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: 4-10 September, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday September 4, 2017

Today is Labor Day in the US, and no one seems to know what or how that means.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology still has no members. And yet the sun rises each day. Hmmm.

Junk calls, robo calls, I thought we outlawed these things.

Wikipedia is so successful that it has to delete 400-500 pages a day. Hard work, but it ensures that success doesn't breed failure.

"the heart and soul of a thriving enterprise is the irrational pursuit of becoming irresistible."—Seth Godin

It appears that Tim Cook can introduce products that make gazzilion$$ just like Jobs could.

Instagram has a security hole, and millions of users' information is up for sale.

Demographics, the aging poplulation, the young become older each day, and job layoffs.

Facial expression recognition advances. See my short story on the topic.

A few brilliant school teachers are becoming stars. Intellectual property, conflict-of-interest, and all that.

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Tuesday September 5, 2017

Folks, pay attention to Hurricane Irma. It could affect everyone from Mexico to Maine.

Ars Technica has a long, in-depth review of Android 8.0 Oreo.

The follies of censorship and AI and labeling toxic comments and fake news.  The eye of the beholder or something.

A call for the big tech five or six to "give back" to the rest of us. Such calls are well meaning, but usually misdirected.

Beats (Apple) updates its wireless, noise-cancelling headphones with an Apple processor and better performance.

Xiaomi releases the Mi A1 Android phone mostly to an Asian market.

DACA: the rule of law and the children of criminals (yes, if you break the law you are a criminal).

It is back-to-school time, and Seth Godin provides excellent thoughts to consider.

Hillary Clinton, of all people, endorses a fact-checking site Verrit.

Facebook just paid $600million to stream sports—not the NFL, Indian Cricket.

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Wednesday September 6, 2017

Different schedule today, so no Internet viewing.

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Thursday September 7, 2017

Uber Engineering describes their own Michelangelo: their machine learning platform.

Silicon Valley tech money leans liberal left, unless you mention labor unions and such.

Silicon Valley tech CEOs vow to defend illegal aliens in court.

Apple and Amazon, with lots of cash, want to buy the 007 franchise.

Google greatly improves its Street View camera and image processing system.

Huawei passes Apple as the world's number two smartphones seller.

Hurricane Irma grows and warrants everyone's attention.

Lenovo will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the IBM laptop with a ThinkPad25.

Linux Kernel 4.13 is officially released.

It appears that the Russian government bought ads on Facebook during the last election. So?

The fading political influence of Silicon Valley, examplified by Google.

Zello Walkie Talkie: most popular app in the path of hurricanes. Send text messages. They will get through.

All these smart assistants, Siri, et el, can hear frequencies people can't and can be hacked right in front of us.

SanDisk shows new base units for iPhones for storage backup and battery charging.

No cause for panic, but the world's power grid has been hacked. Don't connect it to the Internet. How complex is that?

Mark Zuckerburg continues his I'm-not-running-for-President presidential campaign.

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Friday September 8, 2017

Amazon to build another US headquarters with this one costing $5Billion. Location yet to be named.

Atlassian releases Stride—its competitor to Slack.

A $240Million deal produces the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Google Drive is going away in December. I'll have to switch Google's replacement.

Americans continue our move to social media sites for our news.

Equifax is hacked. Out foes credit information on 143million of us. And Executives there sold their stock before releasing the news.

Following Facebook's lead, Twitter goes hunting for Russians in their ad sales. Funny, these guys sold ad space to people they didn't know. Are they repsonsible for their own ignorance? And how about all the foreign influence Bill Clinton sold while renting rooms at the White House? Oh well, politics.

SpaceX launches our Air Force's X-37B space plane.

Richard Branson demonstrates that for a little money, surprisingly little, you can build home that survives hurricanes. This is important folks. We build houses as cheap as we can. Then the wind blows the roof off and ruins everything.

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Saturday September 9, 2017

The Commonwealth of Virginia is removing voting machines that are full of security holes. Will they hold re-elections for all past elections using these machines? I doubt it.

The Equifax security foul up: half the adults in the US are affected. This is just plain awful.

The US workforce is smaller. Use of pain killer opioids is up. Causation or correlation?

Samsung must have pent-up demand as pre-sales for its next smartphone break all the records.

Mazda invents a compression-ignition, gasoline-fueld engine. This is revolutionary.

Something for the home office (maybe) Philips 49" curved display $1,100.

Facebook is plagued with security holes leading to fake "likes" and networks and all such nonsense. A lot of people use Facebook. Perhaps one day the curtain will be opened to reveal things we really don't want to see.

Our government's hurricane forecasting is pretty bad when compared to others. We need more money! How about more brains.

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Sunday September 10, 2017

Hurricane Irma beats all the "computer models" (what happened to human weather forecasters?) and goes westward.

Jerry Pournelle died Friday. Science fiction, technology, political science, blog writer. He wrote a blog post the day before he died. I will have more words later.

Kohls partners with Amazon; Home Depot partners with Google. Who is next? The NFL and Microsoft?

This history and pitfalls of using the Social Security Number as the universal identifier.

How volunteers, a.k.a., civilians, rescued Houston flood victims with the aid of a Walkie Talkie app. FEMA? Who is that?

Born with a talent? "We're all capable of huge leaps of insight and empathy if we're willing to go to work to learn how."—Seth Godin

Do you write everyday? Do you breathe everyday?

Do you want to write? Then write today. "As soon as..." never comes. Don't wait.

One writer's moves into and out of freelance writing with advice (mostly financial). Good piece.

Writing for pay and writing for free. The trouble is, there are enough of us who do enough writing for free so that fewer of us can write for pay.

This is a good piece. "And the biggest thing most writers aren’t willing to do is invest in themselves." "Pro writers invest in themselves, over and over and over again, in whatever ways are required to get to where they want to go."

Story mistakes.

I like this idea: the novel journal. A journal full of scribbles and feelings that you write before you start writing the novel each day.

Take care if someone is paying you to write for them; they may not want to hear about all of their grammar problems.

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