First quarterly report to our readers

This isn't quite a Chimp Nation State of the Union, but more like a quick report to our readers.  Chimpwithpencil is doing well.  I set a goal of 1,000 pageviews in the first three months, and we reached that a week early.

Chimp has a new RSS feed in the column on the right side so folks that use feeds will have that option available.  And chimp is now WAP enabled so you can read it on your mobile phones.  When viewed on a phone, the site will be stripped down to a single column of posts without the column of widgets, but at least you can read the latest articles.  Also, I fixed the link on the HIRED GUNS cover, which sent you to my Amazon page rather than the chimp author page. 

I hope for continued growth in the number of readers, and it would be fun to see more comments.  I'm continuously working to improve this blog, and I appreciate each of you who take the time to visit.  If you have a friend you think would enjoy chimp, please send them a link.

Thanks for reading!
-- Mark

Part 2 of What Happened to Online Poker?

After the US Congress made funding online poker accounts illegal, publicly traded companies like Party Poker realized they were at huge risk, so they acted quickly to cut off all of their US players.  Unfortunately, US players made up 80% of their customers.  Private companies like Poker Stars and Full Tilt remained in business, but players and sites had to devise new ways to fund their accounts. 

The entire situation was murky.  US players weren't sure if they were breaking the law, and millions of casual gamers simply quit, while play continued on the European sites because online poker is legal in the United Kingdom and many other countries.

Further confusing the matter is that several poker sites have their headquarters located in places like Ireland, Costa Rica, the Isle of Man, and Antigua.  US laws have no jurisdiction here, and yet the actions of Congress had a serious impact on these businesses.

Four years later in 2010, lobbying by the gaming industry and a players' organization prompted the US Congress House Financial Services Committee to pass HR2267, a bill that would legalize online poker in the USA as long as it is regulated.  However, the same year the Washington State Supreme Court upheld a law that made online poker playing a felony. 

In April 2011, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York brought a criminal case against Poker Stars, Full Tilt and Cereus (which runs Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet).  The Department of Justice seized their Internet addresses and froze bank accounts in 14 countries.  These accounts not only hold money for the poker sites, but also contain the money of individual players.

I am not a lawyer, so depending on what country you live in, online gambling may be illegal.  I am not encouraging you to play poker online.  I am encouraging you to think about this case and what it means.

I believe people should have the freedom to make choices like whether they want to play poker online for play money or for real money.  A few will become addicted to it, a few will become professionals at it, but the majority will simply play for fun as casual gamers. 

Is some government regulation necessary here? Maybe so.  We don't want children playing for real money online.  Of course, you can make a reasonable argument that their parents, not the government, should be the ones to regulate their behavior.  And no one wants online poker money channeled to terrorists.  So there is room for reasonable regulation. 

I do not know if all of the online poker sites always conducted business in an ethical manner.  But what we can see from this case is that government interference and heavy-handed regulation in one country affected people and businesses in many countries.  Businesses have failed because of it, and individual citizens have lost everything from an amusing activity to their main source of income.

Loss of personal freedom and loss of the freedom to conduct business is something we should all be concerned about.

(Several sources were used for this article, including this one on the early history of online poker.  A three part series from ChicagoNow.  And this article from the UK's Poker Player.  This article on online poker at Wikipedia, and also one on US versus Scheinberg.  And finally, here is a summary of HR 2267.)  

(The pic is from www.graphicshunt.com)

What happened to online poker?

Please note:  This isn't really an essay about poker.  This is an essay about personal freedom.  And how too much government regulation can stifle and even crush an entire industry.

Remember the poker craze? There was poker on television.  Movies about poker.  Everyone was playing home games with friends, and signing up for accounts online.  Suddenly you could go online at any hour and find a game where you compete with people from a half dozen different countries.  And you could play for real money!

So what happened?

The first online casino opened in 1994, but Planet Poker didn't open the first online poker room until 1998.  Planet Poker used the simple method of taking a cut (called a 'rake') of the pot from each game to make money.  The next year Paradise Poker started its poker room with slick graphics and a variety of games.  To supply their accounts, players began to use fund transfer services like Neteller, which fueled the business of online banking.

Party Poker came along in 2003, the same year poker's popularity exploded due to a previously unknown player named Chris Moneymaker.  Moneymaker paid $40.00 to get into a tournament on the Poker Stars site, which eventually led him to a spot in the World Series of Poker, where he won first place and $2.5 million USD. 

