Busy busy

Yikes, this week just seem to spin by at light speed!

Here's what I've been up to besides the obvious:

- Motorcycle battery died, gotta bring in the charger
- Been working on an RFID science project to unlock the office doors wireless using these USB gadgets
- Working on a server based relay trigger to open our front door from a hotkey anywhere on our LAN using this gadget and some home cooked software
- Got a new propeller and some power cable to upgrade my boat sound system.
- Got a few hundred pounds of sandbags to ratchet up the boat wake another foot or so
- Got a million candle light and portable lcd monitor for a submersible underwater camera (wonder what's down at the bottom of the lake?)
- Got the goods to hook up my portable MP3 player to my boat sound system, busting out the soldering iron this weekend.

Lots of hardware hacking science projects going on, stoked about the weekend, pics coming soon.

later friends, hang loose........

Have a look...

at this photographers pictures of Asian happenings.

Another weekend another propeller

What a weekend, with tropical weather and lots of lake time it seems like I just spent a week in South America. So what if I thrashed another propeller, what's 400 bucks anyways (ouch!!)? Lets see, Friday was a bit blown out so we did some evening rides. Saturday was baby day with a boat load of people including MC (pregnant) and the 1 month old baby named Neige. It's cool that Marc and Theleme bring their baby out everywhere, the baby seems to like it. Marc is an ex-pro wakeboarder and snowboarder and he was going huge and pulling every kind of flip/invert in the book. I'll get some pics up soon. That brings us to a trip down the river where my boat loaded with 8 people, a baby, a few hundred pounds of sandbags and a few thousand pounds of ballast scraped the rocks and smashed yet another propeller on the way to a beach party. Luckily my prop still was good enough to ride for the rest of the weekend. Which brought us to Sunday, perfect weather, no wind and few boats around to compete for flat water.

Gotta love summer, especially when the weather is perfect. Pics to come soon.

Fire in Babylon

Yesterday, the company next door to mine had a fire in their office. This is a little scary considering we're in an office tower. The strange thing about it is that the fire alarm went off and then there was a general announcement that they were checking into it. A few minutes later they came back and said that it was a false alarm. Meanwhile, my office is smelling like sulfer and smoke and our corridor is full of water from the sprinkler. Why the cover up?

The company next door sells rice and they had this glass display full of rice in their lobby with what looks like a lamp full of rice. I guess the rice caught on fire or something because there was wet rice everywhere and let me tell you, burning rice doesn't smell too good.

Luckily the sprinklers in my office didn't go off because I'd be pissed to say the least.

I'm out of town tomorrow and then up north for the long weekend, talk to y'all next week.

Check out this costa rican toad with blue eyes. Reminds me of my fourth grade teacher. 

Here's a pic of my boat just before going into the water this year. 2002 Super Air Nautique with a 425HP python engine. I need to get a higher torque prop and upgrade some of the power cabling this weekend. 

Brazillifiaction

Check this out, the Brazilian gov't started subsidizing cane sugar ethanol production in the 80's after the big OPEC crisis in the 70's and then built a nationwide ethanol distribution infrastructure. Today they are pretty close to being self sufficient with their own internal gas/ethanol infrastructure and they pay half of what we pay for gas. In north America, we can't grow can sugar like that but corn, sugar beets and by-product fermentation is all within reach.

http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0616brazil16-ON.html

I had a dozen chicks on my beach last weekend. No, it's not what you're thinking. The nice thing about going up north every weekend is you get to see stuff like this. Last weekend, a duck with a dozen chicks hung out on my beach. Here they are taking a nap under the watchful eye of their mom. 

The ducks weren't the only ones procreating, my friends Marc and Theleme just had a baby girl two weeks ago and came wakesurfing with the little critter last weekend. 

Stevie (J) Wonder

No, not the guy the guy with the shades, I'm talking about Steve Jobs. First off, he's seems like an egomaniac prick from everything I've read and from all I've heard from ex-Apple people. Second, this guy is both a genius and insanely lucky. Pixar and their conquest of Disney was simply brilliant, reviving Apple with new boxes and gadgets was brilliant as well. Now Steve has cosied up to Intel as part of his next party trick.

