September 4, 2008 by Joel.

This evening I finished reading “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is, more or less, the “prequel” to his more famous “The Black Swan”. I read the 2nd edition of this book, the “trade paperback” edition, which included additional material in several chapters. This edition was released in 2005; the original in 2004. I loaned my neighbor my copy of “The Black Swan,” and she loaned me her copy of “Fooled by Randomness.”

I liked this book, and actually found it more readable and original than “The Black Swan.” This book covers much of the same territory, though not in as much detail, and is, as Taleb states several times, more of a stream of consciousness where he’s writing from his knowledge and perspectives, making observations and not worrying about producing an academic tome. I won’t attempt to do more an summarize his thesis, that we are biologically programmed to be susceptible to being “fooled by randomness” and his efforts to overcome the biases that this generates. Taleb is an entertaining and engaging writer. If you believe that randomness and chance, positive or negative (the metaphorical black swan amid the white flock) has a lot to do with life and success, you will enjoy this book. If you take yourself too seriously and conflate luck with skill, you won’t

Pick it up, and give it a read…

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August 15, 2008 by Joel.

There are so many great apps out there in the iPhone/iPod ecosystem right now. The variety is amazing; this is the sort of thing that the mobile device platform has needed — an easy, inexpensive, foolproof way to extend your device. I’d like to single out DataCase from Veiosoft for kudos. A really innovative app, a way of using the device as a wireless memory key…take a look…and if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch, it will be $6.99 well spent.

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August 9, 2008 by Joel.

Spent the weekend of August 1-3 in the vicinity of Ronceverte, WV at the Greenbrier River Campground at Bassclave 2008. Actually arrived about 11:45PM on July 31, having left Chapel Hill after dinner that day. Funny thing with my GPS; I’d entered the Lat/Lon coordinates from the campground’s website, but either I “fatfingered” them, or there was some other error, as my GPS left me about 2 miles from the campground in the middle of nowhere. However, I found my way there, and Drew Nix, clave organizer extraordinary, was there waiting up for me.

Floated the river on Friday and Saturday. On Friday, we did the Pence Springs to Talcott run, and on Saturday went from the campground downstream about 3.5 miles. The fishing was fun, but could have been a bit more productive. Caught some nice bass, but the fellowship is the best thing about the ‘clave. The pictures tell the story better than I can….

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July 30, 2008 by Joel.

Heading to Bassclave 2008 tomorrow…this year it’s on the Greenbrier River in West Virginia…will post pictures and a report when I get back!

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July 30, 2008 by Joel.

I’m taking some time off this week…I worked Tuesday, but that’s all this week…meetings I needed to attend. Jan and I went to Jordan Lake again today. Monday was wonderful, almost like having the lake to ourselves. Today was just as good. Got there about 10AM, put the boat in the water, and headed to “our” beach. Threw balls & frisbees to the dogs…have to get that tennis ball a long way out to wear out Lessa. Anakin, as you can see, likes to stay closer to shore. Stayed about 4 hours, until the weather started to look like it was changing. Lessa wanted to fetch more balls, but it was time to go. As we motored back to the ramp, we could see the clouds building to the west. Drove home through some showers, the timing was perfect!

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July 27, 2008 by Joel.

Our neighbors came over for some wine & watermelon on the patio last night. A fine evening to listen to tree frogs and enjoy July in the south. He’s the facilities manager at a local “eco institute”, and they have some new piglets there. As we were visiting, his cell buzzed with a text message…it seems that the pigs had opened the gate, but were still in the electric fence. No emergency, but one that would take attention in the morning. With apologies to Robert Redford, my wife asked our neighbor if he was a Pig Whisperer (and apparently, this was the title of a 1996 episode of “Spin City”, but heck, I’d never even heard of that). She then mused that perhaps “Dances with Pigs” might be more appropriate. At any rate, we ordered a “pig whisperer” t-shirt for him as a gag. You too can have one if you feel the need!

