Tom Parette

While in London on business I did a side trip south to the coast to the resort town of Brighton. It was a neat town and in some ways a typical beach town with various shopping etc. but the most unusual thing was the beach was covered with gigantic stones. Not small stones like Nice France but golfball size and bigger in most cases. I took the picture below to give some scale to the size of the stones with a typical .5L water bottle. As usual transportation in Europe was very easy with the train ride from London to Brighton being about 1 hour with frequent routes and always on time.

I recently ran across the site http://www.mapmyrun.com and started using it to track my mileage. You map out your regular routes and log those on the dates you run them. Below is a view of my Sunday run using their mapping tool.

We all have personal data that needs to be secure. Be it password files, financial data etc.
I use Truecrypt to encrypt my important data. It does not matter if it is on a hard drive or a memory key any other media.  You create a Truecrypt volume or volumes of any size and it becomes a virtual encrypted drive. The product uses AES-256 encryption, is fully open source and best of all it is free. You can also use Truecrypt for whole-drive encryption. Using Truecrypt is easy, when you want to access the data you start up the UI, select the file, click mount and you will be prompted for the password.
I also have an encrypted volume on the memory key I have attached to my car keys. The file appears to be
a 1G file of random data but I would be comfortable handing it to someone knowing that with a strong encryption key the data is very secure.

Many large corporations have research divisions that have helped create many great products.  This is not one of them.  Microsoft Research created Songsmith.  The intent of this effort was for the user to sing lyrics and Songsmith will create the music accompaniment.  Below is the video created by Microsoft which itself is pretty bad.

The fun part of this story is people have been using this, playing lyrics of hit songs into it to see what the song would sound like.  The song below, Roxanne by the Police is a hilarious example of the music Soundsmith created.  People have posted many Songsmith songs on YouTube.

My guess is Microsoft intended this to be similar to Rock Band.  Not quite there but it is good for some laughs.

I have been on the road every week this year, Minneapolis, Tahoe, NYC, SFO and PHX and got to experience the “joy” of travel. One thing I noticed is a huge increase in the number of TSA agents at every airport. Let me first say based on the fear of being added to a body cavity search list, that the TSA does a superb job protecting us from all enemies foreign and domestic. (I hope that did the trick) But there is no lack of them. I must admit the lines to get through the checkpoints seem to be shorter so perhaps the increase in employees is working. It is amazing to think a brand new government agency evolved from nothing to a huge organization in such a short period of time. Perhaps we should keep this in mind as the discussion of new government entities are being discussed.
BTW, the TSA budget for FY 2009 is $7.1b, about $24 for each of the 300M U.S. citizens.

As I mentioned earlier I love my iPhone.  One of the many features I use is the iPod video capability while traveling.  Commercial air travel can be brutal but having a device you can load lots of video content to will make the trip a bit less painful.  The form factor of the iPhone is easier on an airplane compared to trying to watch video on a laptop.  Currently I have about 12 hours of video on mine including three Nova programs from PBS, the FDR series from WGBH, three episodes of Married with Children, a history of NASA DVD and an iTunes u web lecture from MIT.  Even with that,  a large music library and photos I have taken I still have ample capacity.

The TV programs recorded on the DVR are burned to a DVD in standard format.  I use Handbrake to rip them.  The latest version rips directly to iPod/iPhone format and are able to be directly imported to Itunes.

During my most recent trip Google Maps was a lifesaver as I didn’t know my way around Minneapolis and who wants to get lost when the temperature is near zero.

The genius of this device is the notion of a general purpose “platform” with capabilities that continue to be added with software updates.

Well the web site is nearly complete and I have been very impressed with Wordpress as a web publishing platform.  The installation to my hosted site was simple with clear instructions on how to create the connection to mysql.  The WYSISYG editor is easy to use with the capability to directly input HTML.  The only issue I ran across was the ability to put in a <br> as part of the simply did not work.

Overall I plan to use this for all my web publishing needs including some of the other sites I support.  Prior to this I had used NetObjects Fusion for several years which will now be put in retirement.

I thought I would use the opportunity of being on vacation over the holidays to redesign the site which has not changed in several years.  I am using Wordpress which not only provides a great framework and editing environment but allows me to blog directly to the site.  Expect to see changes over the next week or so as I complete this effort.