Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Tivo Love

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So last night I sat down in front of the TV and flicked on Tivo to be greeted with a screen message saying that Tivo had added some new features in the last update.  So I check it out and here’s what I found:

  • Games from Yahoo! – There’s a marble game that’s kind of like Tetris (I’m already addicted) and another game loosely based on Scrabble.  How will I ever find time to watch TV?
  • Streamed radio broadcasts from an unbelievable number of radio stations (I think there are podcasts too, but I’m not sure).  The stations are organized by genre and I’ve only had time to check out the "Alternative" folder but I found quite a few college stations there that should be fun to listen to.  My favorite was the station that had the tag line: "Maine’s ONLY Alternative Rock Station."  Who knew?
  • Rocketboom!  Yup, you can subscribe to the groundbreaking V-Cast, or video podcast or whatever they’re calling it, and it is saved to your Tivo watch list to be viewed at your leisure.

Feels like Christmas in March.  Now if they will get that deal with Netflix going I’ll be a happy camper.  Speaking of Netflix the Greensboro News & Record has an inside look at Netflix’s Greensboro distribution facility.

**Update** Tivo does indeed have Podcasts, lots of them, and it even allows you to put in your own URLs if you don’t find one you like.  Over lunch, just for kicks, I listened to one from someone (no idea who) about cities coming back from disasters.  Fascinating.  At this point my Tivo-love knows no bounds.

Birders Should Be Recruited for War?

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Okay, the title refers to the war on the H5N1 virus (Avian Flu virus), but I figured it was a little more provocative this way.  There’s an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune (found via Loose Wire) about the fight against the avian flu and how the spread of the virus shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone since it is following known migratory patterns.  The author, Laurie Garrett, suggests that government officials should recruit birders to the cause:

One of the best untapped resources in this epic battle against
influenza is bird-watchers, who are among the most fanatic hobbyists in
the world. The major bird-watching organizations and safari clubs ought
to work with the World Health Organization and OIE, the World
Organization for Animal Health, to set up Web-based notification sites,
where birders could report sightings of groups of dead birds, and the
movements of key migrating species.

Until a little over a year ago I wouldn’t have paid this any attention because, quite frankly, I didn’t know any birders.  Now I do and I’m finding that the birding community is as fanatic as the author describes. What makes this a particularly good idea is that birders are freakishly attentive to detail and to logging the birds they see, where they see them and how often they see them.  That makes them perfect for this effort.  As long as we don’t ask them to get in front of a camera (these aren’t typically extroverted people from what I’ve heard) the author’s plan should work swimmingly.

Mother’s Day Gift?

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Shotgunshell_chairSee that chair to the left?  It’s made with shotgun shells and besides looking quite interesting the brass of the shells is supposed to provide a very pleasant massage effect (more info here).

I’m considering this as a mother’s day gift, the irony of which will be appreciated by all in our family.  You see when it comes to guns my Mom makes Cindy Sheehan look conservative  by comparison.  My brother and I weren’t allowed to have toy guns, although exceptions were made for water guns.

I’ve taken the opposite approach with my boys: they have a gazillion toy guns and my oldest has an air rifle.  He also tromps around the house in combat boots and cammies, and has decided that he’ll make his fortune designing tanks, helicopters and armed Hummers. Actually his drawings are quite good and he’s pricing them below a million since he’s done pricing research online and has figured out that at $750,000 he’d be severely undercutting the competition. I don’t have the heart to rain on his parade with things like production costs, but my heart is all a-twitter at my budding little entrepreneur.  I’m a little concerned that I might have bred a mercenary, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes. You’ve heard of grandchildren being a grandparent’s revenge?  Well I’ve turned this one on its ear haven’t I?

Anyway, back to the chair.  I might get it even if I don’t give it to Mom (she’d break into hives if she ever actually sat in it).  You see I have this pathological fear of guns, what with the childhood brainwashing, and I’m trying to break myself of it with my own weird immersion therapy.  A couple of years ago I shot skeet while on vacation (got two with one shot I’ll have you know) and I figure if I use this chair at my desk I’ll continue my de-programming.  This might also help increase my masculinity score on the PersonalDNA test I took yesterday.  I’ll keep you posted.

Carolina-Duke: It’s Great Being in Carolina

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After my last post about my declining interest in sports I better come out with another sports-positive post.  The one sport I still get really juiced for is college basketball and there’s no better place to live to satisfy that jones than in North Carolina.  This week is particularly good because we have the end of the ACC regular season and we have Carolina/Duke playing on Saturday.

In anticipation of that Ed Cone has continued a debate about the ACC Coach of the Year that started over at Patrick Eakes’ blog and includes references to a column in the W-S Journal by John Delong. Ed’s arguing for Roy Williams at UNC and I’m agreeing with Delong (not in all the details however) in supporting Coach K at Duke.  Since I’m a Wake fan (and NC State after that) I feel that I’m a little more objective than all the UNC partisans, but then I would thin that wouldn’t I? Either way it’s really fun stuff.

Quick aside: One thing I’ve noticed since moving to NC is that while much of the country dislikes Duke, all non-Duke fans in NC seem to have a special level of hatred for that program.  Seriously all Carolina, NC State and Wake fans can agree on one thing: they hate Duke. 

I do understand what big business that college basketball is, which you would think would put me off like the crass, greedy nature of other sports has, but there’s still something wonderful about watching very talented athletes who aren’t yet as polished as their professional brethren.  And I think the passion of the coaches, players, students and alumni give the games a special atmosphere.  That comes through pretty clearly in the debate at Ed’s place.

