It's the Alexis edition of my blog, as she turns 17 today... congratulations, to the most wonderful kid imaginable... and meanwhile, we find:

Chest Beating: NEMA Working Group 6 have approved supplement 145 to the DICOM standard, "Whole Slide Imaging for Microscopy".  This means that the huge complicated images created by scanning entire microscope slides can now be stored using the DICOM standard, a major step forward for my company Aperio and the entire digital pathology community.  It will take time for this standard to be adopted and propagate, but just having a standard is a major step forward, and every journey starts with the first step.  Yay. 

From the August 9 issue of the New Yorker: 

• The Wheelhouse - "Herzog and de Meuron reinvent the parking garage" - and how great is that?  I've always admired the spiral parking of the circular Marina Towers adjacent to the Chicago River... 

• Empty Chamber - "Just how broken is the Senate?" - judging from this article, the answer is very broken indeed.  Yikes.  

Here we have the T.O. Acorn's Squirrel of the Month.  A great feature, and a great choice :) 

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This is interesting...  from Leo Laporte: Buzz Kill.  In which he noticed that everything he was posting to Google Buzz wasn't actually getting posted, and nobody noticed, not even him!

"Something happened tonight that made me question everything I've done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006...

"It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

"I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.

Yep. 

Related, from Paul Carr: Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity.

(I must tell you, I love having my archive.  It's like a diary, only linked to the world.)

I honestly think this microblogging stuff is a fad.  An amazingly popular fad - think CB radios - but a fad nonetheless.  We'll see.

I see socialists myself
and they are scary...

Home for a day, between trips to Seattle and Vista, and on the phone for most of it :(  although it was good to be home.  Trying to get caught up around here and I find...

The August 2, 2010 issue of the New Yorker was excellent; not only was the cover great, but the contents too; some selected articles: 

• Stuck - the incredible badness of Moscow traffic.  

• Letting Go - "what should medicine do when it can't save your life" - poignant and thought-provoking, an important subject...  

• The Scales Fall - "is there any hope for our overfished oceans?" - a tragedy of the commons if ever there was one.  

Christopher Hitchens via Ann Althouse: "Tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism."  That's it.  That's why multiculturalism breaks down.  I can tolerate anyone who can tolerate me! 

Dave Winer reviews Eat Pray Love.  "The most powerful thing you can do to get through all this messy trickery is to first forgive your ghosts."  I'm not strongly tempted to see this, although I like Julia Roberts and I agree with the message. 

Scott Adams goes nonlinear: Larger Than the Coolness of Corduroy.  You have to click through. 

Ever wonder:  How promiscuous are you?  So I took the quiz, and "based on your response data, you'd be most at home in: Finland, the most promiscuous (#1) of the 48 countries evaluated by the study."  Finland?  Huh. 

I must tell you, my opinion of the iPad is gradually morphing...  it is successful, of course, and to everyone's surprise there isn't a killer app; just a bunch of different things people are figuring out that it is good for...  it might not be good for me - so far, it isn't - but so be it. 

PS my friend Gary, who has an extraordinary 20 years' worth of tablet experience, opines "his skepticism about his skepticism is warranted."  Yeah mine too.

Did you know?  Four years ago today, Pluto was de-planet-ized.  The Earth didn't stop rotating around the Sun, but it was a big deal. 

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Woke up this morning in Seattle, at the beautiful Alexis Hotel downtown, got up (yawn), worked out (gasp), ate breakfast (yum), and drove up to Bellingham to meet with a client (wow what a beautiful drive!):

this picture does not fully capture the green and blue, wow

After an equally beautiful drive back, a visit to the University of Washington, aka U-dub, with Alexis...

we are here

our guide explains; statue of George Washington, "red square", that is a library, not a cathedral

the UW campus is stunning; note Mt. Raineer beyond the fountain

Husky stadium!

"the quad" is the main road down campus, lined with greenery and buildings

Alex was pretty impressed - a great place to spend four years learning and playing

a sample of campus life :)

And then ... off again, back home; the whole trip seemed a bit of a dream...

Mt. Raineer towers over the landscape; it doesn't look real, does it?

A quiet Sunday, we had a nice brunch down by the Lake, and I am still pleasantly worn out and buzzed from my 200K yesterday.  And tonight Alex and I are off to Seattle for a visit to University of Washington aka U-dub; I plan to visit a couple of customers as well...  but first, blogging!

