Saturday, September 2, 2006

Team USA not yet a constellation

Proof that teams win more basketball championships than stars do.

At least they got a bronze.

Before & After Ernesto

MyrtleBeachOnline reports that the South Brunswick islands of North Carolina, which took the brunt of former hurricane Ernesto, are okay. Specifically,

Southwestern Brunswick County's beaches fared well during Tropical Storm Ernesto, according to town administrators in Holden Beach, Sunset Beach and Ocean Isle Beach.

The east end of Ocean Isle, which has lost oceanfront houses over the past two years because of erosion, fared well, said town administrator Daisy Ivey.

Likewise, said Holden Beach town manager Steve Wheeler, no major beach erosion occurred along its oceanfront.

All those beaches are featured in a photo tour I took over them in my cousin Mark's plane back in July.

Here's a montage of the whole flight.

Menwhile, we're not all that far from the "cone" of former Hurricane John's predicted path up Baja California. Santa Barbara is above the islands near the top of the map at that link.

Watching for smartereens

Watching for SMART-1, which should have crashed into the moon at 10:41pm Pacific time. It's now 10:48.

Here's the SMART-1 site.

Here's some background on the crash plan.

Here's a webcam on the control room.

Here's the NASA page on it.

Here's SMART-1's picture of its own future (now, presumably, actual) grave.

Here's the Astronomy Blog, which has a pile of other astronomy blogs in its 'roll.

Here's Space.com's picture of how the moon was born. (Don't want that to happen again.)

Curious to see where actual pictures and news show up first: BBCriver, NYTimesriver, Google News, Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Technorati or YahooNews.

[11:08pm...] Okay, Google News won, with a pointer to this NASA page. Let's say Google Blogsearch and Technorati tied for second. I found Google Blogsearch with a pointer to Centroid Blog, "five minutes ago" at 11:10pm. And at 11:11pm I checked Technorati, which pointed this Space.com story "eleven minutes ago".

Gonna crash myself now.

[In the morning...] Here's how it looked. More views.

Lead, follow, or come to a gig

Of himself Glen Phillips says,

I am a singer/songwriter and father of three daughters. I had a brief moment of mainstream success as a young man which I am still in the process of recovering from.

That success was with Toad the Wet Sprocket, a Santa Barbara band that went galactic back in the 80s and 90s.

Now he and his family have launched on a sojourn of sorts, and blogging it. In his first post, he explains,

I will be spending the next ten months with my family, traveling through Europe. We don't know exactly where we will stay, what we will do, or how we can afford it. You are invited to help us figure these things out.

So they're open to the kindness of friends and strangers. If you're in Europe and qualify on either of those grounds, maybe you can help.

Go lock yourselves

In Doc points to the smelly underbelly of this whole Web 2.0 thing, Antonio Rodriguez writes,

...people (investors, partners, etc.) have been asking since day one of Tabblo: where is your lock-in? I used to have a lame answer about network effects and user-generated content that I would give, rattling off comparable efforts like eBay's and MySpace's. I don't do that anymore. And the reason is because I came to the conclusion that looking for this type of lock-in is similar to adopting a revenue model that has a high probability of putting you at odds with your users. Instead, we prefer to focus on execution, and specifically on locking product development to user demands. Better integration with Flickr? Full-res downloads? We're happy to oblige under the working hypothesis that the talented creative class on the Net responds well to companies that take care of their needs and that — to Doc's point — cycles spent there create a deeper relationship between company and users — which may be the only kind of lock-in we'll all be left with at the end of the day.

The world needs investors and partners who love developers who love users — so much that users return the affection. If you ever ask "Where's your lock-in", you're disqualified.