Embracing Chaos

Even though Apple products are expensive, there’s a surprising similarity between Apple and Wal-Mart: both companies push hard on other parts of the value chain to deliver lower prices for consumers.
In Walmart’s case, it’s generally suppliers who get squeezed.  Walmart demands that manufacturers of goods produce them at the lowest possible price so that Walmart can charge [...]

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Apple has done a fabulous job in recent years of asserting itself as a major player in the computer industry.  One of their tools for accomplishing this has been a fanatical commitment to high-quality products.  They strive to make every product they offer to be the best in its class, and they’ve largely succeeded at [...]

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Recently some of my friends were discussing solar activity, and I learned that there’s a system for rating geomagnetic storms.  This recent one was a G3, which is fairly common and not that serious.  But about once per month on average there will be a G4 storm which can interfere with GPS navigation and even [...]

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My buddy Scotto wrote a play titled “When I come to my senses, I’m alive!” which will be performed at Annex Theater on April 23 –  May 22.  I read an early draft of the script and am quite excited to see it performed.
I don’t want to give too much away, but from watching the [...]

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Arrington managed to get his hands on an iPad for a test drive before launch day, presumably from a company that had been given one to build apps for it. His description of the security under which these devices were loaned out is so funny I just have to share it with y’all…
Scores of [...]

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Nothing exciting here to report, but I thought I’d share pointers to some of the jokes I’ve stumbled upon that I like.
UniXKCD command line console

My favorite webcomic, Randall Monroe’s brilliant XKCD, is running a command-line version of itself today.  A few commands you might want to try include:

find
wget http://xkcd.com/
Make me a sandwich
go west

Google renames itself [...]

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I’d like to extend congratulations out to all my friends over on the Google chat team.  They just announced a set of improvements to the web based chat clients in both iGoogle and Orkut.  If you haven’t been there in a while, Orkut is Google’s original social networking site that was born around the time [...]

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I love the Creative Commons licenses.  I use them for most of my photos and rely heavily on other people’s CC licensed material.  As a result, my photos have ended up in all sorts of fascinating places — in magazines, on liquor bottles, and who knows where else! A great feature of CC licenses for [...]

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I recently picked up a book called Secrets of Mental Math written by one of my college math professors.  It has very practical advice on how to learn to multiply large numbers in your head.  He gives practical advice on necessary skills like addition, subtraction, and related mathematical trivia.  To practice multiplying numbers in your [...]

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It took a long time, but EmbracingChaos has finally escaped form Typepad.  About a year ago (just before the end of the previous billing cycle) I started trying to move this blog to blogger.  I like Google’s pace of development and wanted to hop on the blogger train and get automatic upgrades for everything they [...]

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