April 2012

There were 33 posts published in April 2012 (this is page 1 of 4).

Lucid dream tracking with my Zeo

Lucid dream tracked by my Zeo


What you see above is a graph supplied by my Zeo sleep headset showing how I slept last night. The green bars indicate dream sleep while the orange bars indicate wake events. My Zeo does a fantastic job of tracking my sleep but there are moments when it gets confused. For instance, the two orange bars to the left don’t indicate when I was physically awake, they show when I was experiencing lucidity in my dream. You see, my mind was fully awake and aware in my dream. I became aware that I was dreaming while I was dreaming!
Continue reading →

Is Traffic Making Us Lonely?

One nation, on the road, indivisible.

This month’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” has contributed to an ongoing national debate over whether Americans are more socially isolated than ever before, and whether our dependence on electronic communications is keeping us from forming meaningful social ties.

But a generation ago — long before the invention of social media — a man named Donald Appleyard was investigating how automotive traffic isolates us from one another and diminishes our human connections.

via Is Traffic Making Us Lonely? – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Cheap Thoughts: automating appointments

After years of constant sessions spent updating our respective calendars, Kelly and I recently began to share our calendar details directly. It’s been much easier to know who’s supposed to be where, and it all happens automatically.

Why is it that coordinating appointments is still difficult if not impossible? I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists for charities and the like, and each one has important dates that they share with me. Yet, I have to manually add the information to my electronic calendar, risking typos and errors in the process.

Why hasn’t this been automated by now? An appointment has a set number of common fields, like date, time, description, participants, etc. It should be easy to standardize, yet everyone still does things the hard way. Why?

The iCalendar format was invented to solve this problem and most mail clients now support it. Still, it’s rare that I get an iCalendar invitation in my email: usually an event is described only in plain text. Why is this?

Facebook’s events are convenient for announcing events but this is only available to Facebook users. If someone came up with a easy-to-use calendaring server that put event details into an iCalendar format reached through a shortcut link, I think it would be heavily popular.

Ting – a different mobile phone provider


Frustrated by the glacial pace of Virgin Mobile to add newer phones to it’s prepaid service, a friend alerted me to a new phone provider called Ting. Ting was started by Tucows, the first company to bring competitive pricing to domain registrations, so I have high hopes Ting can shake up the telecom world.

Ting offers pay-for-what-you-use pricing plans. If you don’t use the minutes or data you signed up for, Ting credits your account. You have very finite control over how your plan looks as well, choosing very specific amounts of minutes, texts, and data you think you’ll use.

Ting also offers tethering with its phones, allowing you to share your phone’s Internet service with up to 5 computers. Ting also supports power users and seems open to allowing its subscribers to extend their phones’ functionality.

Overall, Ting looks to be setting itself up to make some waves in the mobile phone provider market. I hope to purchase one of Ting’s phones soon and give their service a test drive.

RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies

RTP seemed like a great idea 60 years ago but the tide has turned against the idea of putting job centers in the boonies. The younger workers (you know, the ones graduating from the schools that put the triangle in “Research Triangle Park”) don’t want to own cars. They want to work where they live. They want to work in a dynamic environment, not one with “large amounts of green space.” Collaboration with others spurs new ideas, not navel-gazing in green pastures (or former pastures, as is the case with RTP).

Skyrocketing gas prices and different priorities among today’s younger workforce are what dooms RTP. Yes, RTP could survive if it can become a place where one can not just work but also live and play, but it’s an uphill battle that RTP cannot win. Durham and Raleigh are light years ahead of RTP in this regard and that’s where the job growth will go.

Two years ago, concerned about competition from other research parks within the state and around the globe, RTP hired a New York urban design firm to update its master plan for the first time since the park was formed in 1959.

Since then, the urgency has also heightened as new competitors – Durham’s American Tobacco Campus and N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, to name two – have attracted numerous start-ups.

The park, meanwhile, has been hurt by appearing to be content to be a suburban, isolated campus environment, said Joel Marcus, CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a California company that has been in the park since 1998 and today owns nearly a million square feet of lab space in RTP.

“That’s really not today’s world,” he said.

via RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies, quick innovation – Economy – NewsObserver.com.

Beach trip

I had the pleasure Thursday of chaperoning Hallie and her 4th grade classmates on a trip to Carolina Beach, NC. I had been looking forward to it for weeks and it lived up to its promise.

We woke up at 5:20 Thursday and made it to the school at 6, where kids sat and chatted in the cafeteria while waiting for stragglers. At 6:30 the bus headed down the highway, and I followed it with three other dads in the minivan.
Continue reading →

Time to update the City of Raleigh flag?

Leo Suarez of the Raleigh Connoisseur has some similar thoughts on Raleigh’s flag that I’ve had. I think the time might be ripe to update the city flag and get something we can all be proud to fly!

In other cities, the flag is a sense of pride. Chicago and Washington DC have great flags and if you’re lucky, you may find citizens with tattoos of it. (anyone in Raleigh can claim having this?)

In 2004, the North American Vexillological Association did a survey against 150 US city flags. Respondents answered on a 0 to 10 scale on what they thought were a well designed flags. We ranked 56 on that list, highest North Carolina city by the way, so flag design may not be a huge feather in our cap.

Still, I want to ask this question; Why are there so few Raleigh flags around town?

via The Raleigh Connoisseur (April 25, 2012) – The City of Raleigh Flag.

Bricks vs. clicks

On pondering how Best Buy is going under, allegedly due to becoming Amazon’s “showroom,” I decided it’s quite the opposite. Best Buy is losing to the search engine.

How many times have you walked into a big-box store only to be completely lost and unable to find what you need? How helpful have the zombies in the blue shirts been in finding what you need? Who wants to have to hunt for a surly, clueless sales rep to help them when it’s so much easier to tell a search engine exactly what one wants and have the answer appear within seconds?

Search engines don’t hassle you with aggressive upselling, either. The now-defunct chain Circuit City used to do this and it drove me nuts. I’d have to fight off their commission-based sales associates to the point that it totally turned me off on shopping at their store. The sharks at Circuit City were the meatspace equivalent of pop-up ads.

I think big-box stores still have a chance, provided that they return to one of the time-tested methods of making customers happy: giving them what they want. Store associates should be well-versed in the products and also polite. Above all, they should be accessible. It worked for hundreds of years of retailing and it can still work – search engines and online retailers or not.