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Category: General Thoughts

·General Thoughts
The Twelve Year Road

In January of 1998, Netscape — in a last-ditch effort to retaliate against Microsoft's domination of the browser market with its Internet Explorer browser — took to the strategy of open sourcing the source code for their flagship product, Netscape Navigator. And so the Mozilla Project was born, which has since brought the world the Firefox web browser, and the Thunderbird email client (as well a handful of other things).

·General Thoughts
Climategate: a Case Study in How Not to Conduct Research

Sometimes events arrive with a timing that is both serendipitous and uncanny. Only days after my last post, wherein I state a case for the growing importance of referencing the datasets and algorithms used in the distillation of research conclusions, comes a story about leaked correspondence records (email messages) amongst climate researchers working in affiliation with the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

·General Thoughts
Don't Ask Me for My Email Address

These days, anyone organizing competent promotional efforts (events, organizations, themselves, etc) invests various degrees of their attentions to online efforts. One reason for this is economics: efforts to "spread the word" online has the potential to reach more people at the expense of fewer resources and, therefore, less money.

·General Thoughts
Tagging Friends in Facebook Status Updates

I recently discovered a handy little Facebook feature which allows you to tag friends (and Pages) in wall posts. It lets your audience know exactly who you're shouting out (or talking smack) to. So I threw together a quick video introduction to how to use it.

·General Thoughts
The Ballmer Pattern

Ballmer's at it again, idly laughing off Google's Chrome OS ... last thing he laughed off so boisterously was the iPhone, which he claimed had "no chance.

·General Thoughts
The Running Man Prophecy Scorecard

So after a false start a couple of nights ago, I'm finally getting to watching the 1987 Schwarzenegger classic, The Running Man, which I believe it fair to describe as a movie that foretold modern culture's infatuation with so-called "Reality TV". For those unfamiliar with it, the movie is basically Survivor meets ancient Roman gladiatorial event.

·General Thoughts
The Art of the Reveal

The recent media coverage about Palm having a lower-tier WebOS phone in the works — which I've already labled as madness, if true — has gotten me thinking about an old showmanship concept, called the art of the Reveal (or, more simply, the Reveal). It's a technique exploited by writers, directors, comedians, strippers, politicians, and carnies; anyone in the business of organizing a show.