1776. America is born. 1945. America claims the leadership of the developed world. 2008. America reclaims its position. (more tomorrow.)
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
I Needed That.
“So build something that you use all the time, and, unless you’re really weird and different from everyone else, you’ve got a potential winner.” – Tim Bray.
Decision 2008, and My Vote Goes to…
Attention, St. Anthony Villagers, your sample ballots are here (Hennepin | Ramsey) My votes; Presidential & Vice Presidential: Barak Obama & Joe Biden U.S. Senator: Dean Barkley U.S. Representative District 5: Keith Ellison U.S. State Representative District 54a: Mindy Greiling Constitutional Amendment: Clean Water, Wildlife, Cultural Heritage and Natural Area: Yes. Overall, the decisions were …
TiVo Has Until Feb ’09
“But TiVo has repeatedly failed to gain traction in the marketplace even though it has been hard at work creating innovative ad solutions and coming up with ways to help advertisers and networks recoup ad dollars.” – Meghan Keane I’d flip it around – Tivo has failed to gain traction specifically because it’s been hard …
How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 1
There are a number of ways increase Ruby on Rails performance through caching. Caching works because things don’t change….or don’t change frequently. In Cullect, almost everything is dynamic, even Cullect’s HTML presentation format has 3 different states depending on access privileges and there are 8 other presentation formats available. The standard page, action, and fragment …
Continue reading “How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 1”
Paralympics: Wired, Olympics: Tired
If para-athletes continue to innovate and set records like this – space technology knees and backflipping wheelchairs – it’ll be their games, not their fully-able-bodied counterparts’, that will be the more inspiring viewing. (thanks to Boing Boing for the pointers)
Information as Milk or Wine?
I’ve been thinking about information – ‘news’ if you will – quite a bit lately – in the context of other things we ‘consume’ – beverages. Milk Wine Kids drink it Adults drink it Paired with cookies Paired with dinner Expires/Smells funny “Gets better with age” Homogenized Vintage Price varies …
Phone Home, Redux
In the past two weeks, Jen and I have both replaced our mobile phones. A process too much akin to purchasing a new car or house for my comfort. Just a few years ago, phones were still tied to a geographic location. Home, work, phone booth on the corner. Amusing to think that ‘the place …
Un-Plumb
We’ve been introduced to a number of crazy characters this election season; Joe Sixpack, Hockey Mom, Senator Government, and Joe the Plumber. Signs of Jumping the Shark #18: “Introduction of new characters to revive interest, particularly young, cute children who are clearly intended to replace regulars who once were but have grown up.” “In the …
Except-tional.
“Startups are all about launching things that are not ready for prime time—because startups don’t live in prime time. You can always rush to make something ready if people like it. Except when you can’t.” – Evan William, Founder of Blogger.com, Twitter.com