Pumpkin Launching: Time's Person of the Year

Since Time has named me (and You) the person of the year for all the great videos we have uploaded, I thought I'd better do my part, so here is a video of Andy's Halloween party:

http://one.revver.com/watch/123185

Yes, that is a trebuchet - we built it the weekend before the party. It is designed to have as much as a 1000 lb counterweight, able to hurl small pumpkins 700 feet! We never achieved the optimal configuration (couldn't get enough weight) but still were hurling pumpkins between 500 and 600 feet...

STOP CALLING ME

And I mean YOU Mr. Candidate! I am SO TIRED of having my phone ring with a recorded message from one candidate or another. DON PERATA YOU JUST LOST MY VOTE. And I am keeping track. Anyone who dares to use an automated message dialing machine to harass me LOSES MY VOTE. Join with me in this campaign. Let's send a message to these idiots that spamming us with phone calls doesn't pay!

Google Enters Another Market (Custom Search)

Everyone on the Internet fears the day that Google will enter their market. Today the fear was tangible for Rollyo and Swicki. The Financial Times reported that Google will launch tomorrow (Tuesday) "...a customisable search engine that users can carry on their own blogs and other websites..." and compares the new service to Rollyo.

Matthew Ingram carries the photo of a shark on his post about this development. Ingram points out that when Google entered the calendar market, competitor Kiko gave up and sold themselves. He asks whether or not this was the right decision -- pointing to Paul Graham's post at the time "Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile."

I find myself agreeing with Paul and Rex Hammock puts his finger on it when he writes:

There’s a social networking aspect of Rollyo that probably won’t be a part of the Google product, however the Google product will likely offer publishers, including bloggers, an instant way to monetize narrow search in the Adsense program they’re already participating in.

For all of the things that Google has done right in technology, they have done very little well in the category of social. It isn't too late for them to learn but if history is any guide, they will miss the importance of the social network in search as well.

And frankly having a strong competitor forces you to do the two things which you most need to do in any case when you are a small business -- innovate constantly and be 500% better than your larger competition. Then Google can educate the market about why the market needs your product and then you can deliver on the market's expectations. That is what YouTube did.

Please help with your critique

Stop what you are doing.

Click on this link to the Personal Bee home page:

http://www.personalbee.com

Then email or comment on this message with your thoughts about what we are doing right and wrong. Tell me, from looking at the home page, what business you think we are in. Tell me how you would use this and how you would get others to use it...

thanks!

Ted

Diebold Delivers Georgia for Republicans

In a follow up to his story on the 2004 election, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen," Robert Kennedy brings us, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, specific details on how Diebold has rigged voting in Georgia, with the confessions of a Diebold employee, Chris Hood. "Will The Next Election Be Hacked," is a frightening article that shows exactly how far some corrupt politicians are willing to go to insure that they keep control of our government out of the hands of the people. Folks, our democracy is in danger.

Thailand Coup Special Report

This is the kind of thing I think the Bee will evolve to do very very well...

Thailand Special Report

Shake Rattle And Roll!

We spent the second quarter of 2006 testing the original "beta" concept site for the Personal Bee. We spent the summer implementing everything we had learned. Now we are ready and have released the Bee to the world.

http://www.personalbee.com

You Can Be A Media Mogul

The idea is simple. Anyone one the world can create their own news site. You choose the topic. You choose the content sources. You brand your site. You decide which stories are important and which to remove... You are the master of your topic domain and can build a base of subscribers into a media empire.

Enjoy the Bee. Send your comments and suggestions!

Ted Shelton, CEO
The Personal Bee, Inc.
tshelton @ personalbee.com

Bush Administration Immune from Whistleblowers...

Posted without comment for your consternation:

On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:

Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures.

The rest of the post on the terrific blog Effect Measure

Got Voice?

For the past few weeks I have been testing a new service, GotVoice, from a company based in Kirkland Washington with an interesting idea -- how can you profit from the stupidity of the phone company? Now perhaps that isn't the way that company executives in Kirkland would describe their strategic plan, but its hard not to look at them and think, "this is yet more evidence of how stupid US telecommunications companies are."

The idea is simple (too simple, you'd think). How can I have access to my home and cell voice mail from the web and through email? If we had telephone companies that knew how to build services that customers wanted, this wouldn't even be a question. But there is NO innovation going on at the phone company (fill in your favorite one, or AT&T if you are reading this after they have bought everyone else). Thus companies like GotVoice can come along and fill in the niche.

