Year: 2007

Trying to grok carbon offsets

Post ImageThere’s been a lot of talk about carbon offsets in the news lately, and a whole crop of companies have sprung up to cater to the environmentally-conscious westerner. One such company, Zerofootprint, is Canadian was profiled today at TechCrunch:

Their chief goal, says the company, is to raise awareness among individuals and groups that everything we consume has some impact on the environment. The company is fighting global warming in two ways: encourage carbon reduction, and sell offsets for the remainder.

You can pretty much ignore the first goal. It sounds great, but there’s absolutely no way to measure whether or not they have encouraged reduction. Zerofootprint could fire off a few press releases a month that suggest they having a positive impact, but there’s no way to know. That makes them primarily a vendor of carbon offsets.

The anti-TechCrunch, uncov, also wrote about the company today:

These hosers have even set up their own market for these offsets, outside of the official exchanges. So okay, Zerofootprint is the one selling you these carbon offsets, and they’re also the ones validating that the offset in carbon actually takes place. This doesn’t sit right.

No, it doesn’t sit right.

In fact, the whole concept of carbon offsetting just doesn’t sit right with me. Environmentalist and writer George Monbiot explains the problems with carbon offsets very well in his article titled Selling Indulgences. He compares purchasing carbon offsets to the 15th and 16th century practice of selling absolutions:

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.

I have absolutely no doubt that humankind will figure out a way to survive global warming. I’m also fairly certain that carbon offsetting is not the solution. In fact, I think purchasing carbon offsets could actually make things worse because doing so enables us to ignore the root causes. We need to do more than just make ourselves feel better.

Read: Monbiot.com

Drobo: Infrant's ReadyNAS NV+ with better marketing

Post ImageHave you heard of Drobo? It’s a new storage device billed as “the world’s first storage robot.” I am not quite sure what that means, because there doesn’t seem to be anything robotic about it. Drobo has been receiving a ton of press lately, but I don’t know why. Take for instance, Michael Gartenberg’s post:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using a new device that totally changed the way I think of external storage that finally does works the way I want and lets me leverage low cost and high capacity drives in their sweet spot. It’s called a Drobo and while some have called it a RAID array, it’s really much more than that.

What he likes about it is that everything is automatic. Drobo provides all of the advantages of a RAID array without having to do any configuration. Furthermore, you can replace drives with larger ones and your data is automatically migrated.

Thing is, there’s already a product that does all that. It’s called the ReadyNAS NV+ and it’s made by Infrant Technologies (recently aquired by Netgear). Their “automatic” RAID technology is called X-RAID, and it works like a charm. Actually, it does quite a bit more than the Drobo, and it’s only $150 more ($649 vs $499 USD). For instance, it allows you to specify a RAID-configuration if you want, and it also has a wicked management tool to configure monitoring, automatic backups, and more.

I guess the main difference between the two (besides the price) is that the Drobo is connected to your PC or Mac via USB, whereas the ReadyNAS is connected to your network via ethernet. But seriously, network storage is a much better choice. Most people have more than one computer, so all of them can access the ReadyNAS at once. Furthermore, if you turn off the computer that the Drobo is connected to, your data is no longer accessible. Not so with the ReadyNAS – your data is always accessible. Also, you’ll probably get better data rates over ethernet than over USB.

All of these points are mentioned in Engadget’s excellent review of the Drobo.

We’ve had both a ReadyNAS NV+ and an older ReadyNAS 600/X6 here at Paramagnus for over a year, and I have absolutely no complaints. I would highly recommend Infrant products if you’re looking for a storage solution.

I suppose the Drobo is positioned more as a consumer device, whereas the ReadyNAS NV+ has not been (at least not until being acquired by Netgear). I think Drobo probably has a wicked marketing team too, and props to them, they’ve managed to garner a lot of positive coverage.

That said, the ReadyNAS NV+ is a much better choice in my opinion. It’s too bad it hasn’t received the press coverage it deserves.