People went crazy for poker.  They went online to compete in the hopes of someday playing for big money.  Sites like Party Poker and Ultimate Bet went public and began trading stocks on the London Stock Exchange.  In 2004, Party Poker was making profits of $1 million USD per day!

And then the roof crashed down.

In 2006 the United States Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which made funding or accepting of funds for online gambling illegal.  This meant that while the activity of playing poker online was not illegal, transferring money to an online account to do so was illegal.

This act of Congress choked the online poker industry.  Players could not fund their accounts and could not use credit cards with the poker sites.  And any bank that transferred funds in and out of these sites was suddenly liable.  It effectively killed the game just as it was exploding in growth.

In Part 2, we'll examine how the online poker industry reacted to this legislation.

Is your blog ready to go mobile?

A few weeks ago I went to a seminar for small businesses and individuals that want to build an online presence through a web site or blog.  The speaker had a nice Powerpoint slide show and I took a couple of pages of notes.  He asked how many of us in the room had a blog, and several raised their hands.  Then he asked, "Is your blog WAP mobile enabled?"

Huh? I put my hand down and made a note of it.  We moved on to other topics and I never got around to asking the speaker to explain.  So I did a little research and learned that web sites that may work fine on your computer may not work correctly on your phone.  So for all the readers out there who blog or maintain a web site for their business, this could be a real problem.

An article by Deanne Chance on searchmobilecomputing.com defines WAP this way:  "WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including e-mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and instant messaging."  WAP uses Wireless Markup Language (WML) to create pages that your phone can read.

The four most popular free blog providers I know of are Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad and Wordpress.  This article by Dennis Bournique states that Wordpress and Livejournal support WAP, and that Blogger began to support it in January 2011.  I don't know if Typepad does--I searched their site and knowledge base but couldn't find an answer.  If someone knows about this, perhaps you could leave a comment?

Bournique's article tells Blogger users how to turn on the mobile option for their blogs by going into the Settings and choosing the Email and Mobile tab.  This feature strips down your blog to make it easier to display, and supports iPhone and Android, but not Symbian, Windows Phone and Opera.

He supplies a neat little hack to fix this.  Add "?m=1" to the URL address, and the site should work on your phone.  I haven't tried this yet, but if you do, please leave a comment and let the rest of us know.

I plan to look at this option for chimpwithpencil because I'd like people to be able to read it on their phones, and I realize that as smartphones become common, more people will view web pages via their phones.

Out of curiosity, I checked my Blogger stats and found some interesting statistics.  The operating systems used by people who visit chimpwithpencil include 80% Windows, 7% Linux, 6% Mac, 4% iPhone and less than 1% Android.  The browsers were 57% Internet Explorer, 18% Firefox, 12% Chrome and 9% Safari, with the rest being in single digits.

Not a lot of people reading chimp on their phones yet, but your blog may be different, and I think it's worth looking into.

(I found the pic of the droid here.)

If we eat the rich, we will be hungry tomorrow.

Watching the economic and political problems in Greece is troubling.  The Greek government knows it has to cut back, but people don't want a reduction in services, so they take to the streets and squares to protest or riot.

The global economy appears to be making a slow comeback, but times are still difficult.  It's natural for people to look around, see the rich, and be jealous.  After all, if you're working hard every day and still struggling to make it, it's tough to watch another guy go buy a big, fat yacht.

Without getting too political about it (because it is hard to separate politics from economics), there are a lot of people in the world that believe in wealth redistribution, whether in the form of communism or socialism or punitive tax codes.  Basically, take from the rich and give to the poor.  So out of curiosity, I went to the Forbes site and checked out their famous list of billionaires.

Let's look at the top ten:  Carlos Slim Helu and family 74 billion, Bill Gates 56b, Warren Buffett 50b, Bernard Arnault 41b, Larry Ellison 39.5b, Lakshmi Mittal 31.1b, Amancio Ortega 31b, Eike Batista 30b, Mukesh Ambani 27b, and Christy Walton and family 26.5b.  Add them up and we have 406.1 billion dollars (let's round it to 406).

So if we took their money and gave it to everyone else, how would that work out? Well, there are about 7 billion people in the world, so each person would get $58.00.

Let's compare that to the yearly Gross National Income per person for three random countries.  Near the top of the list we have Norway at $35,053.30.  In about the middle of the list is Guatemala at $1,628.86.  Down near the bottom is Burundi at $88.82.

So for a person in Norway, $58 is a small percentage of their income--it might buy them a tank of gasoline for their car.  In Guatemala, it's .0356 of their income, which is a nice little bonus but probably not life changing.  And in Burundi, it's .65, which is a lot.  Wouldn't you like your income to jump 65% this year?

