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: December 29, 2014-January 4, 2015

Summary of this week:

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

Monday December 29, 2014

The government of China has blocked gmail from its subjects.

Executives in Silicon Valley have aging parents. Hence, they are starting companies to help with the elderly.

Surprise (not)! Sony's release of "The Interview" online broke all sorts of financial records.

And everyone is streaming the movie. Jump on the bandwagon and make some money too.

Have the 20-somethings lost the ability to repair anything?

After 20 years, the Yahoo Directory closes (five days early).

I can't afford to visit any of these, but here are photos of 20 amazing swimming pools.

The significance of Facebook indexing a trillion posts.

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Tuesday December 30, 2014

The world awakens a bit after Christmas week, but will pass out again tomorrow  night for the new year.

Apple had a big Christmas with more than half the smartphones activated being iPhones.

The price of oil continues to decline. Good news for those who buy it; bad news for the job losses in the industry.

The drop in oil prices is killing the Russian economy. A grumpy Russian population is not good for anyone else.

The Washington Post is about to make a lot of money by selling copies of its content management system. Thank you Jeff Bezos.

Now we are getting somewhere. Former Sony employees are suspect in the great Sony hack.

Microsoft is creating an Internet Explorer replacement.

A look at the web text project that pulls text from the old Internet of 1980–1994.

Good news for a few workers in light manufacturing as sock production resumes in America.

Airline travel is becoming safer.

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Wednesday December 31, 2014

Xiaomi does what the Chinese have done for the last century: make copies of western technology.

I seems that you can hack into a Mac via the Thunderbolt interface.  At one time,  I/O interfaces were just wires with standard connectors. Now these things are computers running software that  may be vulnerable to hacking and all that fun.

Chromebook users can now run Linux in its own window.

What will Google be researching in 2015?

An engineer gets Quake to run on a digital oscilloscope. So what did you do last weekend?

This engineer turned a scanner into a 143-megapixel camera. So what did you do last weekend?

Samsung will have a MacBook Air competitor in January. The specs are better than the Air.

Seth Godin on the proper and improper use of PowerPoint. Excellent.

It seems that the Android hardware business isn't profitable.

"Email and the internet are deemed the most important communications and information tools among online workers." So says the latest research.

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Thursday January 1, 2015

Happy New Year. That is of course if you use the arbitrary calendar like most of us do. There is little to say about the folly of all this "new beginning" bantor.

2014 was a good year for Chrome OS and the Chromebooks.

We are currently debating nerd entitlement and the social loneliness of being a nerd. Many of us had rough childhoods—many of us, and "rough" came in many different forms. Everyone we meet has deep-seated troubles—everyone. Those troubles are easy to find if you want to probe. Those troubles change all our wonderful plans for endeavors into improbables.

Has the era of social media come and gone?

This Comcast customer spent four hours cancelling his account. I wonder if simply not paying the bills would send a message.

Google to move 1,000 jobs into Colorado. The locals are worried about what all these rich techies will do to housing prices.

Security hackers earned $50K from Google for finding problems.

Samsung shows a curved-display, all-in-one PC.

LG has a 34" curved display with features tailored for game playing.

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Friday January 2, 2015

If you have an older Mac, you can replace the parts and make it much better.

A little device that chirps when you are driving poorly. A great idea, but I don't think many people are going to buy it.

The rich kids of Instagram continue to live in some other universe.

2/3s of cancer is caused by bad luck—a mutation of genes that simply happens sometimes. Of course that leaves 1/3 of cancer from being around the wrong stuff, and 1/3 is a big number.

The government of India is blocking web sites due to ISIS threats.

Google, Comcast, the FCC, and utility poles. A mess from Washington DC.

The danger of assuming things about programmers and engineers. Just because someone is excelling at something when you walk in the room doesn't mean that something defines their life. There is much more to each person than can be stated in five words or less.

Marriot Motels talks about why it wants to block personal WiFi hotspots in its locations. This is simple. You are on their premises, so they decide what happens. If you don't like their policies, stay in another place.

Happy New Year in Europe with new, higher Internet taxes.

Attendance at movie theaters hits a 19-year low. Bad economy, too many choices to view a movie, it all adds up.

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Saturday January 3, 2015

Google found a security holes in Windows, MS didn't fix it, so Google disclosed it to everyone. There comes a point when competitors help one another by finding problems that they stop helping one another when the other party doesn't take advantage of the help—or something like that.

Some good ideas here for personal technology in 2015.

The American government has sanctioned the North Korean government for the Sony hack. Persons living in both countries yawn.

Twitter brings out "While You Were Away" to select users.

Computing life in North Korea and the Red Star 3 OS (an OS X clone).

Our young are turning to AirDrop to share photos instead of Instagram and SnapChat.

A more anti-immigration tech worker side of the argument. This one stresses that tech companies have illegally worked to lower wages in the past. Why should American tech workers trust those in charge?

This story is all over the Internet, so it must be important: our FCC will vote on Net Neutrality in February.

Looking forward to CES 2015: self-driving cars and small improvements on everything else.

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Sunday January 4, 2015

Believe it or not, our nation has a Cheif Technology Office. Her big challenge so far is to remove floppy disks from the White House. This is not a joke. This is how bad and wasteful our government conducts our business.

Seagate announces new harddrives: a really thin portable model, a wireless model, and personal cloud solutions.

Acer shows the world's first Chromebook with 15" screen. Companies are drifting away from the inexpensive idea of the Chromebook. They should cost $200, not $400 and up.

Apple is showing art in its retail spaces. I like that idea and wish more retailers would do the same.

Finding three words to guide the next year or moment or two.

The trend in self-publishing for money is down. So what do we do now?

One path to becoming a full-time writer. It is a lot of hard work.

This post examines the maybe coming trend of online magazines and writing articles for them.

In knowledge work, like writing, you can do a day's work in 90 minutes and a week's work in a day.

One writer's travails with writing, publishers, self-publishing, and ghost writing.

Writing a good short story and having it published somewhere.

Beware the hyperbole of self-publishing. It is hard work with no guarantee of any income.

Some sources of information on what to charge people for your writing services.

Some platforms to easily create an online portfolio of your writing.

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