Read: Engadget

Guy Kawasaki and Truemors

Post ImageEver hear the name Guy Kawasaki before? If you’re at all involved in the tech or marketing industries, chances are you have. He’s a pretty famous guy, credited with “bringing the concept of evangelism to the high-tech business.” He made his name at Apple, where he was responsible for marketing of the Macintosh.

Lately Guy has been blogging, and launching a new company called Truemors. Here’s a description from the website:

The purpose of Truemors is to democratize information. We made it so that people don’t need to be a journalist or even run a web site or blog to “tell the world.” Think of Truemors as a friction-free news site.

Reaction to the site has run the gamut from extremely positive to extremely negative. That doesn’t seem to bug Guy though, who recently posted “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.” After listing a bunch of facts and figures, he says:

One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company.

He then ends with:

I end with a truism (as opposed to truemor): There’s only one way to find out if your idea will succeed, and that’s to try it, so go for it.

Lots of people have written about his post already, but I just have to add my two cents.

He’s absolutely right with that last point – if you have an idea, you have to go for it! There’s no other way to determine if it will fail or succeed. And you’ll learn a lot in the process too, as Guy pointed out.

The idea that you can launch a company for $12,000 is bullshit though. Guy may only have spent around $12K on Truemors, but that doesn’t take into account the value his name brought to the whole project. He knows it too:

Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

It’s obvious, but it is worth mentioning. TechCrunch wrote about the site three times, and that was before it even launched! Even ignoring the rest of the press Truemors got, those three posts are invaluable, and Guy can thank his name for them.

Guy makes it sound like it’s now dead easy to build and launch a company for hardly any money. From my own experience, and from everyone I have had the opportunity to learn from over the last few years, that’s just not typical.

I’m not saying you need $1 million, and I don’t want to discount the fact that Guy earned the value his name carries over 24 years of hard work, but his experience is clearly unique. I find it hard to believe that most entrepreneurs will have a similar experience. I sure haven’t! I’d love to have over 260,000 page views at Podcast Spot in a single day.

Anyway, I’ll stop now. If you’d like to read an interesting counterpoint to Guy’s post, check out Valleywag.

(This is a total aside, but I think my friend Alex looks a lot like Guy. He’s an evangelist too!)

Read: Guy Kawasaki

Notes for 6/3/2007

Can you believe it’s June already? Here are my weekly notes:

  • For a computer geek, I sure have spent a lot of time outdoors this weekend! I walked about 32 blocks on Friday in the scorching heat with Sharon to check out Famoso (it was kinda like “Quizno’s for pizza”). Went to a BBQ/water fight yesterday. And today I spent a lot of time planting flowers.
  • On that note, I have new-found appreciation for gardening. Not only is it time consuming and laborious, it’s expensive! Who knew flowers could cost so much?
  • Last week I mentioned the giant wild pig, and wondered how it got so big. This week, the answer: it was raised on a farm and recently sold to a hunting preserve.
  • Don’t you hate it when you order something from a fast food restaurant only to discover that it looks nothing like what you saw in the commercial? Here’s a collection of images showing just that.
  • This news is a bit old, but apparently you can send an email to Canada Post and they’ll turn it into snail mail for you. The service is called EasyPost.
  • Facebook Polls launched recently, and initially it blocked “restricted text” like MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster from being used in the poll. Kinda funny…a rep for the company said it was due to “outdated code” – riiiight.

New RealPlayer – Who Cares?

Post ImageThere aren’t many technology companies that I try to stay away from completely, but there a few, and RealNetworks is one of them. I have never liked their software, and frankly, I’ve never quite understood their reason for existing. I mean besides Rob Glaser getting to do his own thing, what has RealNetworks accomplished? They created media formats that no one wanted to use, so they switched to reverse-engineering their competitor’s formats. Oh and they took Microsoft for $460 million for beating them with “monopolistic power”. Nevermind that Microsoft’s software/technology was and still is superior.