So for some, the $58 is small, for others big.  But for all, it is temporary.

I think we waste too much time worrying about the rich.  What we need to focus on is the middle class and the poor.  If you think of it as a chart, what you really want is for the middle to be very wide--for the majority of people on earth to have clean water, sufficient food, and a decent home.  This cannot be achieved by redistributing the money of the rich.  This can only be achieved when there are jobs for people that earn them a decent salary relative to the costs of the area they live in.

We need a broad middle class worldwide, and as few poor as possible.  And the rich? Forget about them.  Let them go invest and engage in activities that create jobs for other people.  The old saying, "A rising tide lifts all boats," is appropriate here.  We need the tide of a growing middle class.

(The Forbes list is here.  The gross national income data from here.  You can find contrasting figures on income all over the Internet, but I just used the numbers for purposes of comparison.)

Is the social network the business network?

An Associated Press story I read yesterday mentioned that with all the tech companies having IPOs (initial public offerings) of stocks, it feels a lot like 1999.  Back then in the dotcom boom days, people invested in companies that weren't even making a profit, simply in the hope that they would.

I think that given the present state of the world economy, investors will be more wary, but it isn't hard to understand their enthusiasm.  We use some of these companies daily when we're online and there is wide spread familiarity with their products.

In May alone, the Russian search engine Yandex, the US business networking site LinkedIn, and the Chinese social network Ren Ren all entered the Nasdaq.  Now Pandora, the Internet radio company, has gone public, too.

Consumer review site Angie's List is rumored to be preparing to go public, perhaps in August.  Groupon, which negotiates with businesses for coupons and vouchers, may also jump into the market.  And of course everyone is waiting for the social media giant Facebook to enter the arena, although this may not happen until next year.

Does this sound like another dotcom bubble ready to burst? I don't know.  It's reasonable to ask, what do these companies actually do to make money? Something investors should have asked 11 years ago.  But to be fair, much has changed since the year 2000.

The Internet has 2 billion users now, and social networking is a force in the business world.  Maybe now these stocks make sense in a way that the dotcoms of the last decade did not?

(For this post, I read a variety of articles from the Associated Press, Business Week, Fox Business News, and Forbes Magazine.  I found the cool bubble pic at ilovebacteria.com.)

Folks from all over

We picked up new readers from China, Pakistan, Hungary and Botswana this week.  Welcome to chimpwithpencil!

And thanks to Germany and the United Kingdom for the multiple pageviews this week.  I'm glad to have you visit.

Sincerely,
Mark

Techno Combo Platter

Thanks to my buddy Patrick, I've been visiting some new tech sites, and several stories I found pertained to previous posts here on chimpwithpencil.  So today is a good day for some updates.  We'll call it Followup Friday.

Back in May in 'Send in the Robots' and 'Robot Counterattack,' we discussed the use of robots to help in natural disasters like the tsunami in Japan.  A story and video on Engadget tells how workers used a robot helicopter called a Parrot to enter an earthquake damaged church in New Zealand and survey the structure without risking human lives.

Good idea, but it struck me funny that the $300 robot helo was controlled with an $700 iPad.  Wouldn't a radio-controlled plane type setup with a joystick have been easier and cheaper? But the main thing is that no one went inside the building and got crushed.  Here is the engadget link to the Parrot's video.  

In other tech news, on 13 June we talked about hacking in 'Who are the hackers?' Gizmodo has a story about a hacking group that released 62,000 stolen usernames and passwords combinations.  The names/passwords may be from Paypal, Ebay, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and other sites.  I'm not sure what the point of this is.  Digital vigilantes usually pick a specific person or organization they disagree with, but this appears to just be 62,000 random accounts.

And from Lifehacker, there's a neat story for the DIY (do it yourself) folks on how to rig you garage door opener so you can open it with your smart phone.  Projects like this are fun and useful, although the paranoid part of me wonders how secure this is.  Still, if someone wants into your garage, there are low-tech ways to break in.

It's interesting to me that there is a strong do-it-yourself approach to a lot of technology these days, and the Internet makes it possible to share these techniques with each other.  But that's a post for another day.

Have a good weekend!

(Pic is from www.robotsrule.com)

You need water.

If you are reading this blog, you have access to a computer and electricity, and probably to a water utility system.  Which makes you a fortunate person, since many people around the world struggle to find clean water each day.

