Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 29 April - 5 May, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Marriot moves into home sharing
• Microsoft, Dell, and VMWare partner in the cloud
• Apple reports drop in hardware and rise in services
• FTC to run Facebook?
• Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) dies at 74
• The Russians have a nation-wide Intranet
• Git sites held for ransom
• Adobe doubles the price of Creative Cloud

Monday 29 April 2019

It is Monday. Not much time to view the Internet, and there isn't much to view.

Predictable and predicted: the latest comic book movie breaks all the financial record$$$.

In-ear hearing protection that is easily programmed for the frequency range from which you want protection. I wish I had them over the years. These were made for firearms enthusiasts, but easily apply to many occupations and avocations.

Chris Cox, formerly of Facebook, and "creating progress and motion and buoyancy." Someone had a firm grasp at Facebook. These are the people who built a system that many of us like to use.

Hertz sues Accenture for non-performance on a contract to build a fixed and a mobile web site.

Tuesday 30 April 2019

Samsung is making $400Million a week profit, but that is less than last year.

Demographics and aging. Just read the numbers. In 50 years, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. Time to switch platforms now before the inevitable.

Marriot—the world's largest hotel chain—jumps into the homesharing business. They call it "Homes and Villas."

The succe$$ of the latest comic book movies shows that the movie theater is still a viable option for entertainment.

Microsoft, Dell, and VMWare (owned by Dell) partner in the cloud business. Virtual everywhere. Virtual everything.

Small and steady  income for writers: paid newsletters. Have to look at this. Substack is a company that is supposed to make this easier.

Samsung introduces a televisor that rotates to vertical. The vast majority of smartphone-based content fits this format, so...

Spotify hits 100Million paid subscriber$—double what Apple has.

Anki, who built little robots for kids to play with, is gone, bankrupt, out.

Google joins the list of really smart people to figure out that high-priced smartphones are priced too high.

WeWork joins the list of companies having an IPO and revealing that they lose lots of money everyday. A bust is coming. Losing more money faster is not a viable business model.

20 years ago...Microsoft replaced the roller-ball mouse with the optical one we all use today. Lint and such always clogged the roller balls and jr hi kids stole them from the computer labs to infuriate the adults.

The biggest trend in entertainment is having closed-caption turned on. There are many reasons, with one being that it is better and less intrusive than it used to be.

Wednesday 1 May 2019

Google employees to hold a protest to protest what happened to Google employees when they held a protest. Got that one?

Facebook: If you're having a tough time, change your look. Grow a beard, color and cut your hair, change the order of things on your mobile app.

Facebook continues to evolve its Dating app as it approaches the date when they release it in the US. What could possibly go wrong?

Apple reports its financial quarter: hardware sales down with services sales up. Revenue is about $600+Million every single day.

AMD had a pretty good financial quarter.

Amazon's Managed Blockchain service is now available to everyone.

All the announcements from Facebook's F8 Conference.

Facebook will provide a large amount of data (how else to describe it?) to researchers to determine how it affects elections. Here is an answer: not nearly as much as people want to believe.

The Fedora 30 Linux distribution is released.

Thursday 2 May 2019

Google launches CallJoy. The idea is to help small businesses answer the phone. It may work.

Here comes truckloads of cash from the Saudis and Chinese. Do American businesses take it? Do Americans take what comes with the cash? This is a tough one.

We have all these great tools to communicate and collaborate, but are we using them to generate tournament brackets, draft boards, and argue over the color blue? Focus folks.

An alarming report on what our government, i.e., some of us, are doing to the rest of us (citizens) at our borders. Again, somewhere we goofed and decided that some of us can abuse the rest of us in the name of the best thing to do for all of us. This is bad for all of us.

Let's all party like we work for Facebook. Harmless fun? Let us not be jealous. Some folks at Facebook, and everywhere else, work hard. They just happen to have the budget for fun.

Our Federal Trade Commission wants to run Facebook for the good of us all. Facebook has its problems. Lest we investigate the operations of the FTC, let's slow down a bit.

Coming real soon now, a all-land-based fibre-optic cable connecting Alaska and western Canada to the rest of us.

