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: 24-30 April, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday April 24, 2017

The people who watch YouTube all day to find and remove the things AI can't do, yet.

How Russian hacking changed from credit cards hacking to government programs. The US has a similar story.

The big three Internet giants of China and their pursuit of foreign markets.

If you read four hours, we call it reading. If you watch all episodes of a TV show four hours, we call it binging.

Uber delays its internal review report of sexual harassment.

Is Google too big? Is it violating anti-trust laws? Does Congress need to break it up?

Does social media make us hate each other? What social media site was Cain using?

American Airlines' flight attendant is tired, stressed, and goes berserk. Of course its on YouTube.

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Tuesday April 25, 2017

No Internet viewing today.

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Wednesday April 26, 2017

Wikitribune: started by Jimmy Wales, it attempts to combine journalists with the crowd checking the facts. Perhaps the problem is that real journalists want to become celebrities. They are generally under-age for what they attempt to do and are little more than fashion models who can read teleprompters. Maybe Wales has something here.

Waymo (Google) is offering free rides in Phoenix in its self-driving minivans.

Marissa Mayer will make a good fortune in the Yahoo-Verizon deal. Good for her. She has worked for much of what she has. Luck had a big role as well. Perhaps she can do good by others with the money.

A court orders Uber to give Waymo (Google) documents in the self-driving technology suit.

LinkedIn hits 500million users. I was an early one.

An Uber engineer commits suicide, and his wife blames Uber and its work culture.

Here come the flying cars, or some maybe reasonable facsimile...

Larry Page has a company that will have a flying vehicle for one person later this year.

Uber claims that in three years it will have a network of autonomous airplanes to ferry people about cities.

Sergey Brin is not-so-secretly building a Zeppelin in San Jose, Ca. in one of the old blimp hangers.

Got $4,999? Get the first 100-megapixel integrated drone imaging platform from DJI (has a Hasselblad).

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Thursday April 27, 2017

FCC non-news: Donald Trump has a different view of regulation from his predecessor.

Deep learning based, black-box medicine: will people accept the absence of explanation?

YouTube Kids now has 8million users. At one time that was a success. Now?

The Amazon Echo Look. You have to watch the video ad—either a zilch or a trillion dollars.

Online shopping, manipulation, the power of information, and lots of profits.

Google wants a campus in Berlin. The locals reject the design.

Kickstarter has distributed $3billion in pledges in eight years.

Expectations for retirement. It has not become a "right" to retire before 60 and still have an income.

Shake your head in disbelief: security theater in the US Senate.

Google has servers up and running in Cuba.

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Friday April 28, 2017

Not much Internet viewing on Friday as I had breakfast with some fine gentlemen. Here are a few things I viewed Thursday evening.

Microsoft and Amazon both have better-than-expected financial quarters. They are both making lots of money on cloud services.

Amazon Web Services is still growing leaps and bounds. Revenue is up 42%.

Google has a better-than-expected financial quarter.

From history—Norm Hatch dies at 96. He was the last Marine living who saw the flag raised at Iwo Jima.

LaCie shows a new Direct Attached Storage device: up to 20 TeraBytes (with a T).

The different income tax rates in the different states. Virginia is in the upper third.

NASA delays the SLS first launch another year. I guess we won't be able to put a person in space by the end of the decade.

Excellent post on self-leading groups of people. Highly recommended if you are a "leader."

Google open Google Classroom to anyone who wants to teach anything in any setting.

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Saturday April 29, 2017

My RSS reader (Feedly) isn't working this morning.

Microsoft's hardware (Surface) had lower-than-expected sales this quarter.

Robots are coming to farms. Some farms claim that no one will work on farms any more.

Planting items in files so that stolen files are easily identifiable. Of course this makes it much more difficult to show that someone stole files if they can remove these items.

This is all over the Internet this morning, so it must be important. Elon Musk's dream of tunnels and cars.

Sony sold 20million Playstation 4 consoles in the past year.

Must see video: time lapse video of the night sky or the cockpit of an airliner.

Interesting paper that shows how Facebook uses the same concepts as information operations in warfare.

Forget self-driving cars; bring the self-driving city buses.

Microsoft tries to push into the education market.

And we end with some fun—the Lego Saturn V rocket.

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Sunday April 30, 2017

Harry Huskey dies at 101. He built some of the first electronic computers in the 1950s.

Censorship is alive and well in Turkey as Wikipedia is blocked.

Now we enter the reactionary phase where people play dirty little tricks on robots—poor defenseless robots. There is no end to what some of us consider "fun." And at this time, much of these tricks are in good fun. I am reminded of "The Monkey Wrench Gang." Let the games begin and all that.

Yes, our government still runs Windows 95. It would be funny, but taxpayers' money goes to Microsoft to maintain these special systems.

Acer shows a new gaming laptop. Pause to note the supercomputer you can carry under your arm all day.

How to build a desktop computer with the latest Nvidia card and install Apple's OS. Hackintosh!

Three stories about book publishing.

One writer lost her smartphone and went a week without one. How that affected her writing.

I was asked, "What tips can you give to someone who wants to write his first book?"
Don’t worry about it, because the first book is just practice. Maybe the first few books. So stop worrying and write your practice book.—Jerry Weinberg (who has written 50 or 60 books)

Beating distractions. This post recommends a little at a time. One minute. Fifteen minutes. And so on. Close the door and everything else.

Some ideas for turning an idea into a story to write.

What people whose advice you heed, and all the others.

The concept of the personal brand for the writer.

Some inspiration to do what you want to do and create. Build. Ship. Repeat. No guarantee of money, though.

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