But what if that water service was interrupted? Hurricane season has begun, and throughout the planet there is always the possibility of earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis, monsoons, floods, wild fires, and civil unrest.  Many of us don't stop to think what we would do if we needed water.

You can go days and even weeks on minimal food, but only two or three days without water.  Forget washing clothes or taking showers or baths.  Let's consider the basic needs of drinking water, water to cook with, water to wash your hands after you use the bathroom, water to dump in the toilet to make it flush, and water to clean dishes you've eaten on.

We also need to differentiate between treated and untreated water.  Except for the toilet, the other four items in the list call for treated water, especially for drinking.  A person needs 2 to 3 quarts (or 1.9 to 2.8 liters) of water a day to function, and more in hot weather.  In an emergency that lasts several days, how would you get this water?

First you need a water source, whether it's bathtubs and buckets you filled before the crisis, or bottled water, or a pond, lake, stream, or cistern, a swimming pool, a rain barrel, or a well.  If you have an electric pump for your well, you may be able to figure out how to hook it to a gas-powered generator, which would be great until you ran out of gas.  For people that live near a body of fresh water, they should consider how they'd get the water to their house.  If the streets are blocked with downed power lines and fallen trees, you may have to carry the water.  Water is heavy--it weighs 2 pounds per quart, or 1 kilogram per liter.

If you can get the water to your house, how will you treat it? People often say, "Boil water," but how practical is this? Do you own a large container suitable for boiling water, and do you have a sufficient supply of wood or charcoal or propane gas to burn? Maybe not.  So you may consider using chemical treatments like the purification tablets soldiers and hikers use, or iodine or bleach.  You'll want to be careful in treating your water so you don't make yourself sick.

An alternative may be a filtration/purification system.  There are all sorts of filtration systems available, from tiny ones built into straws, to hand-pumped models that can treat a fair quantity of water. 

My point is not to frighten people, but hopefully to get folks to consider what they may need to do in an emergency.  If you survive the initial onslaught of a disaster, very soon after you will begin to think about your need for water, so planning ahead is a worthwhile effort.

(Photo courtesy R. Pelisson - http://www.SaharaMet.com)

(If you want to learn more, there are many public information sites like this CDC one and survival sites on the Internet that cover getting and cleaning water.)

Who are the hackers?

Sony Playstation accounts.  Lockheed Martin's network.  Citibank credit card numbers.  And now the IMF (International Monetary Fund).  All hacked in the last few months.  Which may lead you to ask, "What's up with all the hacking?"

Most of us don't think about hacking until we realize our credit card is with Citibank, or a virus has slowed our computer to a crawling, disease-ridden wreck.  Hacking is a such a faceless activity that it feels more like catching the flu--just something involving bad luck and blind chance.  But hacking isn't random, it's a targeted activity created by some very bright people.

So who are the hackers, and why are they hacking?

In the past, we had hackers who were essentially electronic explorers.  They may have trespassed into areas where they didn't have official access, but they would look around and maybe leave a message to the company to upgrade its security.  Some were thieves using technology to steal, but many were curious, intelligent people with a drive to learn and explore.  That has changed.

Modern hacking is far different.  We can separate most hacking and hackers into two broad categories, economic and socio-political.  Economic hacking is all about money.  Stealing credit cards numbers is simply theft by electronic means.  In industrial espionage, companies use hacking to steal data from rivals and disrupt their activities.  Pirate downloads of music, games, movies and books all mean the creative folks who made these things don't get paid.

The socio-political category is wider, and murkier.  This area spans from a disgruntled employee hacking a company they were fired from, to countries hacking other countries for military and technological advantages.  Terrorists spurred by political and religious beliefs hack government, military, and corporate sites to advance their particular agendas.  And now we are seeing a rise in 'hacktivism,' where hackers target institutions and individuals they disagree with. 

Gone are the days of phone phreaks and benign explorers.  Hacking is about politics and money now.

(For a lively and interesting discussion of spammers (and security in general), check out Bruce Schneier's blog here and scroll down to "Spam as a business.")

Horsepower Then and Now

Horsepower as a measure of power wasn't invented until the 1700s when James Watt, a Scottish inventor and engineer, came up with the idea.  He probably picked horses because they were commonly used back then for everything from riding to pulling wagons to carrying burdens.

Power is work done over time.  And Watt made 1 Horsepower equal to 550 foot-pounds per second.  All this means is that he thought a horse could lift 550 pounds a distance of 1 foot in 1 second.  Kind of an odd measurement, but hey, it was the 1700s and Watt was busy redesigning the steam engine and inventing the paper copier in his spare time.  Yes, he made a paper copier in the 1780s, long before the office cubicle was invented.