Faster please!  Digital textbook startup Inkling scores Sequoia funding, publisher deals.  Using the iPad for textbooks is such a no-brainer, you can totally see the writing on this wall.  Textbooks are *so* expensive, and it is such an inefficient market.  Of course the challenge is that unlike novels and the like, textbooks must be "rendered", the formatting must be preserved via PDF or HTML or something like that... but it is doable, and it shall be done. 

Meanwhile: Then this happened. 
The iPhone happened, and smartphones changed. 
The iPad happened, and ... laptops changed?
I'm not sure I believe it, but it's cute. 

An interesting think piece from Brad Feld: should you charge more for your product?  The conventional wisdom is no, you should charge less, and make it up on the volume.  But... yeah, you might be leaving money on the table, and yeah, you might be cheapening your brand.  Pricing is tough. 

I love it: One more reason to ride a bike.  Most encounters between cars and bikes end badly, but not this one... 

From LGF: Cactus bloom.  I find the lifecycles of desert plants to be amazing, wherein they wait patiently for weeks or months or years for a teeny bit of rain.  And often the blooms are equally amazing. 

Here we have six fascinating underground homes that go above and beyond.  Just when you think you've seen it all, you realize "it all" is so much more than you thought!

 

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Yesterday I rode the Cool Breeze 200K, for the second year in a row, and it was ... a great ride.  Starts in Ventura, up the river along the bike trail, back into the quiet neighborhoods East of Ojai, then the climb above Lake Casitas and descent into Carpinteria, through Montecito, up into the hills above Santa Barbara, down into Goleta, and back along the coast via Hope Ranch, downtown Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, the 101 Freeway (!), and the coastal bike path.  The weather was perfect, and I rode most of it with some good friends from the Conejo Valley Cyclists which made it even better.

Some pictures, of possible interest:

the route: 126 miles, 8,100' of climbing, and yeah a cool breeze along the coast

self portrait in the early morning light of Ojai

my CVC compatriots Jim, Richard, and Gary climb the Lake Casitas grade

above Lake Casitas - wow! - all the climbing pays off

view of Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean from East Mountain Road

paceline through Hope Ranch - amazing properties

bike path along the Four Seasons in Montecito ... a perfect day

Rincon Beach checkpoint - all I needed was a book and a beer

riding the 101 is not my favorite part; traffic to the left, ocean to the right, paceline ahead

feeling great on a perfect day

And when I was all done?  I'd done it in 7:12 riding time, the fastest 200K ever for me.  Yippee.

Tonight we were guests of our friends Mike and Liz who took us to see the L.A. Philharmonic's Tchaikovsky Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl.  It was indeed spectacular; the entire experience, including the ambiance, eating in their box (lobster salad!), the music itself - violin soloist Baiba Skride was awesome! - and of course the finale, featuring the 1812 Overture, the USC Trojan bands' brass section, fireworks, and yes of course cannon fire.  You can't get much more spectacular than that!

violinist Baida Skride with conductor Bramwell Tovey

Conductor Bramwell Tovey was magnificent, coaxing an energetic Capriccio Italien from the staid Phil, and then a rather peaceful and dreamy Swan Lake, before the excitement of the 1812 Overture finale.  Tovey's remarks to the crowd were delightful, about the trombone fanfare at the end he remarked "it is rather hard to ignore them, but I find it is worth the effort".

the Bowl in full regalia; USC Trojan brass, L.A.Phil, fireworks, and cannon fire

A great evening and a wonderful example of a uniquely Los Angeles tradition...

This you must see...

no arms, no legs ... no worries

Unbelieveable.  And incredibly inspiring!

Yay, back home, finally, after another long week on the road again...

Unexpected.  "The seemingly-endless parade of bad economic news, which time after time is described in the press as 'unexpected.' Apparently it is always a surprise when left-wing economic policies don't work. It happened again today, with the announcement that new unemployment claims rose to a nine-month high of 500,000."  It would be funnier if it wasn't our lives. 

Guy goes into a bar, there's a robot bartender.  "So, you still happy you voted for Obama?"  It would be funnier if... 

Q: Will Barack Obama be a one-term President?  A: Yes, he might last that long. 

Union member fired for attempting to unionize union's employees.  I am not making this up. 

Kindle and iPad displays, up close and personal.  Not only is the resolution on the Kindle better - as shown in these 400X pictures - but the contrast is *way* better, especially in bright light.  No comparison, really. 