Here's how it works -- You sign up for an account with GotVoice (basic service is free, but added features are available at $4.95 and $9.95 a month) and give them your phone company, phone number, and voicemail "PIN" -- they will then place a call on a regular basis to your voice mail box, record your messages, and send you an email letting you know you have a message (or email you the message as an MP3 with a premium plan).

But this is absurd! Why can't the phone company simply email me the message? Why do I need a third party to glue voice mail and email together? Perhaps someone in the finance department of AT&T found a study conducted in the early 1990s which said that none of their customers wanted voice mails in their email... or maybe they have a trial of voicemail to email right now but they are only rolling it out in 3 small test markets over the next two years... or maybe they don't actually care at all about their customers and never think about introducing new products that we actually want!

In the meantime, Got Voice?

Future of Warfare

Hope that you never meet Crusher. Watch this video to see what I mean. This is a robot. Entirely autonomous, programmed to get itself from point A to point B, and capable of "aggressive" behavior -- especially if it has weapons (which this one doesn't). Even without weapons, I wouldn't want to be chased by one of these... Of course sophisticated robotics will have military applications before they have civil ones.

How Republicans Plan to Steal 2006

Salon has published an interesting review of the six states where Republicans have schemed to "suppress" votes by traditional Democratic voters. Here is the article -- "Salon's Shameful Six" -- Here is an excerpt:

Opinion polls show that a majority of the public wants a Democratic Congress, but whether potential voters -- black and Latino voters in particular -- will be able to make their voices heard on Election Day is not assured. Across the country, they will have to contend with Republican-sponsored schemes to limit voting. In a series of laws passed since the 2004 elections, Republican legislators and officials have come up with measures to suppress the turnout of traditional Democratic voting blocs. This fall the favored GOP techniques are new photo I.D. laws, the criminalizing of voter registration drives, and database purges that have disqualified up to 40 percent of newly registered voters from voting in such jurisdictions as Los Angeles County.

Here are the six states that Salon calls on the carpet: Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio. What are people doing about it?

DNC Announces Expanded National Voter Protection Effort

Brennan Center Election Reform Resources

Common Cause Election Reform Agenda

Shameful Behavior (Your Tax Dollars At Work)

At the risk of becoming the target of government investigations myself, let me now go on the record as saying that, if these reports are true, our government is engaged in the worst kind of anti-democratic behaviour, activities I thought reserved for dictators (or the Nixon Whitehouse). Yes, I am talking about the latest ACLU report "The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California." The Berkeley Daily Planet has a story here which details a local incident on the UC Berkeley campus:

The local incident featured in the report was an April 2005 demonstration at UC Berkeley, sponsored by Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, aimed at military recruitment on campus.

The incident was described in an April 21, 2005, Department of Defense Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) report released to the ACLU by the Department of Defense following a freedom of information request and subsequent lawsuit.

The information released describes the demonstration—the “incident type”—as “specific threats,” and describes the subject as “direct action planned against recruiters at University of California at Berkeley.”

The source, whose name has been redacted from the released report, is described as “a special agent of the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The full ACLU report can be found here: http://aclunc.org/surveillance_report/

I hope you will join me in supporting Jerry Brown as the next Attorney General for the state of California. Given the folks that currently control our national government, a strong liberal California AG may turn out to be suprisingly important for the future of Democracy in this country.

Participatory Consumption

The last couple of times I was listening to NPR on the radio I got angry. Why? Because I had a question, or a comment, or information about the discussion underway and there was no effective way to join the conversation. I thought about this and realized that since having converted my reading habits almost entirely to blogs I have been retraining my consumption habits from passive to participatory. I now expect to be able to leave a comment at the end of an article, or email the author to ask a question. I expect media consumption to be participatory! What a strange expectation...

The Evidence for Global Warming

David Isenberg has done a tremendous job of adding value to a recent (great) article in the New York Times about global warming -- he has gone through the article and created links to all of the sources to which the article refers. All in all it is a compelling and worrisome picture of an earth in turmoil. Worth reading in its entirety. Here is the link: The Evidence for Global Warming.

SD Forum Visionary Awards

98 degrees in Heidi Roizen's backyard but no one is complaining (we had
to wear sweaters last year). And the winners of this year's awards:

Vinton G. Cerf

Louis V. Gerstner

John L. Hennessy

Terry Semel

Quite a line-up this evening. Should be a lot of fun...