Michio Kaku's book PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE mentions in one section that throughout most of our history, people have had to make do with about 1/5 horsepower, or in other words, our own strength to accomplish tasks.  This got me thinking about humans and our ingenuity. 

Now any hardcore gearhead or mechanic can tell you the Horsepower of their car.  For example, the 2012 Honda Civic has 140 Horsepower.  A quick glance at history may give you the idea that until steam engines came along, humans were stuck with their weak 1/5 Horsepower.  And taking into account the smaller size of ancient people, I'd say we were working with more like 1/10 Horsepower.

But humans have been domesticating animals for a long time, giving us access to the strength of horses, oxen, llamas, donkeys, goats, elephants, dogs and others.  An ancient Egyptian warrior in a chariot would have commanded 2 or 4 Horsepower.  The average ox weighs about twice as much as a horse, so a farmer with a team of 4 oxen would have 8 Horsepower.

Elephants were used in north Africa and Asia, especially India and Thailand.  The average Asian elephant would have cranked out about 9 Horsepower, and the bigger African elephant would be pushing 12 Horsepower.  Pretty impressive, and scary if the elephant is chasing you.

Going beyond domesticated animals, humans did pretty well for themselves by using mechanical advantages.  In ancient Greece, the Athenians built boats with 3 rows of oars called triremes.  The standard trireme used in the battle of Salamis in 480 BC had 174 rowers, or about 17 Horsepower.  Enough to move the trireme to ramming speed when calm days rendered its sails useless.

Throughout human history, we've been harnessing Horsepower through animals or mechanical advantage.  So today when you start your car or your lawn mower, think about the amazing Horsepower at your command.

(Info on elephants, Horsepower, oxen, James Watt, and the pic of the trireme.)

Finally got my work on the Nook

My thriller HIRED GUNS is now available on the Nook.  So if you use a Nook or a Kindle, you can download a free sample of this novel.

If you don't use a Kindle or Nook, there's a free Kindle App that enables you to read Kindle ebooks on your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Droid, Blackberry and Windows 7 phone.  Here is a similar app for the Nook.

I appreciate your patience.  Rather than go through a publisher, I do all the editing and formatting myself, so these projects take time.    

Thanks for reading!

On the morality of zoos.

The creature pictured above is a fire bellied newt named Petri.  I think it's a Chinese fire bellied newt, but it may be Japanese.  The pet shop that sold it to my friends told them Petri would probably live three years.  That was 13 years ago.  In the wild, Petri probably would have been eaten by a larger predator, or frozen during a harsh winter in China.  In the safety of his aquarium, he has lived a long life.

Which led me to thinking about zoos.  I love to visit zoos.  I love to see the exotic animals, but I always go home depressed.  These creatures live in captivity.  No matter how nice or interactive their environment may be, they are not free.

A zoo presents a moral difficulty.  There is a well-reasoned argument that zoos help preserve animals in the wild by getting visitors interested in wildlife preservation.  Anyone who has gone to the zoo as a child or with children can attest to this.  And zoos study animals, learn about them, and even breed them.

These efforts help animals overall, but for the specific animals held captive, it's not the life they were designed for.  Nature is a harsh place.  In their natural habitat, animals routinely starve, sustain injury, fight predators, and live short lives.  But they also migrate, play, mate, wander, eat and roam.  No zebra in a zoo will ever take part in the Great Migration.  No zoo lion will ever hunt down a gazelle.

So while I support the efforts of zoos to promote conservation and learn more about animals, I find it very hard to visit them anymore.  However, I am optimistic about the future.  As education and birth control become available to more people around the world, I think we'll see human populations level out or eventually reduce.  For example, Europe and the United States would both have falling populations if not for immigration.

As human numbers level out and we learn how to better sustain ourselves, the world will have large areas of undeveloped land and animal populations (at least the ones that remain) will have a chance to rebound.  The next 20 years will be crucial to this process, so we should preserve what animals we can right now and plan ahead for the next generation. 

On a final note, an article I found states fire bellied newts can live up to 30 years! I should probably mention this to my friends.

(Thanks to Chris and Shannon for the picture of Petri.  Here is a good blog about newts, and another with some sharp photos.)

Well, gosh, it is a pretty small world after all

Not that I am obsessed with Blogger's statistical tools (I can quit looking at them any time I want to, I just don't want to), but it's amazing to me that people from all over the world visit chimpwithpencil.

