Imagine this:

"You get to choose your doctor. If you don’t like him, you can go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any doctor will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of patients being made to wait because other patients come first."

I modified the paragraph, it was originally written for a dog. Theodore Dalrymple writes "Man vs. Mutt". He writes:

"In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog."

I am not sure I agree with him. However, I as far as my lab goes, in the USA, it is far easier to take care of her health care than mine.

The new Nikon Coolpix S1000pj has a built in projector. How cool is that? A projector on a point and shoot camera. Here is a video (demo starts at 1:24), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXlKWbTLXAw

Over the years I have tried many email approaches. In the early days I used Pine (Program for Internet News & Email). Pine was ok.

Later I used Eudora. I liked Eudora. I especially liked that the content was written in plain text files to the application directory. Years later when I no longer used Eudora I could still search the files with a text editor.

At the tail end of my Eudora days, I was getting a lot of peer pressure to use Outlook. I finally gave in. Over two years, I tried to make Outlook work for me. It never did. 

I started using Gmail while I searched for a new email client. I soon found that Gmail reminded me of the early Eudora clients, no bells or whistles, it just worked. As an added benefit I had all the advantages and reach of the web. Eventually I stopped looking for a substitute client and moved to webmail 100%. 

I really like Gmail. 

That being said, I often wished I could send email without the “on behalf of user@domain.com” and simply send as “user@domain.com”. This week I got my wish.

I am in mail nirvana.

Here are the instructions if you are interested http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html

Update: the idea is solid and long awaited. However, in my case, my organization uses my main identity password for SMTP. Even though the connection is using SSL, I did not feel comfortable using my password. 

Instead I setup my own SMPT server. This was OK. However, I soon began to deal with the common issues of running your own server. I really want to be using “user@domain.com” but due to time constraints I have gone back to “on behalf of user@domain.com” for now.

As you start to travel the world your perspective certainly changes. I grewup in many different countries due to my fathers work. Even so, I am still surprised when I travel and experience firsthand the extremes of uneven wealth distribution. In certain destinations I marvel at the almost miraculous population density. Yet in other cases I am awaken and surprised by the everyday security realities. 

When you return home, the contrast certainly hits you.

Many have written about the Chinese Foxconn employee who committed suicide after losing an iPhone prototype. Oreilly writes a thoughtful piece, "Seeing Our Culture with Fresh Eyes". He ponders a look back at our current culture in 100 years:

"What will people think of our enormous steak dinners and obese portions of food? That's on the cusp of changing. What will they think of our profligate use of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources? Our assumption that the American way of life will go on forever, just as it is, much as the British thought their empire would go on forever? What about our assumptions about unlimited technological progress? Will science fiction visions of star flight or "the Singularity" seem as quaint as "the White Man's Burden"?"

STM.NET on MSDN DevLabs, "Transactional memory is a technology that frees developers from worrying about the mechanics of fine-grained locking and synchronization in multithreaded applications by providing transactional semantics for reading and writing to memory.  It enables developers to focus on application logic instead of the details of memory I/O when building multi-core and many-core programs." [Via Somasegar]

I got my Google Voice invitation late last night. I immediately selected my number and setup my account.

I have been using it exclusively all day and I really really like it. The service is way beyond anything else in the market. 

The integration into the Android OS is great, the application is transparent. I also get to choose the level of use. Everything from "Use Google Voice for all calls" to "Only user Google Voice for International Calls".

I am really happy I went with Android instead of the iPhone, see "Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core: Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store". 

Google Voice is currently available by invite only. You can request and invitation here, http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

I came across the following graphic on retention:

Many programs focus on teaching students a mastery of the fundamentals. However, in many technical fields education is short lived and continuous learning is the norm. Does learning to learn then trump a mastery of the fundamentals? Or is learning the fundamentals the first step in learning to learn?

If we become autodidactic masters, would we not then be able to overcome any learning gaps? 

In the same vein, I was thinking about my own personal learning cycle. Here is what I am currently doing:

1) Build a knowledge base

    - read, read, read

2) Test your knowledge

     - test, experiment, and challenge

3) Summarize and structure your findings

    - write, write, write

4) Teach what you have learned

    - explain it to others

The process is often iterative in steps and in cycle.

Something that was not obvious to me was "self feedback". On a traditional teaching structure, the feedback comes from the instructor. In self teaching, you give feedback to your self.

I love this news, Redfin Turns Profitable, Real Estate Industry Shudders.

I recently heard someone say, “If the user model is right, performance will follow”. The comment made think of the successful software models in the last 10 years. I am thinking of web models like HTTP, HTML, XML, and RSS. All of these had massive adoption at inception and performance followed.

I have been designing software for many years. However, I have yet to start a project by saying, “What would be the simplest model for the user?” I wonder how many do.