You may have already seen this, but if not - Randy Pausch passed away yesterday so I thought it fitting to link to it today. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given only a very short time to live. Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. It’s definitely worth a listen beyond the simple draw of morbid fascination.

My company hasn’t embraced Vista. We have been ordering Windows XP “downgrades” for months and staving off the inevitable as long as possible. Today I received in a machine that I needed to set up for engineering, and it came in with Visa Business. A mistake, but I figured as long as I had it here, I might as well mess around with it. So far I am not very impressed. There hasn’t been any crashing to speak of, so that much is good news, but annoyances abound, and many of the things I hated about XP are still there.
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The first open phone is already out (for developers) called the Neo Freerunner. By “open” I mean that the OS is fully documented, and customizable by those with the skills to modify it. It is using Openmoko which is the competing open mobile operating system (OS) to Google’s Android mobile OS (still no phones with that yet as far as I know). Both projects are leveraging the linux kernel which makes this exciting to me. You can use the new $400 device (which is currently sold out) on the AT&T network, but its mainly going to Universities for use in computer science classes right now.
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We were out at the LI Irish Fest which was held at the Abbess Farm in Calverton from about 2 until 11 on Saturday, and I had been having such a good time I had forgotten to take any pictures at all. All I have are some crappy shots from a cell phone, though I think Sport had a camera with him. There were 7 tents of various sizes, all very impressive. I quipped that we should find out how much it costs to have one of these put up, so we wouldn’t need to set up any tents at all when we camp; We could just partition the huge thing into rooms! In fact, the only thing that wasn’t impressive about the fest was the turn out. I don’t know if it was a lack of advertising or what, but there were some awesome bands playing to nearly empty tents which was a shame. The lack of crowds was very welcome to me personally, however - I just hope they broke even at least. Those tents were probably not cheap.
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Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…
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