So I want to take a moment to say, "Thank you for reading."  Also, I think you'll find the list of countries interesting.  Here they are in order of total number of pageviews.

United States, India, France, Poland, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Greece.  And just this week we had our first visitors from Canada, Egypt and Spain.  Welcome everyone! Thanks for visiting.

(the nice shot of planet Earth is from guardian.co.uk)

Somewhere in the sands of time.

Two interesting stories from the world of archaeology.

"Lara Croft, meet Dr. Parcak."

University of Alabama's Dr. Sarah Parcak used infrared satellite imagery to find 17 previously undiscovered pyramids beneath the sands of Egypt.  Finding just one new pyramid would be a big deal, but finding 17 is huge.  French scientists on the ground have already dug at two sites and confirmed the accuracy of the imagery.  Parcak also found evidence of 1,000 tombs and 3,000 settlements.

Use of satellite imagery like this could totally change and reinvigorate the field of archaeology.

* * *

"Dr. Jones, welcome to Turkey." 

The June 2011 issue of National Geographic Magazine has an article by Charles C. Mann and Vincent J. Musi about a Stonehenge-type site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.  Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute first visited Gobekli in 1994, and quickly realized that earlier surveys had mislabeled the site as Byzantine.

The discovery of an enormous number of flint chips led Schmidt to start digging the site, and over time he and his team discovered several rings of standing pillars, some as large as 18 feet tall and weighing up to 16 tons.  The shocking thing about Gobekli is that it dates back 11,600 years ago--7,000 years before the Great Pyramid at Giza was built!

The pillars are carved with all sorts of animal totems, including snakes, scorpions, foxes, cranes and wild boars.  The site must have been built for religious purposes because apparently no one made permanent homes there.  In fact, the nearest water is three miles away, and there's no evidence of organized agriculture.  It looks like people came from quite a distance to build a temple in the middle of nowhere.  Very curious indeed.

(Thanks to the history blog and the Telegraph for info on the 17 pyramids, and thanks to National Geographic for the article on Gobekli and the cool monthly quizzes.  The pyramid pic is from digitaltrends.com.)

The Once and Future Tech TV

My buddy Chris sent me a Yahoo article about how people make money on their blogs by featuring ads.  I've been debating whether to have advertisements on chimpwithpencil, so I read the article carefully.

The article mentioned a site called Hak 5 where I found a cool tech show.  The Hak 5 folks describe it this way, "We take on hacking in the old-school sense, covering everything from network security, open source and forensics, to DIY modding and the homebrew scene. Then we wrap it all up with a healthy dose of cocktails and geek comedy. Damn the warranties, it’s time to Trust your Technolust."

Watching an episode of Hak 5 made me think back to the days of Screen Savers on Tech TV, a show I really enjoyed.  After the Tech TV merger with G4, Screen Savers moved to Los Angeles and became Attack of the Show.  The new format focused more on entertainment and pop culture than hard core computer tips.  And I missed the previous hosts like Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane and Patrick Norton.

Leo Laporte and other former members of Screen Savers formed This Week in Tech, and Sarah Lane joined as a host/producer/editor there about a year ago.  TWiT's About page says, "You'll find over 15 different shows here, all covering some aspect of technology. Leo hosts and produces most of the shows, but as the network expands new hosts and participants are added all the time."  And a search revealed Patrick Norton is over at Revision3 Internet television, where he hosts their Tekzilla show. 

It's nice to see all these folks have moved on to good things.  So hit some links and try out these shows--see some old friends and make some new ones!

(This sweet TRS 80 pic is from oldcomputers.net)

Children of the Sun: The art of Deth P. Sun



Art is reactive.  Most times you only need to glance at a picture to see if you like it or don't.  But some art makes you think.  The human mind can't help itself.  We see an image and our minds build a story around it.

Deth P. Sun created these pictures.  I don't know Sun, so I don't know what his pictures represent to him--I just know they make me think.  I first saw his work in Giant Robot magazine and I reacted.  Maybe it's the haunting nature of the art.  It's serious but not gloomy.  And I like cats and drew a lot of cats back when I used to draw.  His creatures have character, personality, and they appear to be on perilous quests in dangerous lands.

And there are subtleties here.  For instance, in this picture the cat and ghost emerge from the cave to find a massive coyote swimming ashore.  If you look carefully, you'll see a skeletonized dead cat on the hill above, watching over them.  Fascinating.

So for a moment today, look at a piece of art and make up your own story.

(Here is Deth P. Sun's site.  And Giant Robot.)