Over the past year we've made it the norm in our family that we have a salad with most dinners (some dinners don't really work well with a salad, so this rule is more general than absolute). We buy big tub things of mixed greens (Fortinos, a local branding of Loblaws - I think they made an Italian sounding name to pander to the nearby Hamilton market - has an awesome very high quality, organic, already cleaned tub with something like 2KG of mixed greens for ~$5. With proper storage it lasts for about a week), and then add in some cut green onions, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and whatever else tempts our taste buds that night.

The health benefits are unquestionable, but more importantly it's an epicurean delight.

It is remarkable how accessible, and inexpensive, such quality-of-life improvements really are.

Every 6 months or so I sell myself on the idea that I need to go to the gym more consistently (meaning "more than every 6 months", demanding of myself that I "find the time" which more accurately means "make the time"), so I pull together all of the gym-related paraphernalia, discovering once again I can't remember the combination to my lock.

So every 6 months I end up buying a new combination lock, promptly putting the combination hint sheet in a "safe place", and then forgetting it over the coming 6-months of gym downtime.

I wonder if you can buy combination locks in bulk.

Two weeks back I derisively mentioned Microsoft's Live.com gadget creation contest (where they're trying to egg on development of gadgets for their web app by contest giveaways). Now Ebay is getting into the game - they've announced prizes for the best applications that hook into Ebay, extending the value of their services. So Ebay gets a more vibrant developer community, with more tools and services for their highly lucrative clients, and the developers get...a remote chance at winning some token prize.

As a professional software developer and enterpreneur, this serves as a huge omen, yelling out "There is no money to be made in this market". The normal carrot that draws developers into a niche is revenue, with which there is little need for additional incentives (e.g. Why would I care about your token game machine when I'm planning on selling 50,000 copies of my software at $49.95 each?). So when an organization becomes desperate enough to start doing giveaways, you know that niche is undergoing pretty unhealthy times.

A bubble is expanding, and for those of you who missed out on getting rich like everyone-else-supposedly-did during Bubble 1.0 (being in the technology market, it was confusing to relatives that I wasn't a hundred-millionaire in the late-90s: The newspapers were telling them that everyone in tech was overflowing with cash. On the flip side they were confused that I remained employed and making a good wage after the crash, because the newspapers were telling them that everyone in tech was unemployed and replaced by offshoring), here is your magic machine to tell you what you need to do. Press the button and start raking in the millions!

Apparently the marketing plan for Riya is bloggers and online "word-of-mouth". This seems to be paying off very well: Many are blogging about or discussing this "amazing" product, and how it's going to revolutionize the photo tagging world. Flickr (Yahoo!) and Google are going to be knocking down their door trying to get a piece of that action!

Remarkable, though, how incredibly few people have actually used the product, and how few will actually vouch for its capabilities. If you want to sign-up currently, and try the product out yourself, it's an "invite only" affair (though strangely you have to send them your email address - That's not invite only. That's a lottery system). Despite the so-called press (see the Wired article above) heaping on strangely uncritical praise, no credible reviewer has had a round with the software. Odd, wouldn't you say? Wouldn't it make sense to get a respected reviewer to vouch for its capabilities before firing up the press wagons? Someone credible who would put it through its paces and either credit or discredit it, putting their actual career on the line if they misrepresented it.

Facial and scene recognition is easy in theory - it's something we've all imagined up, inventing our own naive ways to do it - but in reality it is extremely difficult. Yet these guys not only managed to leap the gigantic hurdle of facial recognition (including discerning among incredibly similar people - close relatives, and supposedly even twins), but they added in fantastic, unparalleled text detection as well (in one case purportedly reading a tiny car logo sloped about 70 degrees away from the camera, among other fairly impressive feats).