Anyway, after a relatively long period with no news, RealNetworks has announced a new version of RealPlayer:

How is the new RealPlayer different from previous versions? Let’s touch on a few highlights: The most notable difference is visible across tens of thousands of web sites immediately after installation. On-demand and live streaming and progressive video in the four major formats – Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime and Real – is now downloadable through a very simple download button that temporarily hovers near video content as it plays.

Ignoring the fact that there are already dozens of ways to download YouTube videos, why would I want to? The quality is usually pretty horrendous. I suppose downloading live streaming content is cool, but not when you consider that most live feeds are posted in downloadable form later anyway.

Seems to me like this is a last-ditch effort to make Real relevant. If you’re really interested for some reason, Scoble has a video interview and demo with Vice President Jeff Chasen.

I think Jason Cox said it best in a comment on Scoble’s post:

Real? How about no. Friends dont let friends use Real.

Agreed.

Read: RealPlayer Blog

iTunes Plus Launches

Post ImageSteve Jobs has finally made good on his promise to offer DRM-free music through iTunes. Apple is announcing today the availability of iTunes Plus:

Apple® today launched iTunes® Plus—DRM-free music tracks featuring high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings—for just $1.29 per song.

In addition, iTunes customers can now easily upgrade their library of previously purchased EMI content to iTunes Plus tracks for just 30 cents a song and $3.00 for most albums.

I think this is great news. The more retailers that offer DRM-free music the better! I am kind of confused by the pricing though.

Why are DRM-free tracks more expensive than DRM’d ones? They are higher quality encodings, sure, but so high than an extra 30 cents is warranted to cover the costs of storage and transfer? I don’t think so. Not when Amazon S3 sells bandwidth for 20 cents per GB.

I also find it kind of insulting that they named the store “iTunes Plus”. A more appropriate name would be “the iTunes you actually want” or something. Seriously.

Read: Apple

Microsoft Surface – Surface Computing Has Arrived

Post ImageMicrosoft Surface is insanely cool. I mean uber cool. Seriously, go watch the videos and tell me you’re not excited (Channel 10 has a longer video and Popular Mechanics also has a video). If there was ever a question about whether or not Microsoft can innovate, that question has been answered. Sure, similar ideas have existed for a long time, but not commercially available products. Microsoft Surface is new, different, and exciting. They’ve made it happen. From the press release:

Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Beginning at the end of this year, consumers will be able to interact with Surface in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.

It’s kind of like the user interface in Minority Report, except that Surface is not a hollywood trick. Surface is real!

Five years in the making, Surface is being targeted at businesses initially. According to CNET News.com, Microsoft expects that individuals will be able to get their own surface computers “within three to five years.” The devices currently have a price tag of around $10,000. Okay, that kind of sucks, but it’s to be expected for cutting edge technology I suppose.

Don’t be surprised if Surface is all you read about for the next few days – the blogosphere is sure to be buzzing. Heck, there’s already a bunch of articles and posts available and it was just announced! For instance, this “making of” article is an interesting read.

So yeah, Microsoft Surface looks awesome! I’m all excited now 🙂

Read: Microsoft

Telus Mobility Impresses

Post ImageAs you may know, my mobile phone provider is Telus Mobility. I have used them for years and for the most part, I’ve been content. Not excited, not angry, just content. I did write about some text message troubles I had back in January though, and noted:

…there was absolutely no wait time to talk to someone (minus the stupid speech recognition menu which took a couple minutes). This is a BIG improvement for Telus…normally you have to wait forever!

On Friday, I had another somewhat similar experience. My text messaging was not working as expected, so I called support. Right away I talked to a friendly lady who told me they were experiencing troubles in Alberta and B.C. with text message delivery. She connected me to network services anyway, to see if my problem was something more.

After about 15 minutes of waiting to talk to someone, I gave up. I hoped the problem was simply what the first lady had told me – temporary delays. Turns out she was right – my messages started working again late on Friday, and I started receiving a bunch of messages yesterday and today that were not delivered over the weekend.

