Jeff Barr’s Blog

Last week I was trying to write a complex post for the AWS blog. I was referring to a number of other blog posts and pages and spent way too much time flipping back and forth between tabs.

On a whim I searched for “Firefox split browser” and found Hiroshi Shimoda’s Split Browser Extension. Using this extension I can see more than one page at a time, making it easier for me to write and reducing the cognitive load on my aging brain.

There are a number of helpful context and dropdown menu options to split the existing screen to the top, left, right, or bottom. Once split, the new area can have its own set of tabs. Tabs can be turned in to split screens, and vice versa.

My new link blogging methodology works as follows. First I open up tabs for the items in the post as part of my morning reading. Then I open up Wordpress in a split area, and link-blog away. There’s some kind of weird focus-stealing going on when Wordpress auto-saves, but I’ll figure out a way around that. Here’s what it looks like:

• Show Us a Better Way: What Would You Create With Public Onformation? - “The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.“
• The Daily Galaxy: Hot Tech to Watch for the Next Four Years - “The lifespan of technology is such that it’s hard enough to buy a computer that will last you more than three years, let alone be state of the art after 6 months.“
• Phil801: Living With Leukemia: Going Bald at Age 2 - “Her hair has been shedding like crazy lately and tonight we decided it was time to shave it - she had big bald patches all over and was starting to look pretty ragged. Not only that, but every time we picked her up we would come away covered in hair! “
• Boing Boing: Death and Taxes, and a Boing Boing Story - “Sales from the poster now support me and my family, and I have sold thousands of posters to schools and concerned citizens, even 40 members of congress. I have been in magazines, art galleries, and national television. Last month I was on the Martha Stewart Show to talk about the poster and taxes, it was surreal.“

This fall my son Andy will move across Lake Washington so that he’s closer to the University of Washington. He’ll be living in a room of a rental house where my other son Stephen is already a tenant.

Andy is a very accomplished pianist and piano teacher and he decided that he needed a piano for his new place. We have a perfectly good upright piano at home, but Andy wanted to upgrade to a baby grand. After scouring Craigslist for several weeks he found a nice Kohler & Campbell at a home in nearby Bellevue:

We agreed to purchase it and Andy made the arrangements for the piano mover. He chose The Piano and Organ Moving Company, the ones with the imaginative slogan “We are our name.”

Pianos aren’t the easiest things to move. They are delicate, unbalanced, heavy, and valuable. This particular model weighs over 800 lbs. You need a lot of strength, balanced with a light touch, to move a piano. This particular piano was at the top of a 22-step cascade of steps.

Here’s how things transpired. First, they laid thick padding over the steps:

Next, they wrapped the piano in a form-fitting cloth:

This little dolly was a crucial part of the moving process. It is a basically a snowboard resting on a frame with 4 heavy duty wheels. The board is not attached to the frame.

Next, the largest of the movers lifted up his corner of the piano while one of his associates removed the leg. Then they gently set down one edge on the dolly, which of course tipped to one side. Then, in one incredible move, they lifted up the other end of the piano while slowly bringing the other end of the dolly back to the floor. So this 800 pound piano was moving on two axes at once, carefully managed and under the full control of the movers. Professionals can make the toughest jobs seem easy, routine, and risk-free!

The piano was then strapped down to the dolly and it was ready to go:

Next, they simply rolled the piano out the front door and slid it down the padding in a carefully managed fashion. The mover at the top had a strap around his shoulders, allowing him to lift the piano with his legs and his back. The one on the bottom did a lot of the heavy lifting, while the one in the middle made sure that everything was lining up as they went down the stairs.

Andy was a bit apprehensive as they started to move down the steps:

It took less than 5 minutes for them to get the piano down the steps! After that they strapped it in with care, closed up the truck, and headed to Seattle:

My battery ran out at about that point, and I headed back to the office.

And that’s how you move an 800 pound piano!

• UK Telegraph: Stephen Hawking’s Explosive New Theory - “They argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.“

The summer is finally upon us, and I thought it would be fun to list some of our favorite local activities here in Sammamish (we’re the city to the east of Redmond).

