Skype would be a great solution for me if someone offered an ATA for it, so that my computer doesn’t have to be on all the time.

Though since Skype uses some sort of P2P node system, I suspect an ATA, with some sort of QOS packet prioritzation system, might be bad for your regular Internet usage.

Hm.

So there’s a competitor to Skype now:

Gizmo ? A free phone for your computer

Gizmo is a Free Phone for Your Computer
That makes calling as easy as instant messaging

Interesting. Some of the features that Gizmo has that Skype doesn’t is:

-Free call in numbers (that require 2 steps)

-Based on a standard - SIP

-Doesn’t hog memory and bandwidth (apparently)

I’m not sure you can call someone on the Skype network with it, but since this is a standard (SIP), presumably you can call someone on Vonage possibly?

Interesting match up - anyone have any experiences with this?

The concept of privacy varies greatly from country to country.

Check out what privacy can mean in some parts of China:

Beijing Acid Blog #49 : Designing for Chinese notions of privacy

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning in Beijing’s early Fall. I’m brushing my teeth and hear a knock on the door followed by a curt common in Mandarin. Assuming one of my roommates will answer the door, I do nothing. A few seconds later the door opens and a man’s voice yells something in Mandarin that sounds like “Anybody home?” I look into the hallway to see who it is. I don’t recognize him. He looks out of place, as if he doesn’t know anybody in our house. The man looks at me with a bit of surprise and curiosity, then casually leaves our house… He’s not a burglar and his actions are not culturally inappropriate.

A few months ago we were interviewing a migrant workers and asked her how she communicates with her children in her hometown. One way is by snail mail. Remote villages cluster around small towns that have markets and phones. The towns also have a post office where a bag of mail is emptied onto a table and local residents are expected to collect mail addressed to them. Apparently, it’s common practice for residents to open other people’s mail to satisfy their curiosity. Again, there’s nothing really culturally inappropriate with that. Perhaps it’s even necessary for people to have the ability to look through other

Wow.

The Breaking Point - New York Times

”That’s not how you would manage a national, let alone an international, economy,” he explained. ”That’s the part that is scary. You draw some assumptions and then say, ‘O.K., based on these assumptions, let’s go forward and consume like hell and burn like hell.”’ When I asked whether the kingdom could produce 20 million barrels a day — about twice what it is producing today from fields that may be past their prime — Husseini paused for a second or two. It wasn’t clear if he was taking a moment to figure out the answer or if he needed a moment to decide if he should utter it. He finally replied with a single word: No.

Peak Oil isn’t just about running out of oil, as most people think - it’s about not being able to produce enough to meet the constantly growing need.

If you have some time, I suggest you read this piece.

The ending of this piece is poignant:

In the political and corporate realms of the oil world, there are few incentives to be forthright. Executives of major oil companies have been reluctant to raise alarms; the mere mention of scarce supplies could alienate the governments that hand out lucrative exploration contracts and also send a message to investors that oil companies, though wildly profitable at the moment, have a Malthusian long-term future. Fortunately, that attitude seems to be beginning to change. Chevron’s ”easy oil is over” advertising campaign is an indication that even the boosters of an oil-drenched future are not as bullish as they once were.

Politicians remain in the dark. During the 2004 presidential campaign, which occurred as gas prices were rising to record levels, the debate on energy policy was all but nonexistent. The Bush campaign produced an advertisement that concluded: ”Some people have wacky ideas. Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That’s John Kerry.” Although many environmentalists would have been delighted if Kerry had proposed that during the campaign, in fact the ad was referring to a 50-cents-a-gallon tax that Kerry supported 11 years ago as part of a package of measures to reduce the deficit. (The gas tax never made it to a vote in the Senate.) Kerry made no mention of taxing gasoline during the campaign; his proposal for doing something about high gas prices was to pressure OPEC to increase supplies.

Husseini, for one, doesn’t buy that approach. ”Everybody is looking at the producers to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, as if it’s our job to fix everybody’s problems,” he told me. ”It’s not our problem to tell a democratically elected government that you have to do something about your runaway consumers. If your government can’t do the job, you can’t expect other governments to do it for them.” Back in the 70’s, President Carter called for the moral equivalent of war to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; he was not re-elected. Since then, few politicians have spoken of an energy crisis or suggested that major policy changes are necessary to avert one. The energy bill signed earlier this month by President Bush did not even raise fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars. When a crisis comes — whether in a year or 2 or 10 — it will be all the more painful because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it.

Crisis indeed.

So tonight I almost met ChrisMartin and Gwyneth Paltrow. Oh, and almost Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech.

Huh? What? Keep reading! There’s even a video at the end.

Tonight I went to Coldplay concert in Mountain View. I went to one at the same venue in 2003 - so I have a basis for comparison.

This time I had a pretty good seat because of the perk of being a Mountain View resident:

Section 202, Row C. Even better, being a dorky tech guy, I got the seat right next to the camera, light board, and sound board:

I know a lot about television cameras having worked in a professional grade TV studio back in Middle School (but that’s another story).

Here’s a shot of the DJ who played music before the show, and his DJing equipment. There’s even a PowerBook 12″.

At one point, he was using Microsoft Entourage 2004, the product I used to work on. Neato!

