Reading through the news about the passing of Randy Pausch, the 47-year-old Carnegie Mellon computer science professor whose "Last Lecture" video later became a worldwide phenomenon, I was compelled to go watch it again (like so many are today).
I remember my revelation after one of my friends forwarded me the link of Prof. Pausch's lecture after it was posted on YouTube. At the time he was struggling with Pancreatic cancer and his words were meant as a legacy for his children and family.
The lecture, which Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow helped promote, later turned into a book and has reportedly been translated into 30 languages after it grew so popular.
It was more than talking about the value of hard work. What stuck with me were his points about
living a life well -- and remembering those values throughout your day to day, no matter how mundane.
Some of the points were about:
The importance of letting children express their creativity
The importance of people vs. things
The importance of working and playing well with others.
In May, Dr. Pausch spoke at the Carnegie Mellon University commencement. He said a friend recently told him he was "beating the [Grim] Reaper" because it's now been nine months since his doctor told him he would die in six.
"But we don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well," said Dr. Pausch, who urged the graduates to find and pursue their passion. He put an exclamation point at the end of his remarks by kissing his wife, Jai, and carrying her off stage.
If you haven't checked out the video (there are many on YouTube), it's worth a few minutes out of your day.
Today's New York Times has an update on
the new laptop cases that airport security folks can X-ray while still in the case. Some of the bags that fit the TSA's specifications are expected on the market by September, such as by Pathfinder and Targus.
To make sure the cases are easily identifiable, the TSA said in its
request for proposals sent to manufacturers in March that bags should be
designed with "self-evident features," including an absence of buckles, pockets
or zippers.
The article later states:
Ron Davis, the executive vice president of Pathfinder Luggage, said that his
company had just started producing its two new cases at a plant in the Philippines. He
said both had been tested at checkpoints to ensure that they met government
specifications.
"They don't want anything obscuring the view of the laptop," he said. "In
our case, the material is nylon and foam, and the X-ray machine will see right
through that."
Before the Woo Hoos burst forth, a caveat:
The bags don't carry any special seal, such as "approved by the TSA." So you could still find yourself pulling your laptop out of your X-ray-friendly bag, and watching it go bumping down the conveyor belt in a scuffed-up plastic bin.
Still, if it gets you through just one checkout line faster at the airport, I'll be among the first lined up to buy one of these bags when they hit the market.
As for other travelers that might sneer at me for
being an early adopter of the bag, as one blogger put it, who actually cares what other travelers think? We're all just trying to get through the indignities of airport security checks.
Been reading up on one of my favorite discussion lists about the cool new offering from New York Times online.
It's not a way back machine but the latest offering from NYTimes.com is pretty close: "Times Machine."
Available to home delivery subscribers, the online system lets users look at editions back to the 1850's. You have to be a home subscriber to use it (and, oddly enough, I've recently started getting the print version again). But here's a peek at what the newspaper published 100 years ago today.
Is Yahoo founder Jerry Yang feeling more heat after
the Microsoft bid went away last weekend? Is Bill Gates just confusing things?
Maybe it's just the static coming out of the bitter bankers behind both sides grinding their axes after Microsoft walked away from its $47.5 billion bid last weekend. This, after
Yahoo's Jerry Yang reportedly insisted on more.
Both companies' PR machines have been cranking up in the past few days, busy being the "people familiar"-sourced stories. (Generally speaking, you get Microsoft's side in The Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo's side of things in The New York Times.)
Come Monday, with Yahoo's stock diving by 17
percent, Yang did an interview with Reuters, sounding every bit the lover who,
after dumping the boyfriend, realizes the mistake and wants him back.
Yang told Reuters that he had "mixed
feelings" about the weekend outcome, after investors showed their
disappointment over the break-up of negotiations by sending Yahoo shares down
15 percent.
Now, with Yahoo's stock still at least $3.00 below where it left off Friday, Yang's critics are growing louder.
Take The Wall Street Journal's biting commentary today. In a piece headlined, "Jerry Yang's Scorched Earth," Holman Jenkins Jr writes:
Mr. Ballmer didn't count on Jerry Yang, whose idea of what his
company was worth became inflated by the perception that Microsoft needed it so
much. When Mr. Yang said Microsoft's offer "undervalued" Yahoo, he
meant it underestimated Yahoo's value to Microsoft, not to anybody else.
In a fashion, he outsmarted not only Mr. Ballmer but his own
Yahoo shareholders and board. Having discovered how much Yahoo was worth to
Redmond (and no one else), he set about destroying that unique value by ceding
Yahoo's position in search to Google through an outsourcing deal.
All this so Jerry Yang can fulfill his dream of having an
independent Yahoo whose halls he can continue to walk as the revered
"founder."
Ouch.
(It's not as if Microsoft gets a pass in the piece. Jenkins raises again the Split
Microsoft argument. If the brainiacs in Redmond
are looking for a way to really shake up the competition, while keeping an eye
on spending, maybe it’s time to do it: Split
the company.)
Then, Bill Gates went and told a pool of reporters in
Japan that Microsoft would be open to other possible tie-ups, then later said
the company would go it alone, all while The Wall Street
Journal was reporting that Microsoft and Facebook had been chatting
recently over a possible deal. (The Motley Fool has a funny take on Gates' attempts at a poker face in all this.)
Yang's got shareholders in an uproar, Microsoft has the upper hand in the post-breakup he-said, she-said, and Google's still watching from a distance. The beat goes on.
The 12th Annual Webby Awards are out with a must-see list of winners at the WebbyAwards.com Web site.