When it comes to revolutionary technologies like face/scene recognition, it is critically important to withhold judgement until it actually proves itself in the real world (and no - I'm not being hypocritical. I'm not saying it doesn't work - I honestly don't know - but I'm just say that without proof otherwise claims of revolution seem a little premature). Facial recognition in particular is a field filled with hucksters and fraudsters, grossly overselling the capabilities of their system with dummied up sample cases and ridiculously ideal scenarios (or even worse - "mechanical turks" have been known to occur). I consider facial recognition much like the compression market - how many times have we heard about revolutionary new compression technologies, sold through jimmied up demos and "observers" on the dole, that in the end turned out to be nothing but a fraud (or a completely impractical edge scenario that is of no value in the real world).

I have no idea if this particular product is legitimate or not, but the lack of credible analysis thus far makes the growing chorus of revolution a bit difficult to stomach.

A wide range of motivations drive the creation and maintenance of weblogs (blogs). I'm using the term "blog" to generically refer to the content management system that many are using today (such as what you see here), even though it is quickly evolving away from the minute-by-minute "what I'm doing and what I'm listening to!" style that earned it so much deserved derision in the first place.

Sometimes someone really has something they want to gripe about, and a blog offers an easy and accessible soapbox to vent from. Brand X makes terrible cars, the waiter at the local Denny's was a jerk, or Walmart represents satan incarnate (or incorporate?). No one is forced to read it, and if search engines are polluted with these random rants, well that's a search engine problem and not a blogging problem. 

And why shouldn't they use this cathartic medium if it helps them get it off their chest? Even if their entries are only read by a couple of close friends or family, that is the original spirit of the internet materialized.

Other times a blog is a tool to promote yourself, or a product, in a way that one hopes to leverage into business or personal success (in new-speak: to monetize it somehow. Indeed, that's the case here - I have an exciting venture that I'm going to use as a source for content in here on occasion). Generally this sort of self-promotion blog gets the initial slingshot by capitalizing on some association with a famous event, product, or corporation, and leveraging that into (often unearned) authority in other realms. "Bob, the guy who worked on the install for Office 95, has written some thoughts about Microsoft's opposition to OpenDocument..."

It's become quite a proven formula, and examples abound.

I consider Joel Spolsky of Fogcreek Software a pioneer in using a blog for this sort of self-promotion, using the "authority" technique I mentioned previously, even though he was doing it before we called it blogging. He has used www.joelonsoftware.com to publish some fantastic essays of various levels of formality (which were even printed out in dead-tree form), doing so for quite a few years. He has taken the fact that for a brief period he worked on the automation engine for Microsoft Excel and parlayed it into attention and credibility for his business, and has gotten attention for his thoughts regarding virtually anything relating to Microsoft (in particular those things that could be interpreted as "anti-Microsoft". The minions love when Joel disparages Microsoft, because his tenuous association with Excel in the past makes him an authority figure on all things Microsoft).

Joel is a "best case" example of this technique, as he happens to be incredibly insightful and pragmatic, and is an excellent author as well.

The "Joel Fomula" - leveraging some industry connection or history to build awareness for some new venture - is growing in popularity as more are seeing this as a critical strategy. Everyone who had anything to do with any well known (or infamous) product, however remote their role, is coming out to give their take on some current situation (and a cynic would say that they're "karma whoring" - they're saying exactly what the populace wants to hear, throwing sand in the eyes of their old masters if it helps get them mentioned on Slashdot).

This is becoming so formulaic that I'm getting a bit cynical about it all. Oh look, the former `Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications' has given the world his thoughts about digital rights management (all 271 words). Zzzzzzz.

Expect more somehow-connected-at-some-point people to pander to the populace as they try for their piece of the Bubble 2.0 action. They'll tell us how everyone should get along, Microsoft is evil, all IP should be free, and so on. It's a proven equation.

Came across this looking at the gift issue of Consumer Reports. You can see their website at http://www.flypentop.com/. It's the most heavily produced, "Hollywood"-type website I've seen for some time. Quite impressive.

The technology itself is really intriguing. I suspect a lot of it is smoke and mirrors (e.g. you can't randomly adhoc, but instead have a fairly constrained set of actions, each with a limited set of options, that they just happen to demo, acting as if it magically correlated with their need), however it's an interesting approach - could this be an alternative to PDAs? There are a tremendous number of possibilities with that sort of technology. Interesting stuff.