Holy Cow…A Positive Sports Story

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I’ve always been a sports junky, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve begun to lose interest.  It isn’t that I find the sports themselves less interesting it’s that I find the athletes less compelling and quite frankly I think ESPN has killed the sports star.

But just when I think I’m ready to throw in the towel I read stories like this one that ran in the Washington Post and was posted by bookofjoe. It is nice to know that even in the over-hyped and completely crass events like the Winter Olympics a flicker of that which can make sport majestic still appears. Here’s a sample:

Sara Renner was skiing the cross-country race of her life when she looked down at her pole and saw it had snapped.

She flailed and struggled uphill as the field passed her in seconds.

And then something happened, maybe the most serendipitous, skin-tingling moment of the 20th Winter Games.

Another pole.

Out of nowhere.

Given to her by a person she would call "my mystery man."

Renner was back in the team sprint relay final, trying for her first medal in three Olympics, thanks to a stranger.

The stranger turned out not to be Canadian.

Bjornar Hakensmoen is the Norwegian cross-country coach.

His skier had just passed Renner and was now in medal contention.

He didn’t think twice about helping a competitor.

"Winning is not everything in sport," Hakensmoen said.

"What win is that, if you achieve your goal but don’t help somebody when you should have helped them?"

Hakensmoen is genuinely surprised people even want to talk to him about his deed.

"I was just helping a girl who was in big trouble. If you saw her, you would do the same."

Sadly I can’t picture Bonds, Sosa, Iverson, Jordan, Kobe, Gretzky, Lemieux, Manning, Gruden, Coach K, Larry Brown, Roy Williams, Gibbs, McEnroe, etc. doing the same.  Can you?

Benevolent Inventor?

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There’s a neat little personality test out there called PersonalDNA.  It’s a little like the Myers/Briggs but it utilizes new web technologies that allow you to use ranking sliders and charts instead of answering multiple choice questions.  What’s really different about this one is that you can invite your friends and family to evaluate you using the same test.  In other words instead of answering the questions about themselves they answer the questions as they see you.  Could be creepy, but I think it could also be really informative.

I took the test and it says that I’m a "Benevolent Inventor."  Here’s a link to my full report. I have to say that the one thing that bothers me in looking at my 13 personality traits was when I saw the "femininity" and "masculinity" scores.   According to this 60% of the 3200 people who have taken the test have scored a lower "femininity" score than me and only 52% have scored a lower "masculinity" ranking.  Does this mean I’m some kind of girly-man?  Is this why I really don’t want to see Brokeback Mountain?

I’m going to invite some people I respect to evaluate me as well, and hopefully I’ll have my fears put at ease.

Go here if you want to take the test yourself.

XM Rolling Out a Way-Cool Feature

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The new wave of XM Radios coming on the market offer MP3 recording capability which is cool because it allows you to record your favorite XM stations and then listen to them on the road, while working out, etc. Now they’re going one step better: they are adding a button that when pressed "bookmarks" a song that you like and the next time the radio is connected to your computer it will automatically buy and download the song via Napster.

This is the kind of concept I can see working for a lot of online companies down the road and not just from XM, but since XM is doing this already let’s extend that thought process.  Say XM starts a "Great Authors" channel and they have interviews and book readings with authors and they enable you to buy the book through Amazon with one click of a button.  Pretty cool huh?  Same concept could work for advertisers (some XM stations do have advertising), but that probably makes too much sense for most advertising agencies.

Billy Looks at the Port Thing

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I highly recommend you go over to Billy the Blogging Poet’s site and take a look at some of the info he’s dug up re. the now infamous deal to let a UAE controlled company buy a company that will manage some of the most important ports in the US.  Ends up there’s a lot more than six ports involved, and terrorism is probably not the greatest worry here.

I’ve said this on other peoples’ blogs, but I wanted to go on the record here: I’m really surprised that we allow any of our critical infrastructure (ports, airports, depots, pipelines, etc.) to be owned or managed by foreign entities.  The biggest shock to me isn’t that a UAE-owned country is being allowed to do this, but that ANY foreign-owned company is being allowed to do this.

You might think this is isolationist.  Not at all, as I see no need to cut trade with other countries but for goodness sakes lets keep the keys to the henhouse in our own pockets.  And to put the shoe on the other foot if I were living in the UAE I wouldn’t want an American company managing my ports.

Further Proof That Cars Are Not an Investment

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1milferrariA dude named Stefan Eriksson crashed a $1 million Ferrari Enzo on the Pacific Coast Highway and literally split it in half (see picture).  He claimed he was only a passenger and that the driver was a guy he only knew by the name of "Dietrich" but the cops were suspicious.  And rightly so since according to this LA Times article the guy was alleged to have been convicted of counterfeiting in Sweden.  Oh, and he was top exec at failed game-maker Gizmondo.

Who Needs the Military Industrial Complex?

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Tank
Joe over at Joe Write points to a tank for sale on Amazon.com and he rightly recommends reading the comments at the bottom.  Very entertaining.

Me, I’d love to get one of these, grab some buddies, stock the beer, attach a coop filled with quail to the top and then park it in front of the Veep’s ranch, "Fuddville" during his next hunting trip.  When he comes out one of us will shout "Pull!" over the tank’s insane sound system and then let the quail go.  As pellets bounce harmlessly off our tank we’ll laugh hysterically as all the birds fly away unharmed to freedom.

BTW, I’m amazed no one picked up on the idea that based on his hunting prowess we’re very lucky that the Veep didn’t serve in Vietnam.