First, there are some great farmer’s markets. We love these because the produce is bright and fresh, as are the flowers.

• The Redmond Saturday Market takes place adjacent to Redmond Town Center, May through October of each year.
• The Sammamish Farmer’s Market takes place on Wednesdays at the Sammamish Commons in the middle of the Sammamish Plateau, late May through early October. It just started this year but from what I hear it is going well.
• The Issaquah Farmer’s Market is held in the Pickering Barn near Costco. Runs mid-April through mid-October each year.
• The Kirkland Wednesday Market takes place on Wednesdays, April through October, in the middle of Kirkland.

Next, a few fun summer events:

• We went to our first Fremont Solstice Parade yesterday. This is the place to go in Seattle to see the fun, fringe part of our community, including the famous naked cyclists.
• The Movies at Marymoor are great. The movies are projected on a large, inflatable screen. Bring chairs and blankets; it gets cold when the sun goes down.
• Fourth of July at Gasworks Park is a lot of fun. The best plan is to take a blanket, get there early in the day, and take it easy. If you don’t want to go all the way to Seattle, the Family 4th in Bellevue is a worthwhile alternative.
• The Redmond Derby Days celebrates Redmond’s status as the bicycle capital of the country.
• SeaFair is the month-long water and sea celebration, topped off (at least for us) by the air show at the beginning of August, featuring the Blue Angels.
• Bumbershoot, our local music festival, takes place at the end of summer on the grounds of Seattle Center.

These are my personal favorites. What are yours?

• The Big Picture: Martian Skies - “High, wispy clouds cover a large portion of Mars, seen in this, the first true-colour image of Mars generated with the OSIRIS orange (red), green and blue color filters.“
• Greg Verdino: 7 Tips For Real-World Businesses in Second Life - “I feel like those of us who have been advising clients on virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular for the past year or two have been prescribing a set of (if not best practices) rules of the road designed to help marketers entering the metaverse steer clear of danger. “

• David Hornik: Know Your Competition - “How do you know a great entrepreneur when you meet one? Great entrepreneurs would do a better job running the competition than their competitors are doing. They can tell you not only the ways in which their strategy is better than their competitors’, but also the ways in which their competitors have created the very opportunity that they are exploiting.“
• Tom Raftery: Introducing the Negawatt - “What then is a NegaWatt? A NegaWatt, is a MegaWatt of electricity that you don’t use! Huh?“
• Hank Williams: Memo To The Semantic Web: Drop “Semantic” And Become The “Graph Web” - “It turns out that thinking in terms of graphs is far easier than thinking in terms of tables and relations. The semantic web community is so busy trying to sell a utopian vision of data access that they are burying the lead, which, for a typical developer, is in large part, about ease of development and time to market.“
• Vollee - “Welcome to the Vollee beta. You can now access Second Life whenever & wherever you want to.“

• MindMeister: Collaborative Online Mind Mapping - “” - Via @cloudgirl.
• eBirdseed - “eBirdseed.com does one thing extremely well - we ship the highest quality wild bird seed throughout the United States.“
• GigaOM: Vermont Oks The Creation of Virtual Corporations - “Johnson was instrumental to crafting the bill’s language; he, along with his NYLS students and a couple of professors at Vermont Law School, spent the last two years putting it together. He foresees virtual companies launched for countless reasons, such as the production of software or publications written by people across the country, even for corporations that exist only in Second Life.“
• Suchi Software Solutions: S3 Firefox Organizer - “New Features in v0.4.1: - Compatible with Firefox 3.0 ” - Yay!

• Eureka Science News: Scientists Confirm That Parts Of Earliest Genetic Material May Have Come From The Stars - “Because meteorites represent left over materials from the formation of the solar system, the key components for life — including nucleobases — could be widespread in the cosmos.“
• Astronomy Picture of the Day: M51 Hubble Remix - “Image data from the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has been reprocessed to produce this alternative portrait of the well-known interacting galaxy pair. The processing has further sharpened details and enhanced color and contrast in otherwise faint areas, bringing out dust lanes and extended streams that cross the small companion, along with features in the surroundings and core of M51 itself.“

My son Andy just graduated from the Running Start program at Bellevue Community College. This program allowed him to spend his last two years of high school on a college campus, taking college-level classes, culminating in an Associates degree (with honors no less), which he received earlier today!