More on P ≠ NP: inside everybody's favorite million dollar math proof.  I love that everyone knows P ≠ NP, but proving it appears to be NP :) 

The Rise of the MAMILs.  (Middle-aged men in lycra.)  "Flashy sports cars are out, now no mid-life crisis is complete without a souped-up road bike."  Very cool, and I love my bike, but I disagree that flashy sports cars are out :) 

I have to pronounce my upgrade reload to Win 7 64-bit a success.  Everything is *faster*, and no babies died.  Woo hoo. 

This is so funny, remember I told you my Mom was the only person I knew who used their iPad?  Well Bloomberg reports the iPad leads Apple to the elderly.  Probably not the main market but how cool is that? 

Wired: The Web is dead.  They must be desperate for circulation, this is the dumbest thing ever.  From the magazine that ran The Long Tail too. 

Picture of the week: A bike shop with 120 bikes on their facade.  I love it!  A sure-fire way of attracting MAMILs :) 

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Back on the road, back in Vista, back in my stupid little hotel room, and back to not being happy about it.  Had to come down to Vista for some job interviews - did I tell you, Aperio is hiring? - and worst of all 3rd Corner isn't open on Mondays...

An excuse to post the picture: Log Sailing Canoes.  Click through to view the video, too, although it blatantly violates the inverted pyramid rule. 

Most excellent: Levi Leipheimer wins the Leadville 100 - in record time, too, beating Lance Armstrong's time from last year... 

If you've been following the whole P ≠ NP thing, here's P vs NP for dummies.  I can make it even shorter for you: an NP problem can only be solved by brute force search, whereas P problems have shortcuts. 

Rupert Murdock is launching a new digital newspaper... for the iPad.  Good luck with that.  "What’s remarkable about this current escapade is that Murdoch is actually proposing to sell a product that people have previously failed to even give away for free." 

Did you know?  There was an opening scene from Return of the Jedi which was deleted... and which is now on YouTube.  Darth Vader reaches out to Luke via the force, while Luke finishes his new lightsaber... 

BTW I am delighted with Google's new image search UI, available in Firefox (it's HTML 5), wherein you can scroll down infinitely through multiple pages.  A great innovation. 

Do you Bing?  Apparently a lot of people do... I don't know of anyone who has changed their default search engine to Bing however (at least, anyone who isn't saddled with the Windows default). 

Saturn's Titan: will we find life there?  Yes, please.  I for one would love to find out personally :) 

Here we have the should I skip class today calculator.  Remarkable for its thoroughness, obviously someone skipped class more than once to build it.  [ via Althouse ] 

Women are on Team Aniston.  Me, too :)  Rewatched Office Space recently... best movie ever about Credit Union software. 

An interesting longer post from Glenn Reynolds about men and women and priorities...  "Men care more about making money because making money is important to attracting and keeping women, and determining their status in general. Women don't value money as much, because it's not so important to attracting and keeping men or determining their status. On the other hand, caring - or at least the appearance thereof - is."  The state of the world in a nutshell. 

Stephen Wolfram's Setup.  "By far my #1 tool is Mathematica. Which, of course, I built so I could have it to use! These days I use it not just to compute, but also to keep notes, to create presentations, and to do all sorts of other things. Partly, I figure that the more I actually use Mathematica, the better we'll make it work."  Dogfooding!  [ via Daring Fireball ] 

Onward into the week - have a great one! 

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Okay, here we go...
Upgrading Win 7 from x86 to x64...
fXf!

Update: Well, "upgrade" is the wrong word, because it turns out there is no supported path from x86 to x64.  So you have to do a clean install.  So I did.  And am now in the middle of re-setting-up *everything*, and experiencing the joys of installation and configuration.  Fortunately I kept a log when I setup Win 7 x86, so I am following along with what I did before, but unfortunately I didn't note enough detail in all cases.  So be it.  Please stay tuned...

Update 2: The long slog continues... lots of stuff to install, lots of little niddly things to configure.  I remember a lot of them just well enough to know I did something, but not well enough to remember what, exactly.  So be it.  I must say the machine 'feels' faster and it has not yet crashed :)

Update 3: It works!  Everything and I mean *everything* is faster, boots, app launches, apps themselves, screen refreshes... like having a faster computer, and it was fast before.  Most notably I can now run several 2MB VMWare machines alongside all my foreground stuff; I can run Photoshop, Office, Aperio's Spectrum system; all my usual apps, and instantly switch to a VM.  Clearly x64 is a better host for VMs.  Beyond the inconvenience of reloading and reconfiguring everything, there are a few niddly things I haven't got working yet; my Cannon scanner's Twain driver is the worst so far.  On the whole a success.  Stay tuned...

