THE GOGO OHS

It's too bad that you can't find his 2005 World Yo Yo championship performance on Google Video anymore (I don't know what happened to it), but this kid is amazing. He can do things with yo-yos that you wouldn't believe, including flips while he has two yo-yos circling every which way. It's like a circus with Yo-Yos.

Anyhow, I'm only posting this because I just dusted off an old wooden yo-yo and have been fiddling with it a bit, which piqued my interest in the state of the art. Well guess what -- it's pretty normal for a 'pro' yo-yo to cost $40 (and up), and there are even $100 (and up!) yo-yos out there.

Well, that sounds a bit crazy until you hear about the tricks the kids are doing these days. First of all, there's a whole new set of aerial yo-yo tricks that involve pulling the yo-yo off the string like a top, and then restringing it in mid air! These are called "stringless" tricks. Tricks with two yo-yos are so common place that there's even a competetive division for it. And then there's a yo-yo that some guy can make sleep for over two minutes! Now that's a crazy yo-yo.

Almost all the competitive yo-yos have some sort of transaxle and ball-bearing system -- which makes it difficult to wind them for beginners, but makes them sleep like dogs. They are weighted at the rim for longer sleep times, and most have some sort of new-fangled friction device in the gap that assists in rewinding the yo-yo in mid trick. These are not your old duncan yo-yo. Anyhow, I wonder if yo-yos, which are now so high tech, can ever be cool. My old wooden one (a Tom Kuhn "Recreation Device One"), which does have a transaxle and ball bearing system, is pretty fun.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, I've always wanted to be the type of guy who backs everything up, and sure, I do periodic backups of critical files. But since I'll be giving back my PowerBook when I leave the former employer, I needed to take a snapshot of it or risk losing the last three years of my working life. So, my former boss turned me on to this great mac Backup utility, SuperDuper. SuperDuper is cool because it's just a smart convenience layer on top of a bunch of already existing Mac and Unix utilities, which helps restoring files since there's nothing wierd or proprietary in there if worst comes to worst. I used Super Duper to image my PowerBook onto the new iPod, but that's not going to cut it in the long term, so I also bought a drive that I'll copy the image onto once it arrives:

Yeah, those lego looking bricks are actually hard drives. We're getting a red one. Not my first choice in color, but that's the color you get in the 250 GB size.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Luba got me that which I coveted, a new Video iPod. I just watched about an hour of Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" on it while rocking the little dude down for a nap. General review: don't watch widescreen features on a 2.5 inch screen. Luckily there's an option to crop the sides, which made it much more fun to watch. When you're using all 2.5 inches, it's a pretty decent viewing experience.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night my soon-to-be former employer threw me a send-off party, which was incredibly thoughtful and generous of them. It's been a fantastic experience working here over the past 40 months, and the development staff here is really world class. I haven't even left and I'm already getting sentimental about it -- I'm really going to miss the team.

The New Year is a time for new beginnings, and I'm excited about my new opportunity. I don't know how much it's appropriate to talk about my current or future employers on this blog, but I'm fortunate to have been working at such an excellent company and with such excellent people, and I'm fortunate to be moving to a great new opportunity with what appears to be another team of excellent people.

Thanks for a wonderful time and a great party -- it's not an end, but a new beginning.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I have to hand it to the The Robot Co-op. They are the only people who have figured out how to get me to waste time on the internet. I am a total hard core get in, get out type of internet consumer. I don't dawdle on friendster or gossip on my space -- it's just not my thing.

But somehow, the Robot Coop people have developed a set of applications that I can really get sucked into (although I haven't yet let myself go).

First there was 43 Things -- a site where you list stuff you want to do. It sounds sort of corny, but once you realize there are 987 other people who want to "Write a novel" -- it's a pretty interesting experience.

Then came 43 Places. This is the same concept, but for travel -- where do you want to go (and where have you been), as opposed to what do you want to do. Suddenly it's like an AJAXified lonely planet community.

Somewhere along the way came All Consuming, which is like just perfect for consumermas season, and has this wierd spontaneous affinity portal style community feel to it.

And now there's 43 People, which you should be able to figure out from the first 43 X apps. Which is also cool.

Well, thanks for wasting my time you jerks (I mean that in the nicest way possible).

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I never win stuff (well, excepting that time I won $10 on a scratcher), so I was very excited to win a copy of "One Billion Customers" by James McGregor.

A couple of cool things here; first, the book looks great, and I'm totally jazzed to read it. There's a glowing review on Amazon by my neighbor Seth Faison who has also written an excellent book on China. The developing story of China will be one of the profound narratives of the 21st Century, and it's one I'm fascinated by.