In addition to holding down a full load of very tough classes, Andy found the time to teach piano to 15 students and to create an awesome music video. And he’s always smiling too!

He’ll be entering an honors program at the University of Washington this fall, rooming next-door to his big brother Stephen.

Needless to say, I am very proud of him!

I’m working from home today, putting together some presentations and working on some plans.

I have a couple of bird feeders outside of my window. It is fun to watch the birds (and a squirrel or two) come and go. Some of the smaller birds appear to be insensitive to my presence behind the window. I can move my chair, get close to the window, and even snap pictures while they nibble on sunflower seeds.

Others, the blue jays, in particular, are a lot more skittish. When I hear the creak of the chain, I have to turn slowly and quietly in order to avoid scaring them away. This morning I managed to snap a nice picture of one:

• Zha’s Virtual Musings: Happy Jumpy Ruths… Interop Takes a Step - “What’s to unusual about logging into OpenSim? Nothing. But.. this wasn’t a normal login. All three Avatars had been logged on via the Agent Domain in the Linden Lab Aditi test grid. The Agent Domain took a “placeavatar” request from the client, and issued a “rezavatar” request to the OpenSim, which handed the Agent Domain the necessary details so it could relay it to the client, and permit a login.“

• Consumer Reports: Your debt - 8 benchmarks for borrowing - “Those who are financially well off might be tempted to turn the page. Don’t. Debt problems can stalk anyone, especially in a slowing economy. “
• Cosmic Log: Space Telescopes Team Up - “In all, more than 800,000 images were stitched together into a mosaic of the Milky Way’s galactic plane that takes in 120 degrees of width and just 2 degrees of height. The portrait is so detailed, shallow and long that you have to post it on a wall - or look at it using a zoomable image browser - to get the full impact.“
• NASA: Spitzer Space Telescope - “This page contains high-resolution images from the Spitzer Space Telescope which you can interactively zoom into and pan around. “
• NASA: Spitzer Space Telescope: Spitzer Wallpapers - “Now you can decorate your computer’s desktop with exciting Spitzer wallpaper. Simply select the one you want, download it at your preferred resolution, and select it in your operating system.“

• Steven Pearlstein: The Fading of the Mirage Economy - “For the first time since the early 1980s, Americans will have to endure several years of uncomfortably slow growth and uncomfortably high inflation as the U.S. economy regains its balance and creates a foundation for more solid and sustainable growth.“

• Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell: Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage - “More and more of the basic building blocks of scalability—network bandwidth, large-scale storage, and compute servers—are now available in forms analogous to traditional utilities like electricity and water. That is, a contract with a utility has very little overhead, gives you access to vast resources almost instantly, and only bills you for the resources you use.” - Via Wes.
• Seed Magazine: The Reality Tests - “In Vienna experiments are testing whether quantum mechanics permits a fundamental physical reality. A new way of understanding an already powerful theory is beginning to take shape, one that could change the way we understand the world around us. Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?“
• Overcoming Bias: The Wonder of Evolution - “Please note: evolution does not explain the origin of life; evolutionary biology is not supposed to explain the first replicator, because the first replicator does not come from another replicator. Evolution describes statistical trends in replication. The first replicator wasn’t a statistical trend, it was a pure accident. “

Dear readers, I have two small requests for you today:

First, the “Punk Rock Grand Old Flag” video created by my son Andy and his friends created made the final 4 and public voting is now underway here. His video is the third one on the list; if you like it the best, please vote for it! Based on the YouTube referral stats on the videos, I think he’s in first or second place right now; let’s see if we can make that a sure thing.