I’m such a dork - here’s a picture of the supercool light board:

I also got to see some notes from their concert on Wednesday at the Amphitheater at Clark County, Washington:

You can tell from this photo that Black Mountain was touring with Coldplay. They were actually pretty good, unlike the opening band for the 2003 concert.

Anyway, so right before the concert starts, Chris Martin’s (the lead singer) wife shows up with her Entourage. Here’s a picture of just Gwen:

Apple, their daughter wasn’t in the Entourage that came with Gwen. I would’ve taken more photos, but the bodyguard didn’t quite appreciate it.
Gwen was there for almost the entire concert. It was pretty surreal being about 7 feet away from the lead singer’s spouse. She truly enjoyed the concert and had a rocking time, dancing through most of the songs. It was pretty special to see that! It’s not often you see the spouse of the artist next to you, who is also a star. Very very cool.

I wish I had more photos of Gwen without her hood on - but, well, it was pretty darn cold so I don’t blame her for keeping it on.

Back to the show, Coldplay had this massive digital screen that was used very effectively:

Though my seats were pretty darn good, it was often hard to see Chris because the stage lights were so bright. Fortunately, I could closely watch the show from the camera next to me:

I had read that Coldplay really tried to improve their stage presence from the 2003 tour. And it really showed. The lighting was really awesome (must’ve cost a pretty penny), and Chris did a great job of using more and more of the stage. I hear that Bono and U2 are the gold standard for stage usage - I’ll find out in October when I see them in Oakland.

That said, while Coldplay had a much better show than 2003, and got in some great San Francisco references, as well as some not-on-the-album improvisation, Chris Martin still looked a bit awkward on stage. Practice makes perfect I suppose, and time will tell.

That said, Chris did a great job of trying to include the audience more. Such as when he ran off the stage and up to where I was sitting. Yep, just like my Andy Lau experience in Hong Kong - except far better. I was about 7 feet away from him:

That mop of hair on the right of Chris might be Gwen actually!

Here’s a brief video of him jumping and running back to the stage: ChrisMartin.AVI

Overall, this was a great show. Thanks for coming by Coldplay!

Scott, an architect at MSN, is such a tease with this blog entry:

Scott’s “SiteExperts” Place: What’s this?

Well, if you click it, it brings you to this page: http://www.start.com/developer/

Start speculating indeed…

Alright, enough prodding guys.

Yes, I use FolderShare. And I love it. So much so that I’ve been telling lots of other people about it. And they love it too.

My biggest problem is that I have roughly 4-5 computers - and I have files on all of them. All I want is the same working set of files on all my computers, all the time. If I make a change on my Tablet, I want my PowerBook to have the change. If I make a change on my PC at home, I want all my other PCs to have it.

(BTW, the Windows Offline Folders stuff is painful to use. Sometimes if you create a folder in an offline folder, it doesn’t replicate. I don’t get it.)

For a while I tried using a usb keychain. That sucked and was slow.

Then I bought a copy of Groove. Groove was fantastic and saved me so much time. So I used it more and more and more. And it got slower and slower and slower. Didn’t quite meet my needs if I couldn’t sync my iTunes folder and my photos folder. And it didn’t have Mac support.

Fortunately Dan was aware of my Mac-pains and forwarded me a blog entry that FolderShare was beta testing their Mac client.

FolderShare! I had looked at that before… their pricing scheme had changed and become far more user friendly. Woot! Met my needs!

I installed it on my PC’s, and it worked like a charm. It happily synced all 7442 photos of mine, from PC to PC. It happily synced 1306 iTunes files, from PC to PC.

And the Mac beta… well… uh… to be honest, it deleted a lot of my files because of some bugs I helped them find. Good thing for backups. And now those bugs are fixed so my Mac has all the same files as well. Rock solid!

Best yet, FolderShare now works with Windows Desktop Search (coincidentally the product I work on at Microsoft), so I can search all my PC’s from their web interface. Neat!

My next step with FolderShare is to setup an ultra cheap PC at my parents place in NY, so that all my files are replicated there as well for backup. [I mean, it's not like an earthquake will swallow up my PCs in California, and a terrorists will blow up NYC at the same time, right?] The Iomega Network Hard Drive looks interesting… but there’s not enough details about how it works to satisfy me.

Hey FolderShare guys - if you’re reading this, could you please make this improvement as soon as possible:

Auto-Update capability - so I don’t have to manually check for updates? This 2.5.7 update looks pretty important!

Thanks!

Finally, I must note that Groove is still an awesome app - especially if you’re looking for decentralized collaboration. Alas, I don’t need to collaborate with myself - just sync files and folders. Give Groove a try! It really is a Virtual Office.

MSN Money - Extra: Gas up 20 cents in three weeks

Regular Mid Prem Diesel
California $2.76 $2.94 $2.99 $3.12

Congratulations California for having the highest gas prices in the nation!

Now, to take on the Europeans!

Even at $2.50 a gallon, U.S. gasoline prices remain less than half of those paid in Europe. In early August, a gallon of fuel would have cost you $5.74 in Belgium, $5.95 in the United Kingdom, and a startling $6.50 in the Netherlands.

Come on California! I know we can do it!