Author: Paul

Sharing the shiny bits of life since I can remember. I run http://greenergrassmedia.com/.
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Musicians are strong

…Stronger than me.

One line I will always remember is from a James Taylor song, “That’s Why I’m Here.” He sings:

Perfect strangers can call you by name
Pay good money to hear fire and rain
Again and again and again

And he has sung “Fire and Rain” more times than I can possibly imagine. If I were a popular musician, I might puke if I were asked to sing a song one more time.

At South by Southwest, I discovered that most of the bands there performed more than seven times in that one-week span. That’s not any kind of a record – but just one week of singing a song over and over would do me in.

So let’s give it up for professional musicians. Hug one you know.

(The photo is a still from a video I took of the band Tennis.)

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Big brother?

Audi’s new A6 uses GPS and Google Maps to anticipate hills – so it knows when to upshift or downshift the transmission at just the right second. (Millisecond.) This increases performance and efficiency.

So the internet is even creeping into your future car’s transmission!

I do not say this in an alarmist manner. Rather, I see it as an exciting thing. This is technology being used well.

I think it’s even cooler when technology like that is used to bring clean water to people who might otherwise die. A friend of a friend, Erik Hersman, is doing stuff like that for Africa.

(By the way, I do have a big brother, in real life. He’s great. And by the way, this version of the A6 will hit US showrooms late in the summer of 2011. Stand in line now… just kidding.)

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Not fun but necessary

Dust accumulates in this corner about once a week. Maybe there is some kind of a vortex of air and dust particles that causes it to accumulate at an unnatural rate. In any case, I know that I must sweep it up or eventually there will be a dust pile that will take over the house.

Similarly, there are tasks we need to do regularly or we may pay the price. One price that might be huge relates to your data. When was the last time you backed up your data? If it wasn’t this week, think of the time you would lose if your hard drive crashed.

Solution? Easy. Buy an external hard drive.

Mac: Attach the drive and it will walk you through Time Machine, a built-in program. Apple has instructions here, if you need help.

Windows? Just about any external hard drive comes with a program to do automatic backups.

My recommendation is to leave the drive attached and let it do your backups regularly.

A word of caution: if you think your computer is too new to require this precaution, think again. My brother’s hard drive died last week after just 18 months.

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Apple Design decisions

I’ve always thought it was strange that Apple went in opposite directions for their iPad and iPhone lines.

Version 1 of the iPad has rectangular edges. Version 2 has a clamshell design.

The iPhone? Version 3 has a clamshell design. Version 4 has rectangular edges.

Apple is going divergent directions with these two product lines.

Preference for me? I like the clamshell.

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Archive it

We recently got rid of a bunch of books. One of them was “The World of Donald Evans.” My parents gave it to me as a birthday gift, a long time ago. It’s a fascinating look at fictional stamps this artist created before he died at the age of 31.

I realized I had not looked at the book in almost as long as I’ve owned it. So I sold it on Amazon… but not before I took some representative photos of the content. So now I can remember that lovely gift, without my kids having to give it to a charity shop when I die. And having to take the time to do so. If they want to dig through my old hard drives, they can do so. But those will take up the space of just a few shoe boxes. Or by then, a small flash drive. Or a small bit of the cloud. (But I like owning my own data!!)

I’ve written about this before: here and here. But I feel strongly enough about it that I wanted to remind you of this concept.

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John Denver contest

Update: We have a winner! (See the end.)

You can win a free copy of a John Denver Greatest Hits CD – with Chinese packaging!!

To win, all you need to do is simply comment on this post.

Yes, it’s that easy. No tweet my blog, join my Facebook page, sell me your first-born child stuff.

This 2-CD set is brand new. It even still has the shrink wrap on it. (So I don’t know if John tries to sing his hits in Chinese. The winner will have to tell us.)

The lucky winner will be randomly chosen at 6 pm mountain time, on Thursday, April 14th. I’ll announce the winner on this blog post. (I’ll also contact them by email.) Sadly, I cannot ship outside the USA, as I’m too crazy-busy to make a special trip to the post office.

The winner, picked unseen out of a salad bowl by my daughter Rachel, is Carl Irby! Congrats, Carl!! The CD will be headed your way in tomorrow’s mail.

And special thanks to Elizabeth, who provided the inspiration for this post.

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Cool new technology

At the Denver Auto Show, the Saab display was amazing. Not for the cars (though I do like the new 9-5) but rather for the giant screen at the end of their rectangle. It was one giant TV. (Sadly, the top photo does not do it justice.) It was made of LED panels that were assembled for the show. Think: one of those giant displays at a big-city football field, only one that the roadies can take apart and reassemble multiple times.

The lower photo shows a closeup of the backside of the display. Each panel section was about 2 x 3 feet and was made of lightweight white plastic.

Excellent.

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