Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book

Items I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture, and of course Writing

This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it, his Day Book. I encourage you to see Jerry Pournelle's site and subscribe to his services.

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This week: 14-20 August, 2017

Summary of this week:

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday August 14, 2017

Google buys Senosis, a health monitoring company.

Can a "commercial" computer work in space reliably over time? HPE and NASA are about to try.

Fascinating: 91 new volcanoes in Antartica. We don't know as much about this planet as we thought. Climate change folks, pay attention.

Alexander Zverev: tennis finally gets the new face it has desperately needed.

No mistake about it: Game of Thrones is THE news for summer 2017.

Microsoft has quality issues with its new laptops. So it blamed Intel.

Amazon continues to push into the food market. There is money in food and health care as we all eat and want to live.

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Tuesday August 15, 2017

Everyone loves Snap Spectacles, but few people are buying them.

We are too divided, so I will stop talking to you. I guess there is some logic in this that escapes me.

Microsoft wanted to stop others from scraping publicly displayed LinkedIn data. Judge says no.

A smartphone recording video falls 1,000 feet from a plane into someone's backyard. Good it landed lens up.

SpaceX continues to send stuff into orbit and land their launchers for reuse.

Amazon Macie: machine learning to bring cybersecurity to the cloud. A little for HBO and the DNC, but...

Microsoft releases .NET 2.0 technologies.

GoDaddy and then Google push a neo-nazi group off their services. This is not a free speech issue. Free speech may not be prevented by the government, not by private businesses. The neo-nazis can make their own server and such. And once again we stray to the edge of what is censorship. This gets messy very quickly.

The hatred expressed about the marching morons of Charlotsville has surpised me. I am saddened to see so many persons become what they hate.

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Wednesday August 16, 2017

The Ghost open-source blogging and content management system is now released.

MongoDB has filed for IPO.

Amazon Instant Pickup: yet another way to buy more stuff.

Microsoft acqui-hires Cycle Computing to boost its cloud computing technologies.

The next generation of Intel architecture will come and it will be called Ice Lake.

The Chinese government is backing its tech industry with money and regulation of foreign companies. At this time it is working.

I continue to puzzle over recent reactions to freedom of speech and innocent until proven guilty. I don't like what Americans are doing to ourselves. I understand the visceral reaction, but there are those who job it is to stand back and think things through.

Facebook and Reddit ban hate groups. Are they banning the Democratic and Republican parties? They seem to hate a lot these days. How about CNN and Fox News (just to name a few).

Someone seems to understand the Constitution and the founding fathers concept of rights given by the creator.

Everyone seems unhappy that Donald Trump isn't unhappy enough and happy that Barack Obama is happy.  Well, we move on.

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Thursday August 17, 2017

Summer drags on. It seems everyone is waiting for the solar eclipse so we can all have a happy day. Perhaps someone will measure a voltage drop or water pressure surge during the eclipse as everyone leaves their jobs and goes outside to watch.

Someone has a firm grasp of the obvious: raise minimum wage, bring in the machines and toss out the jobs.

Google acqui-hires AIMatter to get a jump on computer vision technologies for mobile. AIMatter makes the Fabby app.

Google enables phone calling from Google Home. OK Google, call my wife...so the old joke begins.

Someone goofs at HBO and the next Game of Thrones episode is out on the Internet.

Apple jumps into entertainment production with a billion $$$. There are now many more but lower paying jobs in entertainment.

Another really bad outcome of the Charlottesville weekend is that industry advisory councils, created to create jobs and help people, have disbanded. People are angry, so let's not help people. I lose the logic in this.

Hackers silence those they hate for hating...or something like that. Again, the logic escapes me. The emotional knee-jerk reaction, that, I understand.

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Friday August 18, 2017

Another hack of our automobiles. This isn't just the expensive top-of-the-line models.

Lenovo has a bad financial quarter as PC sales continue to decline.

Asus releases six new ZenFone model smartphones with multiple lenses on its cameras.

Terrorist in Barcelona runs a van into a crowd and kills 13.

Reddit now has video uploads. I am confused by this as there have been videos on Reddit for years.

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Saturday August 19, 2017

No Internet viewing today as this was a travel day.

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Sunday August 20, 2017

Limited Internet viewing this morning

Another "no duh" that should have happened years ago: coat asphalt with something that reflects vice absorbs heat. Of course you don't do this in Alaska where you want the heat. Let's see if national regulators figure out that last one.

Bill Gates gives $4.6Billion to his own charity. Well, he did give away personal wealth.

Restaurants are figuring out how to use Facebook so we can order food and pay them and all that without any work on their part.

Lots of chatter this week about freedom of speech from persons who don't seem to understand the US Constitution.

I love this: "How to melt your camera shooting the eclipse." No doubt people will be buying new smartphones on the 22nd.

Some instructions that may help if you want to photograph the event.

This is pretty good: 40 ways to market your writing.

How one writer wrote 100,000 words in six months in a blog. One keystroke at a time.

The value of having colleagues as a freelancer.

Should we learn to write and read cursive. Not the beginning of the sentence, "should we learn..." Question answered. Now we debate about how and when cursive is learned.

Freelancers and sick days. If you work for yourself, you must do what you need to stay healthy.

Thoughts on writing creative non-fiction. Not really fiction, but...

Sometimes you have a book or a long piece that you just don't want to finish. Don't throw it away, just put it away, for now.

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