How to Change the World

Pictures from Blogworld Expo

Keynote lunch.

On stage with Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion.

Brett Tabke of Webmasterworld.

James Whatley of SpinVox

Gary Vee of Wine Library TV.

Line to talk to Gary Vee.

Gary Vee and Hawaii contingent.

Zach Coelius of Triggit, Jessica Hanson, and Laura Fitton. Laura is the person who brought me to Twitter along with Dave Winer.

This way to the Techset party.

Hanging with buddies at the Tagga "booth."

Me, Steve Rubel, and Chris Brogan with our respective Jones Soda sodas.

My Visit to Google Germany

I recently visited the offices of Google in Munich, and these are some of the pictures I took there. Enjoy!

Google in the pretzel font.

Front-desk receptionist.

Front-desk receptionist trainee.

Google-wear collection.

I don't know what this lion is about.

Google cow-bell bike bell.

This is really how Google Maps are created.

Cafeteria.

Buffet line.

The biggest hotdog I've ever seen. Literally, it's a loaf of hotdog meat.

Google Hawaii contingent.

Indoor shading.

Light reading in an engineer's office.

Sales department rainmaker.

Google marketing department.

More marketers.

Self-replicating machine.

Most of the engineers have three monitors.

San Jose Sharks fans?

Massage room.

Foosball.

Proverbial bean-bag chairs.

Office climbing wall.

I don't know why they grow cactus there.

Google footwear.

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Thanks to the folks at Fixmyphotos for enhancing my photos.

Nikon D90 Video Example

Here's the long-awaited D90 video sample from me. :-) You can watch it on YouTube by clicking here. Or download the original file here (35312.7K). Or watch it on the Posterous platform here. What’s most interesting is how much better the Posterous version is--you've got to love what Posterous is doing. (Here's a higher resolution YouTube version, but people don't see this option in embedded players.)

Unboxing a Nikon D90

Nikon just released the D90. This is the first digital SLR that can shoot movies (as far as I know, anyway)--now you don't have to carry a digital SLR and a video camera. How cool is that?! My buddies at Ritz Camera and the 6sight Future of Imaging conference made this possible. Click here to buy one from Ritz Camera. Incidentally, I'll be the first to admit that these aren't the greatest shots--I had no idea product shots are so much harder than people shots.

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Later today I'll try to post a high-definition video taken with the D90. For complete photography news, click here.

The Art of iPhone Battery Life

Some of my buddies have expressed astonishment that I get approximately thirty-six hours of standby with my iPhone, so I'm sharing my settings. Note: this is my second 3G iPhone--I returned the first one because I was getting only five hours of standby time.

This is my usage screen. One thing to notice: I don't talk much on the phone--"talk is not cheap" in my book. I am totally an email/tweet centric person. This clearly contributes to my standby time. I consider my iPhone a "tinytop computer that can also send and receive phone calls" as opposed to a phone that can "do email and browse."

These are my top-level settings. Wi-Fi is turned off. Push is off, and Fetch New Data is set to hourly.

These are my General settings. Bluetooth and Location Services are off.

These are my Network settings. 3G is off for two reasons: to extend battery life and because calls drop in areas where 3G coverage is spotty--for example, Goleta, California.

These are my Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings. I only use MobileMe to synch bookmarks. Exchange does the heavy lifting of mail, contacts, and calendars. Incidentally, with much trepidation, I synched 9,000 contacts to my iPhone via Exchange. To my delight, I found that Google's mobile app can handle this many contacts quite well. Searching for contacts while in Phone or Camera is also tolerable.

In case you're wondering, these are the applications that I've added: Adventure, Bejeweled 2, Google, If Found, mDialog, PCalc, Showtimes, TicTacToe, Twittelator, Twitterific, and You're #1. The four that I have in the launch bar or whatever it's called on an iPhone are Mail, Phone, Twittelator, and Calendar.

I don't know if you'll get this kind of standby time (or more!), but this is what works for me. Of course, people with lesser phones are having a good chuckle because they get three to five days standby time, but their phones aren't cool. And it's better to have a cool phone that you have to charge everyday than a sucky phone that you can charge once a week.

For more news and information about iPhone, go to here.

On the Nightstands of Famous Scientists

Ever wonder what scientists read when they are not mapping the universe or otherwise changing the world with their discoveries? Hint: They're not all geeky science texts. For example, physicist Freeman Dyson has printouts of 165 emails.

Here is a link to the books and other whatnots of a handful of famous scientists like cosmologist Max Tegmark, physicist Freeman Dyson, pediatrician Philip Landrigan, and primatologist Frans de Waal.

By Thomas Kang

Kronomy Again: Apple Timeline

Take a look at what Jeffrey Gordon did with Kronomy after he read my posting about the company.

Apple Computer’s life path
make your own   show details

Make Your Life Flash Before Your Eyes

Guy Kawasaki’s life path
make your own   show details

God help me, that's my high-school graduation picture that you see in the second frame. Showing you this picture, however, isn't the reason for this posting. The real reason is to tell you about a company called Kronomy that enables you to create a time line of your life with descriptions, pictures and video. Then you can share your story and make your life flash before your other people's eyes before you die via 3D browsing. The site also features a whole bunch of social networking functionality such as commenting, sharing, and "friends." Check it out!

Also, I have to pervert everything: one interesting (and probably unintended) use of Kronomy is to document a product's lifecycle from initial sketches to prototypes to version 1.0 and so on. Someone should do the history of Macintosh using Kronomy. That would be cool.

It's Not Easy Being Me

Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do--for example, host 250 women bloggers at your house. This is a photo from the Kirtsy ("Digg for chicks") and Alltop ("aggregation without aggravation") pre-BlogHer party. If you click here, you can see many more including White Trash Mom lifting her leg, Jenny the Bloggess drinking two-fistedly, the world largest wok to make paella, AllMediocre stealing dirt from my son, how Silicon Valley moms pack to drive across the country, a new chesttop-publishing advertising model, and the baby that Johnson & Johnson didn't want to see at its mommy-blogger seminar.

The Cleverest Calendar Ever

I love ideas like this: bubble-wrap calendars. You pop each day when it's done. A company from Brooklyn sells them for $50--$50 for bubble wrap! I love the margins as much as the idea. Put this one in the "why didn't I think of that?" category.