Maybe if he hadn't put his finger in his mouth?

There are cameras everywhere recording everything we do. The man who is likely to be Australia's next prime minister discovered this recently. I can't believe some of the stuff that gets passed around the Internet nowadays.



SFGate is reporting the story here.

5.6 Earthquake

We just had a 5.6 magnitude earthquake centered near San Jose. It felt like a slow rolling quake that made everything in the house sway back and forth. I have felt a few earthquakes since moving to California but this was by far the largest one yet. The scariest part was how long it seemed to last (probably about 15 seconds). That may not sound like much but when the earth and your whole house is shaking, it's an eternity. The good news is that there was no damage and nobody was hurt that I know of up here in San Francisco.

Time to finish filling the disaster preparedness kit.

Here's a picture from the USGS:

So Simple My Mom Can Use It

This weekend I set up a new computer for my Mom. Like most people using the Internet today her needs are relatively straightforward. She needs to read/write email, surf the web, and view pictures and video of her grandchildren. Like most geeks I have tons of hardware at home and I've been trying to clean up lately and part of that is getting rid of some of my less often used gear. So, I did a little experiment and took one of the better pieces of gear I had, installed Ubuntu 7.10 on it and set up a new desktop for her.

So far (it's only been 2 days) the results have been very encouraging. The best, and most obvious, sign of the success has been that I've been receiving email from her and I checked the mail headers (User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (X11/20071008)). Go Mom!

You might ask why am I putting my dear and beloved mother through this kind of torture? First of all, I don't believe it is torture. I use Ubuntu 6.04 as my primary desktop for day to day work. I have a Windows XP partition on my laptop but I haven't felt the need to boot into it for weeks now. When I need to test out TripIt in a windows based browser I use a VirtualBox VM running XP with a copy of IE6, IE7, FF2, and Safari 3 installed in it. I'm pretty productive in this environment and aside from some minor annoyances like not being able to read the latest files from Office 2007, I don't miss Windows at all.

Given the other options I had for mom, I think the one I chose is actually the best combination of low cost and best usability. Plus, she gets an improved user experience over the Windows 98 box she had been using. Yes, she really has been using Windows 98 for years.

So what options did I consider?

1. PC Running Windows

I could have gone out and purchased a new machine running Windows but the reality is that the version of Windows we would have received from the PC vendor would have been Vista. I've had some experience using Vista at work and all I will say is that I love my mother dearly and wouldn't put her through that kind of pain. I know some of you guys like Windows, but while I can actually see some value in XP as being a stable version of Windows that works well, Vista is really quite bad and Microsoft should be really worried about stabilizing it. I hope they clean it up a lot in SP1.

2. Mac Running MacOS X

This option might have been a good one except that the cost is too high and my mom doesn't need a highly capable a machine. For doing the simple tasks she does on a daily basis, I shouldn't need to spend over $1000 on a dual core machine machine no matter how nice and slick it might look. It's true that the Mac just works but given how much they cost, open source political considerations aside, it's just not worth it if all you're doing is email, web browsing, and looking at pictures.

Some might argue that despite the low cost of a Linux system that my mom wouldn't be able to get it to work for her. That may have been true 15 years ago when I first loaded a pre-1.0 Linux kernel onto my 486DX2-66, but the latest builds of Ubuntu are quite usable. Given my mom is using it successfully, I would argue they are nice even for folks who aren't nerds. I set up the machine so it just logs her in and updates itself periodically. I put several large icons on her desktop so she can get to email, the web, and her pictures, and gave her some basic instructions on how to start the machine up and shut it down.

So far so good, but we'll see how it goes over the next couple of weeks.

More Great TripIt Coverage

Ok, I don't have to keep a secret anymore, TripIt was one of the six companies selected for the Web 2.0 Summits Launchpad. Very cool!

We also got some very nice coverage from the crew over at TechCrunch. It's going to be a busy week!

So Sad it's Funny

I haven't been this entertained by TechCrunch in a long time. Thank you Mr. Arrington!

TripIt Makes the NY Times!

I guess we're a real company now. ;-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/travel/07comTripIt.html

Tips for Dealing with Technooverload

I came across this article on the Pick the Brain blog about how to deal with technooverload and now feel better about not owning an iPhone yet. :)