Second, the fund-raising effort for Serenity Burns is still underway and she now has her own site, Lifting Up Serenity. When the fund raising goal was $500 I committed to contributing an extra 15%. The goal is now $10,000. I don’t think I can swing 15% of that, so I will plan on contributing 15% of the first $5,000. I’ve got some other fund-raising efforts up my sleeves; stay tuned to this blog for details. If you can make a donation to help get to $5K, that would be most excellent.

PS - The new site thumbnails were generated by SnapCasa.

• The Economist: Dropping a Brick - “Today inflation is running at a brisk pace, so property prices have fallen by a staggering 18% in real terms over the past year.“

• Tom Raftery: Reduce Your Carbon Footprint Using Virtual worlds - “In a pilot program rolled out for a small part of the group, Crédit Agricole expect to save between €200,000 and €300,000 this year on travel expenses alone by holding training sessions in-world. If this is rolled out to the group, annual savings would be in the order of €5-€6m. I’m not sure what that is in terms of reduced CO2 emissions but you can take it that it is a pretty big number!“
• Darth Vader Soundboard - “This is a great sound board of the Darth Vader with many of his famous dialogues.“

On Thursday, May 29th, I will be participating in the Working Worlds Virtual Job Fair. I will be on hand to meet attendees, answer questions, and to assist several Amazon.com recruiting managers throughout the day. We are still loading our jobs into the system, but it looks like we will be recruiting for development and program management positions in the UK, Luxembourg, and France.

This is not the first time we’ve participated in this fair. The first event was quite successful. We met a number of good candidates and actually ended up making several hires. In fact, one of them, Simone Brunozzi, is now a member of my team. Simone took the time to write up his hiring story; you can read first-hand how it all worked out for him. This story was also picked up by New World Notes.

Despite what are (to me) the obvious benefits of conducting the first steps of the recruiting process in a virtual environment, there’s still plenty of skepticism out there.

It takes a lot of time and money to hire great people. With travel growing more expensive and less politically correct by the day, there’s plenty of room to make the process more efficient and more cost-effective. The people who show up at a virtual job fair are going to be interested in and comfortable with the newest forms of technology. They are going to be sufficiently self-motivated to get signed up for Second Life, get it installed and running, and to personalize their avatar.

If you are interested in attending the fair, you will need to register in advance.

I spent some time in-world yesterday with our recruiting team. Here are a few screen shots:

I’ll be at the fair for a good part of the day. Look for me in my spiffy Amazon.eu shirt, and say hello if you stop by.

In a series of Twitter messages last week, my friend Phil Burns shared with the world the fact that his 2-year-old daughter Serenity had taken ill and was subsequently diagnosed with Leukemia. In the course of a couple of days their life went from normal, to “what’s wrong with Serenity?” to “rush her to the ER” to “she could die” to “she’s going to make it but she needs two years of chemotherapy.” She has entered treatment, and it looks like she’s headed in the right direction.

Phil and his wife Adria are going to have their hands full. They have 8 kids, Phil’s in the middle of putting a startup together, and this is going to be a huge drain on their time and on their finances.

As a first step at helping Phil’s family handle what I can only guess will be a $100K+ bill for treatment, Phil’s one-time business partner Jesse Stay has started to collect some funds using a ChipIn widget, a copy of which I have posted at the top right hand corner of this blog. The goal is $500. I am feeling generous this morning and will happily augment the final amount by another 15%.

Update: The ChipIn widget isn’t updating for some reason. Jesse is investigating. As of 10:24 PM on May 25th, the total stands at $1,161.97 (click on the image to visit the ChipIn widget editor, which does show the real total):

This is just a drop in the bucket, and there’s going to be room to do a lot more. If you can help, just click on the widget. I’m sure they’d appreciate your positive thoughts and prayers as well.

Some might wonder how and why Phil and Adria have the time and the inclination to Twitter and to blog at a time like this. I am guessing that this is actually the easiest and most efficient way for them to keep their virtual community of family, friends, and well-wishers in the loop. Instead of fielding endless phone calls and email messages they can simply direct people to follow along on the blog.