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July 19, 2008 by Joel.

A while back, probably sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, I uploaded pictures to Picasa from my July 2006 canoe trip into Quetico Provincial Park with my scout troop. It just sat, and I’d not done anything with it. However, earlier this summer, a colleague sent me a Picasa album link from a conference he was attending, and he had used the map tagging features that Google has added. This got me to thinking that I ought to, before my memory completely passes on that trip, try to tag locations on the map for this set of pictures. That’s what I’ve done in this Picasa album. I’d done a fairly detailed writeup of this trip back in 2006, but it was fun to try to tag exact picture locations. I’m close with a lot of them, but some are a bit of a WAG ;-). It’s an interesting feature. Now, hmmm…seems like that thinking about my last blog post on MobileMe, and the galleries, that an iPhone could get GPS info and automatically tag a picture in a map overlay…heck, maybe this feature is already there! I dunno…no iPhone for this boy for a while…about 6 months left on my Alltel contract with my current phone and while $200 for a termination fee isn’t a lot, it irks me to pay that, so I won’t!

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July 19, 2008 by Joel.

I’m sitting here this evening happily listening to the rain; it’s been dry here in Central NC and rain is good! I’ve been playing a bit with Apple’s MobileMe. I was a dotMac subscriber, but didn’t use it much except for file storage, and synching contacts & calendars between my home and work Macs. I like MobileMe, and am using more and more of it. It’s a more focused tool, with mail, contacts, calendar, photo gallery (more on this in a bit), and files (iDisk). One thing I like is the ability to allocate the 20GB of storage between files and email; if you don’t have much in your @mac.com or @me.com mail account (like me, as I don’t really use it), you can shunt more of the storage over to files. I’ve also started connecting my iPod Touch to MobileMe for its contacts & calendar; works very well with the 2.0 software. I’ve put a couple of photo collections in the gallery tool, and it’s a very nice way to present pictures; very flexible end user experience. Here are two examples, Bassclave 2005 and Bassclave 2007. I also have some miscellaneous flyfishing pictures in another gallery, and I’ve now found an app feature that really gives me a Jones for an iPhone…you can take a picture and immediately load it to a nicely formatted gallery on the web (via email upload). With my iPod Touch, I can upload pictures in the same way over email, but only pictures that are already on the device, obviously, as it doesn’t have a camera ;-). The updated Facebook App for the iPhone/iPod Touch (v1.1) also allows uploading of pictures, and that’s cool, but that’s outside of the focus of this post.

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July 13, 2008 by Joel.

Got up and about about 7:30 this morning, fixed breakfast, read the New & Observer, then loaded up the boat and the dogs to go to Jordan Lake for a few hours. Got to Fearrington Point about 10AM. Tried the first set of ramps (nice little beach there for loading/unloading dogs). However, there was so much sand on those ramps I went to the second set (the 4-ramp complex). Dropped the boat in the water, and motored about 3 miles to our favorite lake beach (it’s the one on the south side of the point). Threw frisbees & foxtails to the dogs, read the NY Times, floated on rafts, and were generally lazy until early afternoon. Back now (doh!) and the boat is drying out…looks like thunderstorms well out to the west, coming out of the foothills. Need to close up the boat before going out to dinner tonight.

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July 12, 2008 by Joel.

I have an iPod Touch, so I don’t get all the benefits of the new software, but there is some cool stuff enabled by the update. The app store seems to be really taking off with the apps multiplying like proverbial rabbits. Like many folks, I think that the Remote app is just such a great concept. For those who’ve been under a rock, this free app (from Apple) lets you control the iTunes library on a machine reachable with the wifi connection. As I’ve written in this space before, I’ve got a Mac Mini as a media center computer in my den, hooked up to a set of Bose Companion 5 speakers. Really works well for controlling that. It’s easy to switch to another library on another computer, such as the one on my iMac. Just a really great concept; kudos, Apple!

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