As I walked in the door tonight around 7 PM though, it got even better! My cell rang and when I answered I was greeted by a recorded message from Telus Mobility. Turns out they were very sorry for the delay I had experienced Friday, and to apologize, they credited $5 to my account.

That’s the kind of thing that will make me a happy customer instead of a content customer. They went the extra mile. Well done Telus Mobility!

Die-Nasty Season 16 Finale with Georges Laraque!

Post ImageLast night Sharon and I went to see the season sixteen finale of Die-Nasty at the Varscona. I had never been to one of their improv shows before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew that Edmonton’s own Georges Laraque was guest starring though, so I was definitely excited. Before I get to the show, here’s a bit of background on Die-Nasty itself:

Die-Nasty is a live improvised soap opera, running weekly in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada since 1991. Die-Nasty’s improv comedy format features a continuing storyline and recurring characters, live music, and a director who sets up scenes for the audience (and performers) in voiceover.

For last night’s finale, the focus was on the Stanleycubric Cup final between the Edmonton Die-Hards and the Montreal Canadiens. Dwayne “the Good One” Minsky (played by Matt Alden) led the Die-Hards to the finals but had switched sides to the Canadiens. Thus, the Die-Hards were in need of a new hero – which is where #69 Wellen Dowed came in, played by Georges Laraque. As you can imagine, there was lots of material for the actors to work with!

Georges did an excellent job last night (maybe he has a future in Hollywood). I think he was in every second scene! Much of the humor came from the actors admiring the size of Georges and his hands and, um, other parts. He held his own though! He almost broke the stage in one scene, when he started cheering after having scored a goal. I expected nothing less from Georges, who you’ll recall, was quite fond of slamming the glass at Rexall Place after a goal.

Here are some memorable quotes from last night:

“I haven’t played a single game all year. This is bullshit!”
– Georges Laraque’s opening line

“I have a million dollar tool, that’s why I built the shed.”
– Donovan Workun as Hogey Oogachakka, responding to a comment about his weight

“And the hockey has started. The ice is icy! The sticks are sticky! And the puck is black.”
– Ron Pederson as the new announcer for the Die-Hards

“Where the fuck were all of you the rest of the season!”
– Jeff Haslam as Derrick Capilano at the start of the show (no doubt a dig at the audience…it was a packed house, probably because of Georges)

In one scene Georges made a dig at MacT, but I don’t recall exactly what he said. It was pretty funny though!

I really like actors Jeff Haslam and Mark Meer, so I was happy they were there. Sharon remarked that Jeff’s shirt seems to get tighter every time we see him, and that Mark is superb at accents. Both are absolutely true! The only negative thing about last night’s show was that actress Davina Stewart wasn’t present.

If you want to see Die-Nasty, they’ll be at the Fringe this summer. There’s a “soap-a-thon” coming up soon too, but I’m not sure when that is. And keep an eye out for Georges – maybe he’ll become an actor!

Read: Die-Nasty

Notes for 5/27/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

  • My roommate is gone! Kim has travelled north to Inuvik for the summer. Miss ya Kim!
  • I managed to lock my keys in the trunk of my car today. Not my finest moment. Turns out the tow truck guy that Honda arranged to come help couldn’t get the car unlocked! Apparently a special tool is required. Ah well…thanks Dickson for helping me with the spare key.
  • Went to see Pirates 3 tonight – much better than the second one. It didn’t feel like a long movie, though it was. And man oh man did Keira ever look amazing…
  • This giant pig is pretty amazing, but here’s my question: how did it get so large?
  • For my fellow Coke addicts – the New York Times has a really interesting article analyzing the past, present, and future of the company.
  • Research shows that infants have amazing capabilities that adults lack. That probably means there’s money to be made in helping adults unleash their inner-infant.
  • I have a couple job interviews this week that I am really looking forward to. Hopefully they go well!