Second, there's the site itself: In Bubble Wrap. My friend Josh Lucas turned me on to the site about a month ago, and I've been going back daily since. Basically, they choose a new business related book everyday and give away a bunch of copies. The books they have been choosing are great, and it's been an interesting way for me to learn more about the "business book" genre. And then getting free stuff is also really cool. All in all, a great combination.

I can't wait to get my book, hopefully packaged In Bubble Wrap :)

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After the MadLibs style predictions from my last post, I thought I point to a couple of better resources:

John Battelle's 2006 Predictions

And watch this space: Cringley's 2006 Predictions -- he's always on the money.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[Note, this is from the Dotcom Prediction Generator -- the views expressed are not my own, nor I hope, anyone else's. Enjoy!]

My dotcom predictions for 2006:

Last year I made several predctions that now seem ridiculously slacker. But a few ideas were pretty close. I've got a feeling that 2006 will be a big year, and here are some of the reasons why:

1. A Palo Alto [hey, where's LA in all this?] startup is going to open our eyes to some new ways that RFID can influence culture. IEEE Spectrum will pick up on this and run several cover stories on the founders.

2. Larry Page will be in the spotlight for his decision to support 802.11i. This will upset John Batelle, and the blogosphere will react groovy. The noise will quiet before the end of the year and it will all be forgotten soon after the shock.

3. pets.com will see their stock skyrocket after their selling wheat to 4th world countries online business starts taking off. We've seen it coming for a while now, but 2006 will be the year it really kicks into gear.

4. Either kozmo.com or webvan.com will seek to expand their disintermediating middle men business by acquiring flickr. delicious will be overlooked in the process, and they will see a management shakeout later in the year.

5. One of the big leaders in the paper industry will wake up to the opportunity in the Internet and the Web 2.0 trends. After months of speculation, they will make a key merger that will shake up the landscape for years to come.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just wanted to link to this site -- it's a pretty sweet new 'conversation search' engine -- put in an URL and it finds references from the web and blogosphere. Pretty nice.

Link: Talk Digger: find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Internet..

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I started this blog in August, I've been blown away by the nature of the asynchronous web conversation that blogging can become. Combine your blog with tools like technorati and feedster, and suddenly you have this platform to open your Johari Window to the world.

The downside is that blogging, at least in my case, is not a rigorous activity. It's something I do for fun and to engage with the Web community as much as I can. What ends up happening is that I oversimplify to make a point, or disparage sites and people more than I mean to as part of distilling my thoughts on current events.

A case in point is my oversimplification of Jason Fried and Om Malik's conversation about web 2.0 uptime. To Jason: I'm sorry, and frankly, I'm totally honored that you bothered to leave a comment on my site. You guys are doing a bang up job evangelizing some incredibly important memes (good design, ruby on rails, etc...), and I didn't mean to disparage you.

But again, that's what I love about blogging. Even though I keep getting myself in trouble (like when Peter Rojas of Engadget left a comment defending the Engadget podcast which I had said less than nice stuff about) -- it's such a powerful platform.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, typepad has been down all day until now, and I don't know if they have lost my blog posts or what. Delicious, which was just bought by Yahoo!, was down earlier this week. It's interesting that these two events are happening in light of the ongoing debate between Om Malik (on the side of startups should care about uptime) and Jason Fried (startups shouldn't care about uptime).

There's certainly arguments for both sides, but at some point, if these services are successful, then hours of downtime will mean millions of dollars in lost revenue and additional support costs. If you don't have a plan for how you'll scale, or at least a general idea, then no matter how whiz bang your idea is, you probably shouldn't bother. That's my $.02.

Link: Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Update on TypePad Issues.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, Amazon is opening access to it's archive of the internet. Wow, I can already think of one hundred uses for the Alexa archive. This could definitely be an enormous tool for innovation. Way to go Amazon! This is a great idea.

Link: John Battelle's Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok, I can't wait to listen to this podcast by the original The Office creator and star, Ricky Gervais.

Link: Ricky Gervais... Obviously..

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a bill - SB1 (and some offshoots) - making it's way through California'a legislative processes that will give large incentives for installing solar power systems. If you can't wait for the Million Solar Roofs to get passed, here's an interesting site that describes various incentive plans for installing renewable energy systems: The Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy.

I need to find out more about this property tax exemption for PV installation!

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a great post about using delicious. I had never explored the potential of the 'inbox' and I've never even thought about watching someone else's inbox. Very interesting.

I've actually stopped using Delicious in favor of Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0 because it will archive a copy of the bookmarked pages, and I like the networked searching -- but now that Yahoo owns delicious, maybe they will do something interesting with a combination of the two services.

Link: Slacker Manager: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I dig the first two articles on this web development blog. I have high hopes for days 3-24.

Link: 24 ways.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)