Heading to TED

Looks like blogger is back up and maybe stable just in time for TEDxBloomington.
We are.currently on the road dealing with Westfield construction traffic, but our brains are already in Wisdom of Play mode, as the CNC was running this am.

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She's a Super Geek

I recently had a good friend get on a roll with spoofed song lyrics.. and out of it came this one for me.


Super Geek ( to the tune of Super Freak)

She's a very techie girl
The kind that always stays connected
She will never let your spirits down
Once you get her off the net, ow girl

She likes the boys on the blog
She says that I'm her all-time favorite
When I make my move to her chat it's the right time
She's never hard to please, ow now

That girl is pretty wild now
The girl's a super geek
The kind of girl you read about
In Tech Crunch magazine
That girl is always techie
The girl's a super geek
I really love to tweet her
Just before we meet
She's on-line, she's on-line
That girl's on-line with me, yeah

She's a super geek, super geek
She's super-geeky, yow
(everybody sing)
Super geek, super geek

She's a very Facebook girl
(The kind of girl you want to poke)
From her wall down to her profile
Down to her faves, yeah
And she'll wait for me at Best Buy with her girlfriends
In a lime Hum-vee
(Going back in Cyber-space)

Games not a bore to her, she says
"Room 256, I'll be waiting"
When I get there she's got Ti-vo, Wii, and X box
It's such a geeky scene

That girl is really techie
The girl's a super geek
The kind of girl you read about
In Tech Crunch magazine
That girl is pretty wild now
The girl's a super geek
I really love to tweet her
Just before we meet
She's on-line, she's on-line
That girl's on-line with me, yeah

She's a super geek, super geek
She's super-geeky, yow
Rick Astley sing!
Ohhhhh
Super geek, super geek
That girl's a super geek
Ohhhhh

She's a very techie girl
The kind that always stays connected
She will never let your spirits down
Once you get her off the net

Blow, Sergey!
(sax solo)

  ---- mp

Google Wave Bots I wish I knew

Building off of a previous post talking about the separation of data from application on Google Wave, here is my list of Bots I would most like to be able to include in a Google Wave (watch back later for Gadgets and Extensions):

1)Gluebot. This would be a robot from Adaptive Blue that taps into the Glue data and API. This means that when I am writing in a Wave, it is listening and when I mention an item, it inserts the Glue profile page for that item. It should also allow me to query interactively for recommendations. For example, if I am writing an article on Imogen Heap, I should be able to type in and the bot will substitute in the correct data. If I have also included a shopping bot, it should be able to interact with that bot as well to give me best place to buy.

2. Secure CheckbookBot. This bot would need to be completely secure and have access to the data flow from my bank account. As I interact with shopping bots, it will record the transaction and keep my checkbook register up to date and in sync

3. PersonalDataBot. This bot will know all the personal things I can not remember about the people I interact with. Not because I manually typed it in, but gleaned from all of their other social networking interactions. It will know their birthday, their anniversary, that their kid is sick or their spouse just got fired. It will remember where they went for vacation, and if they commented back to me recently. It would show this data in a private ( HUD-like) display as I am collaborating with people.. showing me select images or reminders on special occaisions. ( yes, I fully expect this one to freak people out.. but that big pile of data is out there, why not actually coordinate and use it?)

4. DataTransformBot. We are starting down this path already. There is a simple Maths bot that will take 5*4 and subsitute 20 in the wave. But I want this one to do more. And probably, it will have to be a collection of bots to start with. Here is the basic starter request list:
a) currency translator (like Rosie, but for dollars instead of words. I
type in my currency, the bot auto translates to the appropriate currency
for the viewer)
b) complex Math ( there is a LaTex bot, but how about the equivalent of a
natural Language bot for math?)
c) unit conversion ( metric to english and vice versa are the first start)

5. TranscriptionBot. If I include an audio file in a wav with an indicator, it subsitutes/includes the transcription

6. SemanticSearchBot- will do Semantic Search where I indicate and substitute the results. Natural Language would be icing on this cake.

7. CodeTranslationBot. People have started writing syntax checking bots already ( handy when they work well), but I want one that I can paste in code from one language and it will give me first pass at my language of choice. I am willing to have it limited to matching language types at first pass... Object oriented to other OO, scripting to other scripting, etc..

