Brian A. Paul

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Wow yesterday was a fun weather day! Suffice it to say that I (and many of my neighbors) will be digging out and replacing fence posts for weeks to come. It looks like someone just drove around in a big truck smashing through fences.

The wind speed numbers for the Sacramento/Elk Grove Area via the National Weather Service state that our highest sustained wind speed was 36 MPH (gusting up to 48 MPH) and our highest gusts were 52 MPH (when the wind was sustaining at 33 MPH.)  It seems like the evening news said something about 60+ MPH winds or gusts but to me that’s purely rumor.  The winds here exceeded 20 MPH for twelve hours straight.

Some background:

Thomas Edison was a little insane about the Dangers of Alternating Current (the kind of electricity we get out of the wall) and thought everyone should use Direct Current (the kind of electricity we get out of a battery.) It should also be noted that Edison had a vested business interest in it’s adoption and widespread use. One other fun fact is that the last building in NYC (power there is supplied by Con-Edison btw) was converted from DC to AC just this last year.

www.boingboing.net/2008/01/03/edison-electrocuted.html

Nikola Tesla invented Alternating Current and this car company is named after him:

www.teslamotors.com

So to recap, Edison loved DC, hated AC, and the power company he founded only uses AC now. Tesla invented AC and the car company named after him sells battery (DC) powered electric sports cars. The elephant died for no reason at all.

I laugh, except, because of the elephant, I cries.

PopSci.com and Bug Labs is offering a contest, the grand prize for which is a BUGbase and modules. The BUG platform is some cool stuff, and it’s modularity is tremendous. The drawback is that it’s a little on the big and clunky side, but this is a first release so I’ll cut then some slack. You know I geek out when it comes to people winning things through the use of their big ‘ole brains so go out there and get to work!

Bug Labs gets a couple things from this, Popular Science has a huge readership so Bug Labs and the BUG platform just became more well known. Also, the killer application that launches the BUG platform in a big way may arrive from this. Every technology platform needs a killer app to become stratospherically great. Sometimes the platform itself is the killer app but in this case I think the trick come from the software side.

I have idea’s but writing JAVA code isn’t my thing. Who knows I might give it a shot anyway.

Oh, and the terms and conditions stipulate that your entry be released GPL v3. Yes, it’s a controversial license but at least it’s an Open Source license.

Google has released the 2007 Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist is always a fun trip down memory lane with a few, ‘I totally missed that’, revelations thrown in for good measure. Not to mention a few ‘huh?!’ moments. So go forth and delve deep into the psyche of GOOG’s 2007 search engines users. The number 1 entries for each of the ‘Who Is’, ‘What is’, and ‘How to’ columns are pretty universal. Check them out here.