Are you an alien? If you lived on the star Alpha Centauri … relatively close … you saw Michael Jackson perform in the Super Bowl five years ago. However, if you live near the star Aldebaran, you just learned about World War II. One of my favorite blogs (Map Scroll) just posted an interesting star chart … click to maximize the image and give it some thought … this is our culture. I'm not sure I would initiate contact with humans!
Given my kids are all in college, or out in the working world, my wife and I decided that after 25 years with the same land-based phone number … we went cell phone only. Monday morning when I woke up the old familiar dial tone was gone, and the phones around our house were really just archaic art work!
This morning, by happenstance I received an invite to Google Voice … reminds you of the early days of GMail. I'm a somebody … Google Voice wants me! (learn about Google voice)
Anyhow, I signed up and activated a phone number (no charge). The service is free in terms of received phone calls and allows me to screen callers. It will even try to translate phone messages into text and send me an email when I receive a new call. Want to try the service? Leave me a message … I'll try to post some of the better comments here (either in audio or text mode).
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Watch a short video about Google Voice (less than two minutes long). Here also are two screen shots from one of my calls (voice mail notification). Click to view full sized.
One of my favorite engineering blogs has died … because of web 2.0 concerns on the part of MathWorks. In one sense the story behind Blinkdagger's demise is both happy and sad. Mathworks, the manufacturer of MATLAB and Simulink liked the this blog so much, they hired one of the two blog owners. However, Mathworks found it difficult to support an "open web" strategy once they made that hire. Read more via the Blinkdagger blog. Coincidentally Bill Ives just published a post which has links to employee social media policies for IBM, Intel and Sun.
I will very much miss posts such as MATLAB and Martians. However, Marvin lives!
Every once in a while I find something new in technical education which excites me … in this case its some classic physics lectures (1964) taught by Dr. Richard Feynman. Why?
Even if you don't care about physics, you need to link over to Project Tuva. Make certain you start up at least one lecture, and enjoy! My thanks to the eScience at Microsoft for making me aware of this initiative. This content will be added to the Engineering Learning Wiki and its Google custom search engine within the next few minutes. I've attached two screenshots below … click to expand and view full sized. The images doesn't do justice to the experience.