Joel Kehle's Blog

Busy Having Fun

2008-06-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

I've been having lots of fun lately.

I just got back from a 10 day retreat in upstate New York on Sunday June 22.

On the following Friday I was able to get the first day of the Aging Conference at UCLA. Lot's of interesting progress is being made on that front. For a more detailed report go to the Next Big Future blog.

Tomorrow, I am heading to Madrid for a week.

Life is good!

Holographic Video Conferencing is Here

2008-06-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Brad Feld has a great post on his blog title Holographic Video Conferencing is Here. Read it and watch at least a minute's worth of the video demonstrating the telepresence system he discusses.

More fun from the Near Future

2008-05-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldy Privatizing Space

Michael Belfiore
In the second space age, human spaceflight is no longer the domain of governments. Dream-chasing entrepreneurs and clever engineers are aggressively blazing new trails into the heavens and preparing the world for an era of space tourism, ultra fast point-to-point earth travel and even orbiting hotels. Having gained inside access into the top private space programs, science journalist Michael Belfiore will share his many insights on the history-making flights, the failures and fatalities, as well as the enduring passion and dreams of the real estate tycoons, dot-com billionaires, a video game programmer and other business mavericks for whom the sky is no longer the limit. They are fueling the highest-flying private rockets ever built, testing vertical dragsters, and preparing to launch an inflatable space station with the mock-up already in earth orbit. Can your ticket to ride be that far behind?

Stories from the Near Future

2008-05-25T15:02:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker Conference, “Stories from the Near Future,” took place on May 8 and 9, 2008. Here are a couple of good videos from the event:

23 and You
Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki talk with Michael Specter on genetics.

Neurobotics
Yoky Matsuoka, the director of the neurobotics laboratory at the University of Washington, discusses how brain signals can control prosthetic limbs, and other advances in the hybrid field of neuroscience and robotics.

Burma Campaign

2008-05-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

My friend's at Fanista just launched an important campaign about Burma. You can see several short videos of celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Will Ferrell talking about Burma. Some funny. Some sobering. Watch them at http://burmaitcantwait.org/burmaitcantwait/

Hat's off the Dan Adler, Prudence Fenton and the whole Fanista Team for making this happen!

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

2008-03-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

I For One Welcome Our Robot Overlords...

2008-03-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

Or maybe not. This is either very cool or very creepy. What do you think?

Celebrating My One Subscriber

2008-03-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm having some fun tinkering with my blog.

I just moved it from wordpress to blogger. Wordpress was giving me some weird layout problems and debugging them didn't seem like fun. It's 2008. Blogs should just work. So far the transition has been easy. As part of the move I am trying out some new (to me) feedburner features. My favorite is the "FeedCount" Service that list my subscribers. Turns out I have one subscriber. I am not terribly surprised since I don't really blog. I just like to play with the medium so I know what the hell is going on with the technology of self expression.

It make me smile to know that I have one fan out there. So, I wanted to give a big shout out to my one subscriber for reading my blog:

Hi Mom!

My Failing Mac Experiment

2008-03-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

Recently I migrated from a PC to a Mac. As part of the experiment, I wanted to use the client side apps written for the Mac (Address Books, iCal, Mail.) Today I just got rid of Mail. Not in favor of some other client program but in favor of Gmail. The primary problem was that I want to archive mail. As far as I can tell (and as far as I can google), there is no way to archive mail from Mail. I can read mail. I can delete mail. That's it. The ability for Mail to tell Gmail to archive a message is non-existent. If someone can tell me how to do this, please let me know.

I really would love to keep using Mail because I now have two problems.

Problem 1: I use Omnifocus to organize my tasks. This means that I need an easy way to copy mail from gmail to Omnifocus. It also means that when I get around to dealing with the mail, I probably need to pull up the original email in gmail. Both of these tasks are doable but Omnifocus has a tight integration with Mail. Going back and forth between gmail and Omnifocus is less efficient. This probably means I need another gtd that integrates with gmail but is not part of gmail. I don't think such a tool exist right now. :-(

Problem 2:Calendar invites that I get through gmail are not interpreted correctly in google calendar. This is very frustrating. I now have to manually enter in calendar invites until this get fixed by google.

If anyone on the Interweb has any suggestions to solve these problems, please let me know.

Thanks!

Update: Paul Paradise showed me the error of my ways (see comment thread). Mail.app is back for now.

Video Video Everywhere

2008-02-29T23:47:00.000-08:00

Today I am guest-working at the downtown Los Angeles offices of The Groop. I wanted to spend an hour catching up on my "reading" and found that it was not possible. Much to my surprise, more than half of the articles I was supposed to "read" contained video.

Normally I would just plug in my headphones and consume the media in my rss inbox. However yesterday while sleep walking through LAX, I managed to step on my headphones. Not having headphones forced me to notice: A year ago this would not have been a problem. I year ago I was consuming text. Maybe I didn't even have an RSS reader. When did I start consuming so much video?

I am not complaining. I think video is a very useful medium for communicating information. I am just surprised that video has become such a substantial portion of my information mix.