The awards site has the annual interactive winner's gallery. For those of you who study and appreciate good Web site design (and don't mind Flash), it's worth the trip.
Stephen Colbert's popularity juggernaut is steaming on. He is The Webby Person of the Year award, "for the innovative way he has used the Internet to interact with fans of The Colbert Report -- from Google bombing to make him the top search result for 'greatest living American' to challenging the 'truthiness' of Wikipedia,: according to the Webby Awards release.
Some winners look like winners, but some of the awards are curious. Take the ahead-of-all-thinkers conference Ted.com , which picked up an award for best navigation/structure. It's innovative, no question. Plus, you have different choices of navigation, based on themes. So hopefully I'll find one I like.
In the Social Networking category, interesting that Flock.com won, but that Facebook took the same award, only as the people's choice in the matter.
It wasn't the only category in which the judges and public parted ways, according to the Webby's own release about it:
For Viral Video, pop phenomenon "Chocolate Rain" earned the public's top votes, while dotcom spoof "Here Comes another Bubble" was selected by the judges. For Weird, the Academy chose Passive-Aggressive Notes, while fans selected I Can Has Cheezburger?
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is getting some attention on the latest geegaw to go with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Amazon said it will make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Since InternetNews.com last covered this service, Amazon.com has tossed in some more features, namely what it calls Elastic IPs -- static IPs for dynamic cloud computing.
Here's the pitch:
An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account.
The larger story here is that Amazon is getting more serious about its cloud computing services -- probably based on a pretty solid uptake on the EC2 beta so far. It keeps EC2 in the same conversations as hosted applications, software as a service (SaaS), Web Services and how software is increasingly sold: like a utility you pay for on a meter.
Amazon is basically building out more cred by saying to potential customers: Applications will be well-cared for here. But in addition, it's a move that will eventually get merchants to deploy Web services behind the scenes -- applications talking to eachother on orders and other logistics stuff that puts Web services to work behind the scenes for a company that makes the bulk of its bread and butter selling books and gadgets in the physical world.
So the latest on EC2 serves a few purposes. It gets folks to take another look at the Web Services menu the e commerce giant is building out. Plus, it fits in with Amazon's SimpleDB (um, hello Microsoft), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.
Looks like Amazon’s getting more religion about selling products that are easily served up, rather than boxed up and shipped out through the mail.
There's, of course, the DRM-free online music sales sales it launched last year, one more piece of its digital content strategy since the debut of Kindle, the electronic book reader. Amazon also launched software sales via downloads in January of tax prep software and is keen to expand its offerings there. The timing on Web services with the latest on EC2 just adds one more piece to the computing cloud at Amazon.
The online version of the "Knowledge@Wharton" publication has another entry to add to the debate about user-generated content and how it impacts traditional publishing business models.
For starters, I agree with how the the article disagees with Newsweek magazine's recent "Revenge of the Experts" cover story in which the magazine argues that the "pendulum" is swinging away from the influence of the user-generated crowd (blogs, social media, eBay even) and back to content edited by professionals. Here's the money quote:
Experts at Wharton disagree on where the Internet content pendulum sits
and whether it's worth fretting over the short-term swings between
professional and amateur content. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader and Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach
say fears about user-generated content are misplaced. "It's absurd to
say the pendulum is swinging back to professional content.
User-generated content has just been born," says Fader. There is little
evidence to suggest that it takes market share from the professional
variety, he adds.
Great to see Kevin Werbach of the SuperNova conferences (and a leading thinker on the Web), quoted in the article and putting the whole Amateur vs. Professional in its rightful context.
Despite hand wringing over professional and amateur content, the reality is that consumers will use and appreciate both.
I agree with their conclusion as well: Both have their place.
Sad to see the news that "2001:...." author Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of 90.
The New York Times has a very good
obit, which is here.
I found this passage from the NYTimes obit spot on about his influence on technology, and beyond:
The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity's destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by "2001: A Space Odyssey," the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.
His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.
Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the "moral equivalent of war," giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.
Mr. Clarke's influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Mr. Clarke's writings with giving him courage to pursue his "Star Trek" project in the face of indifference, even ridicule, from television executives.
Talk about the "train wreck" effect. You can't take your eyes off the stories bubbling out of the blogosphere about the fallout from the chaotic interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by journalist Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Interactive Confab (SXSW Interactive) in Austin.
Wired's got the juicy details as do plenty of bloggers who were there, as well as plenty of twitter posts on the tweetscan.
Audience members, apparently tired of constant interruptions by Lacy and references to her own projects in the interview, essentially said they weren't going to sit for such lame questions and demanded to ask their own.
Here's one passage from the Wired article:
Lacy tried to get the notoriously tight-lipped Zuckerberg to open up. But the discussion rarely strayed beyond the usual business fare and eventually descended into a string of awkward moments punctuated by the audience's heckling.
"Talk about something interesting," one attendee yelled about halfway through the keynote. The remark was met with waves of cheering and applause.
Meanwhile, members of the audience participated in a back-channel discussion on Twitter, with users of the microblogging site directing most of their animosity at Lacy's unorthodox interview technique.
"Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview," said Jason Pontin on Twitter. "Poor girl, flirtatiously awful tho' she was."
A quick search for "Zuckerberg" on Twitter search service Tweetscan reveals hundreds of posts written by those who witnessed the disastrous interview.
Memo to journos who get themselves enmeshed in a story and then turn an audience into an angy mob: If you're in a hole and want to get out, stop digging! In this case, Lacy got the audience even more annoyed with her attitude when a little humility would have helped smooth things over. And we wonder why so many people think journos don't have a clue.
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