JFNO’s Blog

A nice stunt, I was wondering if this was a new game. They certainly catch my attention and it is for a good cause.

Now I’m really on my way to make my reprap. I’ll try to post photos of the next components too as I make them, I’ll try to get the real camera and not my IPhone for those. The Sanguino maybe doesn’t look like much but it is a cool micro controller and even if I’m bad at soldering, it works.

Micro-loans are great and have never been easier than with Kiva. You can see my lender page there. It’s fun, but I think they should also make an RSS feed of my activities there, then I can link it to my FriendFeed stuff, and then we can all challenge each other to do more.

I was on the Plains of Abraham last sunday for Sir Paul McCartney show. Great night, my 7 years old daughter danced to the Beatles, the Wings, etc… The official report is that there were about 250000 people. I took the opportunity of taking some pics from my IPhone 3G. They are not very good but here they are.

Those were the people behind us:

And more of them

The scene from where we were

We Mostly watched this screen (the ones showing Paul McCartney are all overexposed)

Although the pictures are not that good it’s nice to get them wherever you want without carrying anything else than your phone. It also nice I uploaded them with the Wordpress IPhone app.

Go over the official Paul McCartney website for more informations.

A blog about hotel location for travel destination. We’ll try to keep it very focused on destinations and hotel location. We’ll see how it goes.

Once you start with video…

Go see it or press play. It is interesting and an easy introduction material to share.

In the eternal question of age and the entrepreneur here is some data: Paul Kedrosky: Age and the Entrepreneur. This is interesting and surprising for me, but something caught my eye in the report itself. If you read it they also talk about education and there is one place where they give sales figure and number of employee for all the company they studied. They split this in three category all, all with a finished diploma from an ivy league and all with only high school diploma. The numbers are

All : average sales of 5.7 millions USD and an average of 42 workers
All ivy league founder : average sales of 6.6 millions USD and an average of 55 workers
All high school founder : average sales of 2.2 millions USD and an average of 18 workers

I wished they had splitted the data more because the average sales per worker is really bugging me. The ivy league numbers is 121818 per worker, the high school number is 122222 per worker. Maybe I’m the only one focusing on this number, but I like seeing it as the average value produced by workers. Anyway here comes the real story the number for all the company is 135714 per worker. The gap is more than 10%, so there is one category which is performing better than the two the report writer decided to extract. So I guess non ivy league college are good.

Think about it it’s much easier that way. A couple weeks ago I got the customary phone call “we love you and your not locked in with a 21 years contract so would you want to lock in?” But before I said no, I realized they were saying something different. They were saying “You have been a customer (without a contract) with us for many years and we hope you’ll stay for many more years, we want to lower your monthly bill and offer you a phone without any obligation on your part.” I thought “this is too good to be true” so I ask about canceling conditions. They were really clear on the no obligation part, so I ask what the catch is. No catch, I just had to say I “planned” to keep my account with them. So I wrote down the name and the employee number of the person to whom I was talking and said sure.

Two weeks later I got a snail mail saying how they were happy I had renewed my contract with them for a gazillion years and that it would cost me to cancel. I received this snail mail the last day of the 15 days satisfaction guarantee. So I called and cancelled everything. I knew they were dirty, but outright lying.

Anyway Fido has lost a client, this was probably inevitable after Rogers bought them. There was a time when Fido was a different cell company and I was happy to be with the underdog. Now they are still different I guess. They will lie for no good reason.

Harry McCracken at PC World is complaining about Google Gears not being more successful. You can read the piece here: The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears (Harry McCracken/Techlog). What I’m wondering is who cares? Offline is a good idea for 5 years ago. Sure it would be nice, but when will it make sense to spend time making it work offline. You are much better spending the time making your application better online. Anyway I’ve not been really excited by it.