Maybe I should post this on Seesmic. ;-)

Star Trek, Twilight Zone, other classics beamed onto 'Net

2008-02-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

Star Trek, Twilight Zone, other classics beamed onto 'Net: "

CBS has begun streaming episodes of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and other classic shows on its Audience Network site.

My First Seesmic Post

2008-02-14T21:06:00.000-08:00

Stage6!

2008-02-11T21:53:00.000-08:00

Check out Stage6. My friend Kevin Workman just turned me on to it. The video quality is stunning!

Polaroid no longer does Polaroids

2008-02-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

Is this bumming anyone else out?

Polaroid no longer does Polaroids: "

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Well doesn't OutKast look silly now. The brand synonymous with instant film is killing off the Polaroid film format and attempting to reinvent the brand so it 'lives on for the next 30 to 40 years.' In the short term that means closing factories in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands, cutting 450 jobs, and breaking the hearts of hipster-photographers the world over. Obviously the concept of Polaroids was never going to be much more than a niche in the age of digital photos, and the Polaroid / Zink Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer is filling the instant development void left behind, but it's still sad to see a format with so much history and fond memories die, especially since Polaroid spends the majority of its time these days slapping its de-valued logo onto rubbish commodity electronics.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

(Via Engadget.)

Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw from His Own Stem Cells

2008-02-03T19:29:00.000-08:00

OK - People who know me know that I am obsessed with medical advances. This has nothing to do with what I do for a living. It's just a hobby of sorts. If I find medical news that I think is exceptionally cool, I will post it on my blog.

Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw from His Own Stem Cells: "An anonymous reader writes with news out of Finland, where a patient's upper jaw was replaced with bone cultivated from stem cells and grown inside the patient himself. We discussed other advances in stem cell research a few months ago. Quoting:
'In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells -- immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said.'

"

(Via Slashdot.)

Testing Reposting via MarsEdit

2008-01-29T06:16:00.000-08:00

Well that was fun. I just reposted a blog entry from Brad Feld. I read all my news in NewsGator's NetNewsWire. The latest version has a "Post to Weblog" button that lets you republish articles via MarsEdit "Powerful Blog Publishing For Your Mac."

It was easy and simple.

I love it when technology works.

When Is The Release?

2008-01-29T06:07:00.000-08:00

When Is The Release?: "

A company I have a small investment in has been struggling to get the most recent version of their software shipped. A few weeks ago I ran into the CEO who grabbed me and said 'we are almost ready to go live.' I looked at him and said 'when is the release.' His answer was 'Friday.'

I gave him a Bronx cheer and said 'when on Friday?' He looked at me like I was an alien. I clarified - do you mean '12:01am on Friday, 4:59pm on Friday, or 11:59pm on Friday.' I then clarified some more: 'and I mean in Mountain time.' We agreed that 11:59pm on Friday was a good time (which they missed, but they got it out a few days later.)

At my first company (Feld Technologies), our client base got to the point where we were often doing multiple releases of different software on a weekly basis (we were a custom software company but used a very traditional software engineering approach to our projects.) For a long time, we used dates to mark releases (e.g. 'Friday.') After way too many 11:59pm releases (where our clients definitely were not sticking around the office to wait for us) and missed Fedex deadlines (this was back when you had to Fedex the disks to the clients in another state because modems were too slow to transmit the files), we learned that a release has both a date and a time. We also learned that the external release is - at the minimum - date + 1 of the 'internal release' especially on systems with live data. We also learned that the only appropriate days of the week for a release are Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I'll let you guess as to why this is.

As I work with new startups and first time entrepreneurs, I see people learning this lesson over and over again. I think it's just going to be part of the endless education of new software entrepreneurs that you never really learn until you are in the real world.

(Via Feld Thoughts.)

Rock On!

2007-12-18T00:49:00.000-08:00

I spent hours yesterday playing Rock Band with a group of friends. What an amazing experience. I wrote about it on Fanista here. At the risk of repeating myself, I was struck by how the behavior that the game encourages is the antithesis of most game experiences. In my limited time playing games, I have found that the most popular variety is the first person shooter. It's a solitary experience where the goal is to kill things with guns. Sure there are pretty graphics, fancy explosions and scary monsters but most games seem to boil down to killing things with guns. Enter Rock Band. In this game, you and a group of friends get to start a band and live the dream by working hard to become a rock star. I had a room of five people - three guys and two gals, musicians and non-musicians in there 20s or 40s all playing this game together... for hours. I really don't think I have experienced anything like this before. It was so social, challenging, rewarding, exhausting and we didn't kill anything.

Hats off to Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos - the co-founders of Harmonix. And to Brad Feld, my fraternity brother who had the good sense to help them raise money back in the 90s. (Eran is also in my Fraternity but did not live in the house at the same time.)

They have created an game that lets non-musicians experience what it is like to be musician and live in the world of rock. Well done!

Candle Delirium Wins Best of LA!

2007-07-19T03:43:00.000-07:00

I am please to announce that my partner Anthony Carro's store Candle Delirium has been named "LA's Best Candle Store for 2007" by Los Angeles Magazine.

