Next Project

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Randy

Another dinner time discussion, another project idea. This one was around co-evolution and migration patterns of species. The net was that it would be nice if we had the ability to zoom in on timelines of history by let’s say continent. Then you could answer silly questions like, prior to the last ice age, what exactly was living in Central and South America? And was there co-evolution going on, or did everything migrate from Africa? Apparently grad students the world over worry about this things since I did find a nice paper on rats rafting to South America from Africa around 6 Million years ago based on their DNA…..

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Office 365 Update

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Randy

After playing around with it, it’s very disappointing. It doesn’t actually “replace” office; I was amazed when it complained that it couldn’t find a registered version of office on my PC.

Looks like Open Office (now that the infighting with Oracle seems to be over) and Google Apps are the way to go.

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Office 365 Public Beta

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Randy

I’ve been using Google Apps and Open Office at home for a while now, but signed up for the Office 365 Beta as soon as it was announced. Could Microsoft finally be implementing their subscription price model for Office with a cloud based offering? The press releases and initial reviews look promising. But how does it really compare side-by-side with Google Apps or Open Office?

Free is hard to beat…….

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Google Apps upgrade…leaves iPower off the list

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Randy

Google finally stopped restricting what apps you could access if you had a Google apps account, unfortunately they left out iPower.  On the bright side the transition was painless, all I lost was some Google Maps that I had.

Speaking of Google Maps, it’s too bad the iPad Google Earth app has less features than the Windows version.  It does look better, but I’d like to see the ability to overlay more data sets on it.

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Fast Company needs to rethink what an “Expert Blogger” is

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Randy

Usually a disappointing post doesn’t move me to comment, but this one did.

Interesting leadin “The unrest in Egypt has sparked a range of responses around the globe, including a big jump in the price of oil…”  and it was dated today.  I was thinking, too bad the author doesn’t watch the morning financial news as the price of oil has been falling not rising.  But I clicked through wondering how he missed the sell off in oil being attributed in middle eastern governments raising money to buy food commodities to keep their restless population happy with lower food costs…

So the author thinks that oil still flows through the Suez Canal…maybe they widened it so the super-max tankers can get through.  But wait….this isn’t a serious article, is a shameless plug for….”Syntek Global’s Xtreme Fuel Treatment (XFT), which reduces emissions, reduces engine wear, and boosts the efficiency of combustion to get more out of fuel…..”

I guess that’s why print media used editors….

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