In honor of our friends who just had a baby girl on Saturday, this video should be just what the doctor ordered!

 

 

What's the world's 'most peaceful' country? Iceland. The least peaceful? Iraq.

The USA came in at 97th place out of 140.

 

This is all according to the "Global Peace Index" report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, which I found on Reuters. But it's not just about living in the country - it also factors in that country's activities around the world - U.N. deployments overseas and levels of violent crime, respect for human rights, the number of soldiers killed overseas and arms sales.

 

The G8 came in all over the place: Japan was fifth most peaceful. Canada 11th, Germany 14th, Italy 28th, France 36th and Britain 49th. Russia was in 131st place!

 

So congratulaions to Iceland. I've never been there, and this news still doesn't make me want to go there, to be honest. Probably something to do with the word 'ice' in its name... On the other hand, now I know I really don't want to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Sudan and Somalia - the bottom 5 on the list.

A friend of ours is in the hospital today, giving birth. So, we're dogsitting a little chihuahua (AKA alien rat dog). It's actually kind of fun having a dog around the house and he doesn't seem to be too lonely or worried about his temporary home. Mind you, we've been planning for this for quite a while, with plenty of visits in advance so he could get used to us and to our home.

 

Let's see if the dog will let us sleep tonight...

 

We're still waiting to hear the news from the hospital. Everything is going to plan so far, so I'm not worried, however, having visited the delivery room this morning, I can only imagine how freaked out I would be if I was the daddy-to-be. I was nervous enough just being there.

Yes, the project that can bring Robert Scoble to tears, has now been released by Microsoft Research.

 

 

Update: Long has posted an article on his blog on how to get great screenshots from the Worldwide Telescope software.

 

Mark Davis posts on the official Google blog - based on analysis of the pages that Google's search engine indexes, the use of Unicode on the web just surpassed that of ASCII and Western European encodings for the first time.

 

Having ~25% of the world's web pages using a Unicode encoding should not be confused with the actual content on the pages - don't assume that the % of non-Western language content has increased at this rate. A large number of English websites now use UTF-8 encoding only because it's the default encoding for many development tools and data types (XML, JSON, etc) and doesn't cost them anything in terms of bytes used. But at least all those sites now have the ability to support non-Western scripts - a big step in the right direction :-)

More tulips. Sorry. I found a way to embed SmugMug flash slideshows into blogs, etc, and I want to see how it looks.

 

   

Simultaneously showing off some of my tulip photos I took a few weeks ago at the annual Tulip Festival an hour or so north of Seattle, and testing Photoshop Express's embeddable slideshow :-)

 

The default size of the object, 322 x 300 pixels, was really tiny and not useful, so I hacked the parameters to 644 x 600 pixels. Seems to be ok!

  

These days, Facebook is the 'hub' of my online life. Some people don't get into it, but more than any other mechanism, Facebook is now THE way I find out what is going on in the lives of people in my social and professional circles all around the world. I check it about as often as I check my personalized homepage on my.live.com. If there's a birthday party in Singapore, I know about it. If one of my coworkers is a part-time actor and jazz musician, I know about it. But I was thinking about how I could most effectively project what's going on in my life or what I'm thinking about at any given moment.

 

I used to update my Facebook "status" message quite often, sometimes twice a day or so. And I often update this blog, depending on when I have something longer than a status message to say. In order to surface my blogging on Facebook, I installed an app which let me list my recent blog entries. But this is somewhat inefficient. So now I use Twitter, FriendFeed's excellent Facebook application, and another Facebook application called Twittersync to pretty much automate everything.

 

 

So what's happening here? In the screenshot above of my Facebook Mini-Feed on my profile page, you can see FriendFeed activity and Facebook status message updates. But I didn't need to touch anything in Facebook to make this happen. Every time I "twitter" - write a status update on twitter.com, the Twittersync application automatically updates my Facebook status message. In addition, FriendFeed picks up my twitter and lists this activity, which create a duplicate entry in my Mini-Feed. This is somewhat annoying but not FriendFeed's fault. The bonus is that it also picks up my replies to other people's twitters and publishes them as well. Also, if I had updated my blog or posted pictures on Flickr or elsewhere, or recommended an article on Digg, or a myriad of other activities I might have done on the web, those would also be recorded by FriendFeed and published on Facebook for all of my friends to see.

 

Of course, I can choose what to twitter, and I can choose what activities I want to share on my FriendFeed - right now it's just Twitter and this blog - but there are a couple of things which make this almost-40-year-old curious. You need to give some thought to what you want to share, both for reasons of privacy and just general annoyance level for others.

 

This trend in social networking where almost everything is public. how dangerous is it? Do people know that things are being shared? To give one example, a good friend of mine recently discovered that I'd put a photo up on Facebook which included her. I even tagger her. The photo is several years old (6 to 8 years I think). She commented on this photo, not entirely happy that I'd put a photo of her up on Facebook without her permission. However, in doing so, her comment and the photo itself was broadcast to every friend as part of the news feed. So now every friend on Facebook knew about the photo and knew she wasn't entirely happy with it. I could weakly argue that she should have noticed the fact that I'd posted pictures and that I'd tagged her had been broadcast in her news feed, but obviously she wasn't paying attention :-)

 

The other thing I wonder is just general annoyance level that constant updating of profile causes others. Yesterday I embarked on a Father Ted twitter-spree. Father Ted is an old British-produced, Irish-made TV show about three Catholic priests living on a small island off the west coast of Ireland. It's probably the single most hilarious TV show ever made, but that's just my opinion. However, my constant twittering of arcane quotes from this TV series were broadcast mostly to American and Asian friends. I was fully aware that most of them would have absolutely NO idea what the hell I was talking about in my status messages on Facebook. I may well have filled their news feeds with a bunch of mostly garbage. Hopefully a few friends who saw the TV series would have at least got a chuckle out of it - I myself was absolutely in stitches while finding quotes to use! But my point is, how much are services like Twitter and FriendFeed useful, or how much do they just increase the noise level of things you really just don't care about? I suspect it's mostly noise. Another friend of mine just commented on a bunch of photos on Facebook, and now my news feed is full of photos of people I don't know and comments that are not relevant to me in any way.

 

However, I do plan to continue my adventures with Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and so on. This is all "cutting-edge" web 2.0 stuff, even though I know most of my friends outside the high-tech industry - and probably several within the high-tech industry - have never even heard of Twitter :-)

 

What do you think? Is this all just annoying? Am I spamming you all to death? Is it something only teenagers will "grok"? Let me know in the comments.

Today it seems inconceivable that I could be arrested for being married to my wife. Yet Mildred and Richard Loving were arrested for just that.

 

In 1967, just one year before I was born, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states could not prohibit mixed-race marriages. At that time, approximately 17 states banned mixed-race marriages. Mildren and Richard were arrested and sent to jail by the state of Virginia, only to be released on condition that they leave the state. They did leave, and finally brought the case against racial discrimination to the federal courts. 

 

As I am in a mixed-race marriage myself, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mildred, who died on Friday aged 68. Rest in peace. A lot can change in 40 years.

Now that MSFT has pulled it's offer to take over YHOO, I wonder just how low YHOO stock will go on Monday morning... it will be fun to watch.

 

 

I hope you sold all your YHOO stock on Friday! ;-)