This afternoon I went mountain biking up Palo Comado and China Flat and Simi Peak, and I ended up with the view of the world looking out over Simi Valley and Camarillo and Oxnard and the Pacific Ocean.

And you may ask yourself... how did I get here? :)

It was 102º and not an easy trail, I definitely had to work, but how great was it, with U2 accompanying, out there all by myself, to be rewarded with such a view.  I may do it again tomorrow!

"The joy and pain of solitude"
J.J.Sempe nails it again

(...brings back the Death Ride and a thousand others...)

Yesterday.  Up at 0500.  Coffee.  Shave.  Long sleeves?  Yeah...  Out the door at 0530.  Burbank 0615, Southwest to Oakland.  ZZZzzz... stretch!  Rent world's ugliest car*.  Onward to Berkeley!  Slight sun, wind breezy.  In the town, cute.  *The* University of California beckons.  Excited!

the Camponile towers over UC Berkeley

Tour at 1000... our guide Nick is awesome.

Nick explains: special parking for Berkeley's sixty-five Nobel Laureates :)

meeting Berkeley's oldest resident: a T. Rex

Alex is excited - Cal definitely exceed our expectations

Both jazzed, Berkeley was cool.  And impressive.  And exciting.  We could both see Alex there.  Onward.  Across the Bay Bridge.  Find USF.  Have time.  Lunch!  In Haight-Ashbury, cool.

lunch at the People's Cafe on Haight

Up up to the Lone Mountain.  Tour at 1430.  Long Powerpoint.  Blech.  Walking tour better...

USF: at the Lone Mountain high above S.F.

touring USF - okay but socks not flying

Now 0430.  Have time.  Tea...  Debrief.  Back over Bay Bridge.  Dinner 1730 at Five Bistro in Berkeley.  Steak + Pinot + sorbet.  Nice.  Back to OAK.  Return car.  Wait [forever] for shuttle.  Security.  Run to gate.  Whew.  Southwest to Burbank.  ZZZzzz... yawn.  And home!  A good great day.

any day with Alex is better than any other day, and this one was great

If variety was the spice of life, his present existence must be an Oriental curry
                                                 - Hornblower and the Atropos*, C.S.Forester

Hi y'all, checking in from home, where I find myself finally after an amazing few days... at work, in Vista, with nonstop meetings, calls, presentations, and job interviews, and then yesterday I flew to Oakland with Alex and we visited UC Berkeley and USF, about which I will have more to say in another post.  It all leaves me tired and energized at the same time, with my mind racing while my body idles.  And in the meantime, it's all happening...

(Last night I definitely put my spindles to use, and slept like a log :) 

Can sex make you more beautiful?  "A Scottish study found that thrice-weekly action stripped at least four years off participants' faces, and getting busy even boosts immunity and reduces heart disease. There are beauty bonuses, too - sex perks up your appearance instantaneously."  Seems well worth trying! 

Related: Women put weight before sex.  "More than half of women, and 25 percent of men, would opt for a summer without sex over gaining 10 pounds."  The question is phrased incorrectly however, because having sex all summer would probably cause you to lose 10 pounds.  Well worth trying... 

Also related: you don't need heavy weight to build muscle, just lots of repetition.  I think this is why those "body pump" classes are so effective, they encourage less weight and more reps.  Well worth trying :) 

Something to do this weekend: World's largest artwork created on frozen Lake Baikal.  Wow.  Imagine waking up one morning and saying "I think I'll make ice artwork on the world's largest freshwater lake".  Yeah.  I can see it.  And actually now you can see it; please click through, the art itself is amazing... 

My real todo this weekend: upgrade my laptop to 64-bit Win 7.  I am running VMWare almost all the time now, I need the extra virtual storage.  fXf! 

Wow, what a classic 1973 Sony ad: "This could be the tape deck you'll leave your great-grandson."  Amazing that while the ad contemplates the possibility of new instruments ("whatever weird instrument your great-grandson will be playing") it doesn't think about the progression of recording technology.  I wonder what medium *my* great-grandson will use? 

