david touve » life

Googly ga ga over airplane decor

david touve — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 22:58:07 +0000

Looks like the inner-wranglings of the brilliant Google boys is beginning to hit the press in slow increments. Courtesy a lawsuit over the “refurbishment” of the 767 Google has chosen for its corporate airplane, court documents reveal such important decisions as who gets what kind of bed and where the hammocks with hang (WSJ- registration required). These are of couse very important decisions to be made when corporate executive travel is concerned.

It gets a bit embarassing when people confuse founding a company for entitlement. They seem to forget that what has been built could not have happened without hundreds, if not thousands of other people.

When headlines are horseshit

david touve — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 02:39:23 +0000

TechCrunch posted a surprisingly controversial story on Flickr’s choices regarding an API so open that competitors might make use of an import/export feature to lure customers. The story itself is a bit mundane – the question of open data existed before Web 2.0. In fact, Its probably time someone squash the idea that Web2.0 inspired the open data revolution. Openness has been a rather important theme in machine space for a rather long time.

What is interesting is the flow of comments on the piece, including a little tete a tete a tete amongst the founders of Flickr, Zoomr and TechCrunch. So far, we have an executive at a publicly traded company (Stewart Butterfield) posting to an open forum:

(1) Discussions of as-yet unimplemented corporate policy.
(2) Critical comments of the editor of TechCrunch, labeling a story as “horseshit”
(3) Passing insinuation that this editor of TecCrunch used to beat his wife

As someone who, like Stewart, was part of a company acquired by a public entity, I reckon he might want to consider more closely the necessity of engaging discussions like this in open forums. Its only a matter of time before the Yahoo! PR people, and corporate suite, get ahold of this conversation.

Its life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness… in that order

david touve — Thu, 11 May 2006 02:46:45 +0000

Google finally launched a search terms interface whereby you can home in on the popularity of the various subjects for which we search, with access to this search data over time. I figured it would be interesting to look into those ideals, imaginations and even simple interests to see which we hold the most dear.

Life, Liberty or the pursuit of Happiness:

Life = blue. Liberty = red. Happiness = yellow

Looks like life comes out on top, by a seemingly wide margin. Of course, Google does not put a scale on the graph, so you are left to wonder just how popular these terms really are.

Heaven or Hell:

Heaven = blue. Hell = red.

Somewhat surprisingly, given all the talk of fire and brimstone these days, heaven still takes the lead. Most research shows we respond better to rewards than punishment, so this ordering of terms seems to support such a premise, from a search perspective.

Sex, Drugs or Rock n Roll:

Sex = blue. Drugs = red. Rock n Roll = yellow.

Seemingly no contest here. Sex comes out on top, literally.

Welcome to my www page

david touve — Thu, 28 Oct 1993 20:58:04 +0000

Since a signal of authenticity within the blogorama is to suggest you have been blogging since the dawn of weblogs, I figured I would signal my legitimacy within this domain by highlighting my first public web sighting, back in 1993, on a Commodore Amiga. So there. As if…

I’ve been online since…

david touve — Fri, 15 Jan 1988 04:06:41 +0000

Thinking back, it seems the first time I went “online” was in 1988 (or 1987). Amiga computer owned by a friend. We dialed up, connected to the network at NU and then chatted with someone who might have been at U of I.

I reckon its hard to take the internet for granted when you remember things once being so simple that all you had was a 14.4 modem, and a terminal prompt.