If you like candle's or want to buy a gift for a candle lover, check out Candle Delirium's website or visit the store in West Hollywood California on 7980 Santa Monica Boulevard.

Congratulations Anthony!

Pimpin' my blog redux

2007-07-15T01:57:00.000-07:00

So I've updated my blog again. I have

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2.1

Switched to the K2 theme

Added Google AdSense and a Twitter feed.

To upgrade wordpress, I had to delete my old version on Dreamhost and do a reinstall. Apologies to anyone whose comments got dropped in the process (sorry Paula.)

To accommodate Adsense I wanted a three column layout so I went with a theme called K2. I also took advantage of a widget that displays my latest twitter posts.

What's interesting is that in the case of both K2 and the twitter widget, I have set up mechanisms to be notified about changes to the K2 code. K2 has a blog that I now subscribe to. The twitter widget updates go out via twitter (of course) so now I have a new twitter friend.

Pimpin’ my blog

2007-04-23T05:04:00.000-07:00

I've been spending a little time trying to make this blog more meaningful and relevant. As a first step, I decided to update my antiquated blogroll. I currently read 29 RSS feeds with Newsgator's NetNewsWire. Newsgator has a web service for publishing your blogroll. I find it quite useful since I don't have to duplicate and synchronize my reading list.

Mom’s Got a New Blog

2007-02-10T05:03:00.000-08:00

My mom has started a new blog titled 'Writings from the "Holler" with no name'. Though I am biased, she is surely one of the best bloggers alive today. Seriously, I enjoyed her latest entry 'mixed blood identity and agency'. The piece explores reasons for testing one's limits and mankind's reaction's to those who push the limits. If you want a bit of inspiration for your day, go read the article.

Mom - Welcome to the blogroll!

Listen to PodCast From Your Phone

2006-11-12T05:02:00.000-08:00

Finally something useful to do in LA Traffic!!!

(from TechCrunch Article - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/12/listen-to-podcasts-on-any-phone/

Reposted without permission)

Podlinez

Podlinez is a dead simple service that launched a few days ago. Go to the site and search for a podcast. If it’s already there, you can look up a dedicated phone number for that podcast. If the podcast is not included, anyone can add it and a dedicated phone line is associated with the podcast. To listen to the most recent episode of TalkCrunch, for example, just dial +1 (831) 480-3920 and listen. I assume the company will ad advertising to the site and to recordings at some point to generate revenue.

Fonpods

Fonpods, which is currently a TechCrunch sponsor, launched at DEMO in September 2006. It is similar to Podlinez, but has a single phone number for accessing all podcasts, +1 (712) 432-3030. Users can call that phone number (no registration required) and listen to pre-selected content in a number of categories. Registered users can also subscribe to podcasts and access that specific content if they call in from a phone that they’ve registered with the service. Fonpods also has detailed information about each podcast (TalkCrunch information page is here, for example). These podcasts can be added to a user listening list with a single click.

Even though Podlinez and Fonpods are similar services, they are both useful for different things. Podlinez, with it’s dedicated phone number for each podcast, is a good way to “subscribe” to a single podcast and listen whenever new episodes are released. It requires no registration and has zero setup time. Just call the number and listen. Fonpods requires registration and basic setup to subscribe to favorite podcasts, but is a good solution for people who listen to a wide variety of podcasts and want access from a phone.

BabelChat - Why hasn’t someone done this?

2006-02-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

Why hasn't anyone created a chat client that translates between languages? All of the technology to do this exist *right now*. We have translating software on the web (e.g. AltaVista's BabelFish, and Google's Language Tools). We have any number of chat clients that support plug-ins (e.g. trillian, jabber). I'm surprised that all chat clients don't come with translate setting that will translate between two languages on the fly. It seems so obvious and beneficial.

Update 02-12-2006

This entry was posted on LazyWeb today (thanks Jim). I'm looking forward to comments.

I had fun discussing this post with Brad Rubenstein on his blog Odd Quanta.

Update 02-20-2006

I'm please to report that the Trillian plug-in suggested by jacob harvey has been very useful. I tried it out on a native spanish speaker who speaks english. At first he spoke to me in english but then switched to spanish. We had a good 30 minute chat with the translators help. I'm looking forward to using the translator with his mom - who does not speak english. Thanks to Jacob for pointing me in the direction of the translator.

Update 02-28-2006
A commentor suggested another translator at http://www.mecamessenger.com/translations.jsp

Africa Photos and Movies

2006-01-21T04:59:00.000-08:00

In progress:

My Albums (Photographers include Anthony Carro, Chris Spinder and me.)
Note - albums are served from Kodak EasyShare Gallery. If you don't have an account there and don't want to register, just click on the 'View Photos without signing in' link.
Cape Town
Victoria Falls

Chris's Albums
Air Jaws Gansbaai
Simonga Village, Zambia
Safari at Londolozi

Unedited rolls shot on my camera can be found here.

Movies (please download instead of streaming)
Lion's Roar