Paul Graham talks about What Happened to Yahoo.  "Why would great programmers want to work for a company that didn't have a hacker-centric culture, as long as there were others that did? ... without good programmers you won't get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure 'quality.'"  Indeed. 

John Gruber linked it also, and notes this quote: "It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner."

Times for iPad.  A feed reader which looks like a newspaper.  Seems like this might end up being the closest think to a "killer app" we know.  I might try it :) 

Glenn Beck quotes Thomas Jefferson: "If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?"  Said in relation to gay marriage, and it definitely applies, but also true in so many other situations... 

How excellent!  Flying squid:  "The paper's authors argue that 'gliding' is too passive a term to describe what squid do when they leave the ocean for the air: 'flight' is more fitting."  And jet-propelled, no less! 

Scott "Dilbert" Adams thinks an index fund based on Big Round Numbers would work.  "1) When the DOW is exactly 300 points below a big round number such as 10,000, 11,000, 12,000, etc., the fund would buy the stocks in the DOW, weighted the same as the index.  2) When the DOW rises above its big round number by 300 points, the fund would sell everything."  Amazingly, it does seem like a good idea...  "If this strategy worked, someone would already be using it, and you would know about it. What fascinates me is that it feels to me as if it would work while at the same time every bit of my knowledge, experience, and common sense tells me it couldn't." 

This will be much-linked for sheer coolness: World's largest tidal turbine unveiled in Scotland.  Yeah it is massively cool but note that it generates just 1Mw of electricity, a teeny amount. 

How Google routed around Sun's licensing restrictions on Java ME.  Essentially they built their own byte-code interpreter.  Seems like an obvious move, weird that Sun didn't anticipate someone would do this... 

I love the Horse's Mouth's Fish on Fridays series...  this might be the best ever! 

*As a teenager I devoured the Hornblower series, reading entirely through it more than once, and a fair number of random quotes still circulate in my head.  I wish I could be a modern-day Hornblower, and sometimes I think I am - don't we all? 

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Forgive me for some parental chest-beating, but this is SO COOL; my daughter Megan was featured in a cover story of North Ranch Living. 

For her recent thirteenth birthday we threw a party, inviting about 75 kids, and Megan asked that instead of gifts her guests consider donating to the Conejo Valley Assistance League instead.  And guess what?  She raised $750!  And donated it all... How cool is that?

Yes, we are very proud of her...

Interesting day today...  was offline for much of it, busy with personal matters, and yet was able to get an amazing amount of *work* done too... just reconfirms for me The Tyranny of Email, and the need to turn your email client off - entirely - for substantial periods of time in order to get stuff done.  I must tell you again, not running Outlook (or in my case today, not being connected to the Internet) is qualitatively different from running it and "not checking email"; if it's running, you will check it, and you will be disrupted just by that thought.  Anyway.

Uh oh: US Electricity Blackouts Skyrocketing.  The country with the cheapest entropy will win, I think.  Time for nuclear power!  [ via Instapundit ] 

Russell Beattie, who is not always right, but who is usually interesting, thinks scraping is the future of web aggregation.  And accompanies his post with RIP, RSS.  I don't know; I agree that unstructured data is better than ill-maintained metadata, but RSS feeds are so easy and so much better for aggregation... 

A good and subtle UI point: It is easier to imagine hiding an ad than redesigning a UI.  Interesting in that this company clearly wants to "sell" the non-ad-supported version of its software, so presumably they make less money from it.  You can imagine this not being the case. 

We wish: Flash ported to iOS and iPhone 4.  This is a total dancing bear; the phone must be jailbroken before this can be done.  Way cool, but given that nobody actually jailbreaks their iPhone, way not useful. 

This however *is* useful: The brain's secret to sleeping like a log.  It is true, sleeping soundly (or not needing as much sleep) is a huge competitive advantage. 

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I don't like to post too much Aperio-centric stuff on this blog, but here's something that might be interesting to both of us: Aperio is expanding its product team and we are looking for some key product managers and business analysts.  We presently have the following new positions open:

Product Manager, Life Science
Product Manager, Image Analysis
Business Analyst, Healthcare Solutions
Business Analyst, Life Science

If you or anyone you know is interested in any of these positions, please send an email to jobs@aperio.com.  Thanks!

[Update: I am always amazed to see how fast stuff gets picked up on the Internet.  We just posted these openings on our website, and already they've been echoed far and wide, such as this posting on Startuphire.com.  Aperio isn't a startup anymore but we're happy to have our opportunities widely publicized :) ]