So, the best corporate April Fool’s joke I’ve seen today comes from Antares Audio Technologies, makers of the ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch correcting audio plugin, which is used extensively throughout the recording industry, though some producers and vocalists will deny it. There’s a great article in the New Yorker about the impact Auto-Tune has had on…
I’ve been playing around with the face recognition feature in the newest version of iPhoto, and I’m pretty impressed with how well it works. And with how well it fails. I went through the process of confirming/teaching iPhoto to recognize me on photos where it had assigned a high probability that a photo was me,…
While normally I avoid participating in chain-letter type things, for some reason this one caught my imagination when it showed up in my Facebook news feed this morning. It is spreading like an extremely infectious disease on Facebook, and I’ve been amused and surprised about the things I’m learning about friends of mine, so I…
Rather than doing a year-in-review in words, I’ll just provide this very cool time-lapse video by Eirik Solheim that shows a year passing on a fixed landscape in 40 seconds. Incredibly cool. (Tip of the hat to Gizmodo for this one). A two minute version and HD versions of both are available too, as are…
Today it is bitterly cold in Boulder, currently registering -4 degrees Fahrenheit. I returned to Hoth this afternoon from the relative warmth of San Francisco, after attending last night’s excellent Topspin holiday party. As I was catching up on my Slashdot feed, it came to my attention that scientists have discovered a sixth region of…
I cannot deny it – I love beer. My “gateway beer” that taught me there was a whole universe outside of mass-produced beer was Pete’s Wicked Ale, introduced to me when I arrived in the Bay Area to attend Stanford in 1989. Then, during my junior year, I spent six months in 1992 living in…
When I was in Pennsylvania two weeks ago for Thanksgiving with Katherine’s extended family, we took a trip in to Philadelphia to see the new Comcast corporate headquarters building, recently opened, and a new downtown landmark (chock full of green design and LEED goodness). The coolest part of the new Comcast building is the giant,…
I’m very pleased with the people Obama is bringing on board his administration. In David Brooks’ op-ed piece in the NY Times today, he refers to this new administration as the valedictocracy – rule by those who graduated first in their high school classes. Having been valedictorian of my high school graduating class in 1989,…
I just bought myself a brand new MacBook Air, with a 128GB flash drive and the faster graphics. It runs much faster than the first-gen one I have and also runs much cooler, so in general I’m a happy guy. But twice now, I’ve hooked up the ethernet dongle and plugged it into a network…
After spending a moment looking back at the past in my previous post, now it is time to look into the future. Foundry Group invested in a company called Oblong about a year ago, but when we made our investment, we couldn’t say much at the time (though Brad did hint about their Minority Report…