Friday 3 May 2019

Facebook proudly censors a group of "far-right" persons. Somehow we fell into this world where censorship became a good thing.

Google tells Congress that it spends hundreds of million$$$ on manually reviewing content on YouTube et al to remove violent terrorism content.

The Do It Yourself Masters of Fine Arts: $499. It isn't from a "real college," so you won't get a "real degree," but you probably will have the opportunity for real learning.

Our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must not have much to do as they have been studying injuries per 1,000 rides on electric scooters. Really folks? Isn't there something more important?

Peter Mayhew dies at 74. He was the 7-foot tall actor who wore the Chewbacca costume in Star Wars.

Here is a new one: Americans are upset that money spent on analysis software actually caught persons breaking the law. We would prefer we waste the money on systems that don't work?

A similar one: Law enforcement is using Amazon's facial recognition software to find criminals in the records. Of course it identifies the wrong persons at times. That is why we have humans to check the results.

Facebook has a (no longer) secret plan to build a cryptocurrency.

Blue Origin had another successful test launch and landing. They are behind SpaceX, but moving in the right direction.

The Russians have created the first nation-wide intranet.

This is wonderful: WePark: rent a parking space for the day. Put chairs and tables in it and rent them as office space. People are using the space, not cars. Someone is making money as well.

Saturday 4 May 2019

Let's hear it for Apple: they have restored the Carnegie Library Building in Washington D.C. and put a store plus much else in it. They will never recover the money spent. They have done something for history and the community. Of course the loss is a tax reduction, but still, they didn't have to do this.

Adobe doubles the price $$$$ of its Creative Cloud subscription. I hope they know what they are doing.

Did the Romans build meta-material structures around the Colosseum to protect it from earthquakes? Or perhaps this was all a good, unintended consequence of something else.

Lenovo will release the new ThinkBook line of portable computers for business real soon now. Now $$$ attached yet.

Where the money is. Success at Git brings hackers who takeover sites, delete all the content, and offer to bring it back for a ransom.

Despite all the criticism, the Apple Watch holds a third of the market for whatever a "smart" watch is.

Smart cities or police-state surveillance? Perhaps both. The technology is there. Someone chooses how to use it. Who is that someone?

College and hunger and food insecurity. It seems to be more prevalent than we thought. Or is it anxiety?

Sunday 5 May 2019

When in doubt, levy huge fines on successful American companies. They write it off as a loss and lower their taxes. Wait, what are we trying to accomplish?

Facebook bans "extremists." The President comes to the defense of the extremists. It is all about who gets to write the adjectives.

More ups and downs of the use of technology in law enforcement. Technology can HELP find needles in haystacks. A person, with judgement, must decide at some point.

Some advance in nuclear power: cleaning one waste product to produce another useful fuel. It is working.

Amazon is hiring! Delivery drivers. Pay isn't that good, the hours are long, but it is a job.

Quit your job and write for all your income! Well, let's slow down. "Do what you love" often leads to bankruptcy. Living costs money. Save plenty of it first.

Some tips on writing speeches.

Good tips for using the vim editor. I wrote a book using that editor. It worked well.

Writing the first lines...putting the reader at ease.

One writer's experience in moving from novel to memoir.

"You first need to actively shift from presenting yourself as just a writer to presenting yourself as a professional service provider who runs a business with established rules and guidelines."

"Write like everyone you know is dead...Write for yourself."

I love this article on a writing method. Stop all those drafts. Write. Polish. Write. Steady hours. Steady output. "What changed my writing life for me was consistency, expecting small amounts in a reasonable time, and eliminating that multiple draft idea, which can be helpful to some, but can be misleading to others who feel they are writing better because they have a lot of drafts, or working a tremendous number of hours."

Some tips on the timeless advice of "remove needless words."

This is short and sort of quaint, but I like it. Want to be a better writer? Strive for these qualities: size the content, connect the dots, and a few others.

Do you want to hold a weekend retreat for writers? Just yourself? A small group? Here are some tips. Logistics, logistics, logistics.