Porn Porn Porn

Be still my beating heart: Espresso Porn.

Gary Gygax Redux

Following up on my D20 post, I stumbled across this XKCD comic today and thought it was very amusing. Click through for a better image.

Tech Policy Summit

Next week I will be speaking at Tech Policy Summit in Los Angeles. Tech Policy Summit is a

conference … that brings together prominent leaders from the private and public sectors to examine critical policy issues impacting technology innovation and adoption in the United States and beyond.

The nonpartisan gathering provides an independent, balanced forum for learning and networking among an exclusive group of industry insiders, government officials, nonprofit leaders and academic experts who may have different perspectives but who share a common goal of enabling innovation.

Our mission is to bridge the gaps that sometimes exist – even between like-minded organizations with common goals – and to encourage more dialog so that there is greater accord between what happens in D.C. and what matters within the technology industry.

I will be a member on the panel “The Role of Privacy & Trust in the Innovation Economy” along with former FTC Commissioner Mozelle Thompson, John Tomaszewvski of TRUSTe, and JR Reagan of BearingPoint.

If you are a reader of this blog, and will be attending, enjoy our session, and please hunt me down and say hello!

Word of the day: SNOOKER

I love it when a random, fun word gets lifted out of its original context and pushed into the general lexicon. In Ireland and the UK, ‘billiards’ or ‘pool’ is different than in the US. One of the often-differnt rules is that when you ‘foul’ (scratch) you can shoot again. The goal of that shot is often to ’snooker’ your opponent. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word, in its original context, as:

To leave one’s opponent … unable to take a direct shot without striking a ball out of the required order;

and the general-lexicon definition is thusly:

To lead (another) into a situation in which all possible choices are undesirable.

Use it today!

!Anonymity != Identity

I’m consistently intrigued by efforts to attempt to remove what folks often refer to as ‘anonymity’ from the Internet. Last week, the Berkman Citizen Media Law Project site posted an article about the state of KY attempting to stop “Anonymous Posting“.

While I tend to understand the ultimate goals of these sorts of efforts, I do not tend to understand where these folks are coming from. More accurately, I believe they don’t have a crisp grasp of the difference between anonymity and not-anonymity.

There presumably is a difference between someone calling themselves “BobbyBoy17″ bashing a company on a chat board and someone who is verifiably “Robert G. Jones of 17 Main St. Boston MA 02114 ph. 617-738-1829″ bashing a company on a chat board. The chasm between those two ‘identities’ is gigantic. Even in the real world we know that the latter isn’t perfect (~$50B in fraud from identity theft in 2007).

Obviously there is a happy medium to be struck. That medium has a lot more to do with our ‘comfort’ interacting and transacting with others, more so than our ability to ‘know’ who they are. The former is a tractable problem, the latter is not.

Town Caucus!

Old, small New England towns are just different. Sherborn was settled in 1652, only 32 years after the Pilgrims hit the continent. We celebrated our semiseptcentennial (350 years – yeah, I too was surprised there’s a word for that!) not too long ago. Sherborn is a town of about 1,500 households and 4,500 residents, and it’s one of the least densely populated towns inside the Route 495 belt. We’ve still got working farms in town!

Last night Sherborn held its annual town caucus. Not to be confused with the presidential party-based caucus hoopla we’ve been immersed in of late, a town caucus is a now-uncommon annual event at which the townsfolk gather for the nominations for the various positions in town government. Most towns have sadly abandoned this process, and apparently only about 30 towns in MA now hold annual town caucuses. Mostly, towns just have candidates submit nomination paperwork instead – how boring!

I enjoy town caucus immensely (perhaps even irrationally) every year. You get to catch up with folks you haven’t seen in forever, meet new neighbors, and get a great read on the political buzz in town. Plus there’s always coffee and tasty baked goods to keep you on your toes!

The 2008 Sherborn Town Caucus was impressively attended, with about 200 residents crammed (and I do mean crammed!) into the room. Great work everybody!

Heaven’s Gonna Need More D20s

R.I.P.

Evernote: My Brain, Online!!

I first played with the Windows version of Evernote back in early 2007 or late 2006. My friend Chris was/is a big fan of the product and encouraged me to try it out. Ever since Notebook on NeXT back in the early 90s, I’ve been searching for a tool to help me organize “random stuff” on my computers. There are some neat Mac apps, but I run Windoze.

So I tried Evernote out back then and, while I liked it, I chose not to upgrade after the trial period. I didn’t love it.

But man has stuff changed! Evernote is effectively a new company and a new product now. In the “it’s a small world” department, my friend Phil joined up as CEO in Mid-2007. They have brought the capability into the online realm, and in my opinion, they are kicking ass. The Mac client is really impressive. The Windows client has improved and they’re doing another rev soon. The web client is stupendously great – and Evernote handles all the syncing automagically – THANK YOU! I’m running the Windows Mobile client too on my Treo 750 WM6 – which is way useful.

It’s an invite-only beta right now. But surf on over to sign up !

Quote of the Day

Anyone who is concerned about what the ‘market’ is doing on a daily basis really has no business buying stocks.

Warren Buffett