Archive: November 11, 2008

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from Rio de Janeiro

Tuesday,  11/11/08  06:48 PM

This is coming to you from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where my sleep deprivation experiment continues; not having adapted to the [six hour] time change I didn't sleep until 4:00AM, and had to get up at 7:00 for a meeting with Ambriex, Aperio's Brazilian distributor.  After a good discussion which continued over lunch we flew to Rio de Janeiro, had an amazing dinner, and here I am. Sugar Loaf mountain from the air - looks just like the pictures :) Lunch was so nice we missed our flight to Rio de Janeiro.  We booked on the next flight, and then missed that one too while chatting directly next to the gate.  Some things cannot be explained.  Fortunately there seems to be a regular bucket chain of planes between Sao Paulo and Rio and the third try was a charm. The 50-minute flight into Rio was cool; as you land you can see the hills of the city (including the famous Sugar Loaf) and fly over the bay and islands, then land at the an airport which is itself an island.  Interesting factoid: Santos Dumont airport, named after a famous Brazilian aviator, is noted for having some of the shortest runways of any commercial airport in regular use. Copacabana Beach - the view from my hotel room.  Wow.  That’s just about all I can say. We checked into our hotel and discovered that the rooms set aside for us had flooded and were unavailable.  The hotel graciously booked us into another hotel at the same rate, a much nicer hotel, in fact the tallest and nicest hotel in all of Copacabana Beach.  How great was that? Leila Vecchio, Sandra Martins-Boyte, and me: dinner in a great restaurant at Copacabana Beach in Rio with two Brazilian women.  Life on the road. To top it off, I had an amazing dinner with Sanda Martins-Boyte, Aperio's South American channel manager, and Leila Vecchio, a Rio-based sales rep for Ammriex, at the Skycab restaurant at the top of our hotel.  Another meal which will require a week’s riding to compensate. And so ends day two!  Tomorrow we are meeting at INCA (the Instituto Nacional de Cancer) and giving another presentation / demo...  should be fun.

 

Tuesday,  11/11/08  07:19 PM

The Ole filter makes a pass, from Rio de Janeiro, still with very little sleep... Slate says don't count Matt Drudge out.  Okay, I won't.  In fact, I wouldn't think of it; although I rarely visit drudgereport.com, I am subscribed to their feed and it is one of my best sources of breaking news...  BusinessWeek ran an interesting article about Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder of LinkedIn and my old colleague at PayPal.  Not only is LinkedIn a major player in the valley (with so many layoffs, a lot of people will be looking to use it to network their way into their next job), Reid is a prolific angel investor and is involved with a lot of Web 2.0 startups.  He must be one busy guy, but then he always was anyway...  This is pretty amazing: New MRI screening technique differentiates malignant breast tumors.  "Latest results from researchers at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland demonstrate that 'shutter-speed' computer analysis can distinguish malignant from benign tumors 100 percent of the time in breast cancer screening, a method likely to reduce or eliminate unnecessary biopsies. Their findings are published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."  100%?  Wow.  That is amazing.  Here we have the five strangest Kuiper Belt objects.  They are all strange - the whole Kuiper Belt itself is pretty weird - but these are especially interesting.  And you probably wouldn't have expected it but Pluto is one of them :)  The one that threw me for a loop was...  Triton!  Neptune's large and weird moon is really another Pluto, captured by Nepture's gravitational field.  It doesn't even rotate the right way around its planet...  Check out this Task Manager picture, of an HP SuperDome64 Itanium, Dual Core, HyperThreaded = 256 Logical Processors.  Wow, how cool is that?  Speaking of parallel processing, Parallels 4.0 is supposedly 50% faster than the previous version.  This is of course a virtualization solution which allows Windows to run on a Mac under OS X.  I like Parallels better than VMWare but I have to admit, it wasn't as fast, so I can't wait to try the new version!  Want to upgrade your Mac?  No problem!  Global Warming update: Snow arrives early at Snowbird.  I know specific examples don't prove anything, this could be an insignificant outlier, but I still think it's fun.  When the shoe is on the other foot the media are all over it...  The New Yorker has a new online Digital Reader; I have just started experimenting with it.  It is free to all print subscribers, and provides access to all their archives as well as all the material of their current issue.  A pretty ballsy and cool thing they did...  [ via Jason Kottke, who loves it but does say "Sadly, the actual reading interface is the worst part of the DR." ]  Going back to how the Kindle really rocks, the most rocking thing about it is that the reading interface is excellent.  Brings to mind the comment of Steve Jobs when introducing the iPhone: "the killer app for a phone is making phone calls".  :) The New Yorker's Digital Reader

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