My Father's World, My World

In thinking about the death of my father last week, I have been comparing the world my father was born into (my grandfather's world) to the world I was born into (my father's world) and the one my daughter was born into (my world). Each of us as children enjoy and suffer from the decisions that our parents, and our parents' generations have made. And with the resulting "world order."

In 1938, the year my father was born, Hitler marched into Austria and declared that it was now part of the German Reich. Great Britian and France ceded Czechoslovakia to the Germans in a short-sighted attempt to avoid war. And on November 9th, in an event to be remembered as Kristallnacht, Nazis burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish shops, and killed Jews at random. 1938 was a dark year for the world.

The earliest years of my father's childhood were spent in an America fighting world war against governments unafraid of using their power to evil ends. In 1939 Hitler invaded both Czechoslavakia and Poland and entered into the axis agreement with Italy's Mussolini. In 1940 Paris falls and France surrenders to the Nazis. And in 1941, when my father was the age my daughter is today, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.

My father was almost the age my step daughter is now when, in 1945, Germany officially surrendered and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshimi and Nagasaki, accelerating Japan's surrender. At the age of 7, my father had lived his entire life in a world at war. Of course the coming years were dark as well, with the constant cloud of conflict with Stalin's Soviet Union hanging over the head's of his generation as they came into adulthood.

By 1966 when I was born, the pattern of proxy wars between the West and the Soviet Union had been established with a war in Korea mostly behind the US (well... it still isn't entirely behind us) but with war in Vietnam escalating. Despite continued hostility between the world powers, a half century of American dominance in business and technical innovation was well underway by then, making my childhood much different from my father's. Where America had been a relatively weak player in an enormously fragmented and dangerous world, my father came of age in a world where America became a world power.

After first getting a law degree from Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley, my father entered the business world with an inheritence wrested away from his wealthy uncles and grandmother. His father had passed away while he was still a child and he had grown increasingly concerned that his grandmother and uncles would spend all of the money before he received any of it... so he spent it himself instead.

He created a company called Shopper's Plan - one of the first credit card companies in the country. Before we had Visa and Mastercard, stores had "charge plates" that were specific to a particular store or sometimes (rarely) a chain of stores. The 1960s idea of the credit card was a store-independent charge plate. Shopper's Plan could offer this innovation because of the power of this new-fangled invention, the computer.

It was an audacious business idea and it would have required incredible execution to succeed with the (relatively) limited financial resources my father had at his disposal - just a few million dollars (although that was 1960s dollars...). Unfortunately my father was not a terrific business person and the business was soon on the rocks. Complicating things my father got his secretary (my mother) pregnant.

He was already married, with two daughters. Yet he left his wife and began over again with my mother. Within four years he had left my mother and moved on to a string of girlfriends before settling down with his last partner, whom he stayed with until his death (almost 30 years).

to be continued...

World as Symbolic System

For the past 14 hours I have been staring at a computer screen, logged on to various linux systems, moving files, configuring servers, testing... Deeply enmeshed in a particular symbolic system. As I drove home I saw the world with different eyes - the world as its own kind of symbolic system. Some of it imposed by man on the environment (stop sign, crosswalk) some natural (tree, rock). Each blade of grass is a symbol - albeit many without obvious meaning. Like a file you might touch but is devoid of content. Or perhaps each has a very simple meaning like all of those devices in /dev... I should really stop looking at a computer screen about now.

My Father with My Daughter April 2005

My Father with My Daughter April 2005,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

On a trip with the whole family down to Los Angeles a little over a year ago. The only time my daughter ever saw my father. He was still doing OK at that point, although the radiation treatments drained him of strength.

Charles Edward Shelton, RIP

I will be able to write more about this soon. But for now just the news. My father died today of cancer. My sister was with him in the Los Angeles hospital room.

He has been dying for 10 years of cancer - prostate cancer that was diagnosed too late to cure. The cancer spread throughout his body and fortunately for him, medical advances allowed him to live a good life over those 10 years. Only in the last 6 months or so had the disease progressed to far that his quality of life was diminished to the point where living was an enormous burden for him.

So it is with sadness, but also long expectation and relief that the living go on without him. He is survived by his long-time partner, his three daughters and me.

Memory Machine

What we write here may be much less important for who reads it today and more important as a record of our civilization at this time and place. The web is the collective memory of the millions of people that record their thoughts here. Hopefully we will find ways to record these transient memories into some more permanent form so that future researchers will have this treasure trove to draw from when trying to understand the insanity of our current times.