Town law requires spiffy lawn!

Remind me not to move to Orem, Utah. At some point my lawn had two thirty yard dumpsters, a porta-potty and a small prairie. The Boston Globe has a great odd & ends section. Excerpt below,
OREM, Utah—When 70-year-old Betty Perry was accused of neglecting her lawn, she became defiant.

Perry was arrested, handcuffed and briefly jailed in July for declining a ticket for failing to water her lawn.

She agreed on Friday to resolve her case by pleading guilty to a disorderly conduct charge and paying a $100 fine. She also faces six months of probation.

Perry was scheduled to go to trial Monday on a more serious charge of resisting arrest for refusing to give her name, accept a citation or allow herself to be handcuffed on her front steps.

Purported Perpetual Motion Machine Leaves M.I.T’s Markus Zhan Stumped!

Inventor Thane Heins believes that he has created a perpetual motion machine. I always find the possibility of free energy absolutely fascinating. I heat my home with a bio-pellet fuel stove and absolutely love it. It’s not free heat, however I have enjoyed a winter with the thermostat hovering around 72 upstairs and 78 downstairs and paid far less to heat my home for the winter. Looking at $720.00 to heat to heat my house. Excerpt from The Star: “Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped – and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn’t cause acceleration. “It’s an unusual phenomena I wouldn’t have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It’s real. Now I’m just trying to figure it out.”

Cigarettes & Gas don’t mix very well!

This story is troubling. Why would you have gasoline and alcohol in your apartment and then decide to light up and smoke? The crazier part is mistaking the can of gasoline with a bottle of vodka? Guessing that this gentleman had to have been drinking from a bottle and had a bit too many. Excerpt from the Boston Globe: “The 56-year-old apparently grabbed the wrong bottle and took a swig from the gasoline flask, then spat it out when he realized his mistake.”

Apple are you listening? Free the iPhone!

I was interested to see a list of countries with iPhone usage. Check it out

Libya? Malawi? Two things come to mind. Either these were visitors from the US or there is a growing need for a little mobile computer that can access the Internet and provide a rich user experience. Most of these countries are in need of infrastructure and rather than laying cables, mobile makes things so much easier. Free the iPhone!

Arik Hesseldahl notes “The stats show the iPhone browser as a percentage of all Web browsers in use in the given country. Apparently its so popular in Equatorial Guinea that it constituted more than 2% of all Web browsers in use that country during the sample period. Take look at the stats yourself, right here.”

How much fun is an iPhone?

Bob Levitus still loves his and I have to agree with him. Apple really got enough things right on their first try.  I was surprised at how much I have used the camera. The lens does not compare to some of the better camera phones out there but I have been able to take some great photos. I will have to post some this weekend. I have dropped mine 5 times, bricked it once and my complaints are few. The only one that I can think of right now is how difficult it is to sms whilst bouncing around downtown bean town with a taxi. Excerpt: “The automotive magazines often revisit a model to provide what they call a “long-term test review.”

I raved about my iPhone in two columns last July and haven’t mentioned it since. So I’d like to share my opinion of iPhone after seven months of heavy use. On July 10, I ended my column by saying: “Sure it’s expensive, but I still recommend iPhone without hesitation.”

That was when the 8 gigabyte model sold for $599. The price has since dropped to $399, so what I said back in July is even truer today.

Where else can you find a world-class phone, plus video, audio, Web and e-mail, all in a single hand-held device with an intuitive user interface?

I rest my case.

Then, on July 24, after a month of testing, I said I couldn’t “imagine living without one.”

That is still true today as well.

“

Raise your hand if you like Lotus…

IBM is working on developing a Lotus Mashup. This mashup software will be able to help mathematically challenged people like myself who can’t build algorithms and other exotic mathematical based endeavors. Jeff Schick, vice president of social software for IBM, says “Lotus Mashups will let organizations and communities easily assemble new applications with interoperability across the entire span of [business] tools,” Schick said Monday at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, FL, when he announced the product. An employee could, for example, combine a map of store locations with store inventory information, so that clicking on the location brings up, say, a stock list. Normally, this would require programming skills. But Schick says that with Lotus Mashups, the process is simple: users connect existing applications by dragging and dropping them onscreen.”The tool will allow users to build custom widgets from disparate sources.

Excerpt: “”The holy grail for a long time has been to design something that lets the nontechnical person do software engineering,” says John Gerken, a senior architect for the Emerging Internet Technologies Software Group at IBM. “This is a step toward that goal.” The product’s drag-and-drop interface conceals several technical problems that had to be solved to build the software, he says.”

iPhone garners significant market share

I wonder how much more market share the iPhone could have received if Apple applied the traditional subsidized phone and contract deal that everyone else in the mobile industry is doing. Turns out that Apple now has a greater market share than Windows. So much for the naysayers!

Excerpt: “Canalys researchers estimate that the iPhone had 28 percent of the U.S. converged-device market in the fourth quarter of 2007. Research in Motion, with 41 percent, had the largest share of the market. Windows Mobile phones had a 21 percent share of devices sold in the quarter, falling into third place behind Apple.“

Microsoft proposes to purchase Yahoo

Robert Cringley has a great piece on how Yahoo was ham strung by Mark Cuban purchasing his broadcast.com business in 1999 for 5.7 billion. Excerpt:

Yahoo, which probably shouldn’t have bought the company at all, overpaid for Broadcast.com in such an epic manner that the deal quickly became a Silicon Valley joke.

Nerds are sensitive and Yahoo, stung by the deal, resolved never to make such a mistake again, and they haven’t. But this determination has come at a cost. Where Yahoo used to shoot from the hip, post-Broadcast.com the company became a model of hard-nosed business analysis, which also meant they couldn’t make up their minds. Business development decisions at Yahoo can take months or years and every deal is required to be the antithesis of Broadcast.com. Companies used to want to be bought by Yahoo, but now they don’t. Whenever fast action was required it didn’t happen and the company fell further and further behind, not because it wasn’t smart, but because it wasn’t brave.