it took another heated debate and another law to ban texting while driving. 

Today we’re seeing proof from Boston while it’s really bad: a 24-year old trolley driver was texting his girlfriend when he rear-ended another trolley in front of him, that got stopped by a red light in a tunnel. He may have looked down for just a few seconds it takes to type a word, but by the time he looked up he could not slam the brakes hard enough.

The speed of the incoming trolley is not known, but it sent the other trolley 100 feet forward in the tunnel.  49 passengers were injured, none in a life-threatening condition.

Full story at the Boston Globe.

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Knee-jerk Henry (Henry McMaster, the Attorney General of South Carolina)Ā  must have sent his swat team to bring down Craigslist, as this is all I find on everyone’s favorite classifieds site:

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What’s This?

Misc March 31st, 2009

Guess now… or you’ll know tomorrow. smile_party

Do you see theĀ  girl spinning clockwise?Ā  Then you’re using your right brain.

Do you see her spin counter- clockwise?Ā  You’re likely using your left brain.

Some people have the ability to see both.Ā  (If you read this post in a feed reader, it probably won’t work, please click through for the test.)

.Spinning girl

Today I can only see her turn clockwise … but they way I recall, when I first saw this a few years ago, I ssaw her turn left.Ā  Hm…changes in my brain function?

Of course it’s an optical illusion.

The image is not objectively ā€œspinningā€ in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.

By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.

The above explanation comes from Dr. Steven Novella,Ā  academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine.

So now we know.Ā  But I still can’t make her turn left…

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