“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 …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
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 …
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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
First Crack 111. Patricia Cumbie’s ‘Where People Like Us Live’
From the unpublished First Crack archives, I bring you a conversation I recorded in July 2007 with Minneapolis novelist, Patricia Crumbie on her then – yet to be published – young adult novel, Where People Like Us Live. As you can tell from the links above, her book is now available. 🙂 In our conversation, we …
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Re-grarian
In March 2007 (18 months ago), I wrote the following 2 sentences – thinking there might be an interesting short story in behind them. A kind of eco-post-apocalyptic-new-world-esque thing. The contemporary version of re-visiting the grandparents’ abandon, run-down farm in Iowa. “Future world where ex-urbs are re-claimed by the government and turned back into farmland …
13.986
Driving back from WI this weekend, the car had alerted us a number of times we were running low on fuel. We didn’t stop. Until we reached the station closest to home (albeit one a few cents higher than the one we passed a few minutes earlier). The car has a 14 gallon tank. 14 …