So what exactly is he up to? Since day one, Apple has depended on profit margins from their hardware to subsidize their low unit volumes. This is the BMW business model, even with more affordable models, they still miss the Walmart/Dell price points. This year when Steve released the mini-Mac at a near-Dell price point, he threw everyone for a loop. He's within striking distance of a price point that Dell/Microsoft can't reach without eating major margins which really hurts.

These days Steve has 50% of his revenue and profit coming in effortlessly from iPods so he can take some serious risks with the old computer business and not have to sweat too much. He can even afford to make it a loss leader altogether to pull his next hat trick.

What's he up to? My guess would be that he's being egged on by Larry Ellison who's an old friend that always told him that the Internet will kill off personal computers as we know it. I'd say that Steve will drop the price of x86 Macs to $299 and give a few million away to seed the market. He'll take his lessons from iTunes and make his own office suite run on distant Cupertino servers. He'll tie his own Internet servers in to the $299 boxes to rent you storage and community space you need to share with your friends in the office and around the world. He'll pull more and more functionality onto the back end and make the front end boxes cheaper, cooler and disposable. And he'll do it well.

To what end?

Apple/Google/Oracle all want the same thing, all do things the same way and should eventually merge/partner/fight to become the next BIG thing. No dominant empire has lasted forever, not the Romans, not the Greeks, not the Huns, not the British, not the Spanish, not GM, not IBM, and certainly not Microsoft.

My wildest guess would be that Apple and Oracle would merge and take over Google. However there are way too many alpha males in those tribes for this to ever happen smoothly.

Let's see how this goes. And for the record, I hate using OS/X and still think the iPod is gay. My left brain was likely misplaced at some afterhours party in '92.

Britney Spears Sex Tape

Paris had one and finally Brit's got one too.

2 outta 3 ain't bad

Kendra won, Michael is free

but our government didn't fall.

I was close.

Do you have coco-bum?

Maybe you need this. I'm guessing this is what MJ uses on his face.

And these 'tards are really funny.

And this flower is the worlds biggest and it's blooming any day now. This is probably the dullest video you have ever seen but the cool thing about it is that they have a 1.5mbps multicast stream that actually works. OK so I can only get the unicast stream but it's cool to see somebody pushing technology pretty hard and actually getting away with it.

Yeah, I'm still alive.

These days I seem to have no time for anything other than the bare essentials - working and socializing. Yes, I am still alive and actually starting to have a life again. Here's a rundown:

Work: Busy as ferk, still living out of boxes since the move and waiting for some swank new furniture - hopefully coming soon. I'm on the hyper caffinated sucrose enriched diet which includes lots of carbonated grain products (coffee and beer for you yobs and perverts).

Play: Lots of wake surfing, the water in Lac Oureau is 70 degrees on the surface and the weather has been great. Lots of ducks, friends, boats and beer but no motocross yet because I'm still pooped from living a bigger life than my body can handle (see the diet above).

Other: Love the weather, miss costa rica, hate looking out the window at the river while my friends are wakeboarding there in the mornings, planning a surf trip in fall blah blah blah.


This site is pretty cool.

Oh yeah, Micheal should walk soon and these guys crack me up.

Beer

If you haven't yet been to the Montreal beer festival, you really should go. It's going on right now at the Windsor station on Peel street. Eight bucks buys you a mug and tickets are a buck a piece. You can get a beer for between two and eight bucks depending on the beer. My favorites were the cognac XO beer and the cranberry cider at the local brewery stand right at the entrance to the outdoor terrace.

Lots of people, lots of ladies, lots of beer. You've gotta love summer in Montreal.

On that note, it's going to be really hot and sunny today and tomorrow so I'm stoked about doing a little wake surfing and mid-lake beer tasting up north.

Some other notes:

Eve, if you're still reading this thanks for the little present. I did get it and got wrapped up in a busy spell so I forgot to thank you. Get your blog back up soon!!