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Two months ago I bought a flat in San Francisco with Aimee. Very exciting - my/our first home. We closed back in February but didn’t move in until yesterday because it came with a tenant. Anyways, he moved out on Saturday night and Aimee and I moved in Sunday at 9am.

Last night was our first night in the new place. I love it.

We’ve done a pretty good job unpacking already, but that barely matters because I love the place. The building is a bit over 100 years old - very solid and stable and classic. Three-story SF flat. Between Guerrero and Dolores on 23rd Street.

I’ll fill you in on more details later, but for now that’s the news and part of my excuse for not writing here with any consistency as of late.

I’ve been dreaming about a future where wireless devices were free from their last tether — the power cord/charger — and it seems the day is finally here!

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn’t be done. “If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, ‘Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?’” says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips. “But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power.”

The range is about three feet, with radio waves being converted to DC current by a small receiver embedded in the device. Price point seems to be about five bucks, which means it’s viable everywhere. The idea of having your ipod, camera, and phone charge while you’re sitting at your desk — with them still in your pocket — is pretty cool. A wireless mouse that never needs to dock is attractive too. It’s low-power stuff for now — including pacemakers — but as with all technology i’m sure it will improve and expand.

Here’s the article Death of the cell phone charger from Business 2.0 magazine.

This new-to-me service, Green Dimes, will drastically reduce the amount of junk [snail] mail your receive by diligently and comprehensively removing your name and address from lists large and small that are bought and sold by and to marketers. They automate much of the process, and when a signature is required send you a self-addressed stamped postcard to sign and send. They have a staff of 20 working full time to discover new lists to remove your from, while as the same time providing tools to ensure you still get catalogs and charity mail you desire.

By getting less mail you save some of the 100,000,000 trees consumed by the direct mail industry. Better yet, Green Dimes will plant trees each month in your name, helping to repair a bit of the damage already done.

Pretty good value proposition for only $4/month. Sign yourself up or send a gift membership to family and friends.

via

Here’s the trailer:

I can’t wait!

A video called “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” is an engaging and enjoyable 4.5 minute non-verbal documentary taking us from ‘pencil’ to ‘Web 2.0′. It adds context to the advances that got us here, and suggests what might yet be in store. At about 03:40, highlights from an August 2005 Wired article, “We Are the Web,” are used to suggest that we are “teaching the machine.” I’m afraid that that notion is still inadequately understood and appreciated.

Perhaps the so-called “social web” isn’t about connecting people (not about helping people socialize), but about information conservation: If a person chooses to do something — no matter how small — it’s inherently interesting, precious, and valuable. We’ve barely started to figure out what to do with this second-generation information. Where we have it’s been exciting, useful, and successful: Flickr’s Interestingness and Clusters, the notion of “watching” on Upcoming, the newer “people who looked at this ultimately bought that” in Amazon, and of course Google’s PageRank. The idea isn’t new, but it’s still under appreciated.

Here’s the paragraph from Wired that surrounds the words used in the video:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we’re already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

Here’s the video, which was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University:

(via via)

In addition to pointing to CNN debunks false report about Obama, I wanted to summarize it. I struggled a bit, but luckily a great new magazine GOOD summed it up well (emphasis mine):

A conservative magazine started a rumor that Obama attended a madrassa in Indonesia that taught fundamentalist Islam. Then they falsely sourced Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the tip. This might have been a pretty ingenious campaign smear a few years ago, but these Rove-like tricks don’t seem to work anymore. CNN did some good, old-fashioned journalism and quickly debunked the story. Republican strategists should denounce these tactics if they want any chance in ‘08. The American public is finally wise to it.

Let me reiterate their conclusion: this shady business won’t fly in the ‘08 election cycle.

(If you’re not familiar with GOOD, take a look and consider subscribing (100% of your subscription money goes to an organization of your choice.)