(edit. corrected this is not an official Google site ( see comment below) but still very useful)
You can find a very cool and useful Wiki of Bots , but what Bot would you add to conversations if it existed?

Network Security: a teachable moment

As parents, we are always on the watch for the "teachable moment" . These are moments that take basic concepts out of the abstract and into a concrete immediacy. For the simple, basic things in life ( compassion, humility, kindness, life and death, etc..) there are many opportunities to share those life lessons. For others, the opportunities are few and far between. One of the life lessons that are hard to find concrete examples for is Network Security. Safe networking ranks right up with safe sex when you are trying to find non-theoretical examples to share with your kids. I recently had the perfect teachable moment to hammer network security home with my teen aged daughter.

Growing up in a geek household, on the net early, my kids have always had a good grounding in online safety ( don't talk to strangers, don't give out personal information, people may e lying about who they really are, etc..) but when we talk about people hacking into networks or computers, it is feel to them like a remote- "only to governments and corporations" sort of event. Kids visit from house to house, from Starbucks to Panera, easily plugging into anyone and everyone's free network- not pondering any potential risk.

Then, I had the great opportunity to use my iPod touch to bring this home. My daughter and I were sitting in the car and I noticed on my iPod that it was seeing wifi from the school. Being sure it was a locked down network, I clicked connect ( geek psychology) and was astonished to find that the campus had implemented open WiFi. When asking what the big deal was, I pull up the NetScan application on my iPod and showed her how I could start to gather information about objects currently connected to the network. ( yes, there were open ports and some potential vulnerablities spotted). We talked about how, given a laptop connected instead of my iPod, this information could have been used to look for vulnerabilities, break into computers and gather data. She was astonished at how easy the first steps were and that gathering data did not require massive amounts of "hard core" programming.

It occurred to me that we had talked a lot about network safety, but we had never sat kids down on our home or any public network and showed them how it worked. If you are out with your kids in a place with a public network and have a secure device you do not mind connecting, I encourage you to do a quick demo. Don't crack someone's computer... it's just not polite ( and fairly illegal in most places)- but showing how easy it is to scan for information proved a big eye opener here...

Testing Google Voice- Need some help

My GrandCentral account (finally) got converted and I am busy testing all of the GoogleVoice features. Be sure to check back in a week for a full update, but in the meantime, I need your help. Please click on the widget below and help me test out the embedded call feature. Your call should automatically go to a voicemail I recorded just for you. If you leave me a message that makes me smile, it might show up in the review post and you could be (sorta) famous. Be sure to tell me if you do NOT want your message to be published, but please leave me some love anyway.

Geeky Fun

If I had not been driving my daughters to the airport yesterday, I would have been over at Purdue, watching the Rube Goldberg Contest. There may be those who see this as a silly waste of time and talent, trying to find the hardest way to accomplish a task, but it is also a great lesson in team building and creative thinking. I will, however be over at Purdue Monday night and all day Tuesday for the Industry Workshop on HPC- both to give them some insight into the world of manufacturing, as well as fodder for the HPCMFG blog.

What are your favorite Geeky ways to kick back, have fun and expand your mind?

Weekend Forecast: Full Geek Mode

Thanks to a man with a dream, we have a long weekend coming up here in the states. I decided it was time to make some of my dreams come true, and get caught up on some hardware/software maintenance as well.

To prep for this, I have renewed my AVG licenses ( to be installed this weekend- easy peasy)
ordered new hard drives for 2 different laptops, ordered a video card and memory from two different vendors ( one batch from Dell/one batch from eMachines for an old computer we have here) and will hopefully be picking up some very old laptop SDRAM from a friend.
I need to rollback a windows bases flash only terminal box we have sitting around from an old project, as it will make a great web browsing/reference "terminal".
I need to fix an auto disc mapping issue with the shared media drive on two computers.
There should be at least 3 Ubuntu installs in the mix.
If it all goes well and nothing explodes I will end the weekend with at least 4 additional computers functional in the household. This is probably some sort of horrible sin, since it will put us at more computers than humans in the family-- but it feels worse to me having hardware just sitting around gathering dust. We frequently have folks over who borrow computer time, so this will ease some of the crunch that way.

One of them is the "terminal", one a very old but wonderfully thin and portable M300 that will have Ubuntu and be perfect for ultra portable writing anywhere. I am claiming this one as my writer's brain. It gets no games, no second life, none of the silly experimental stuff. If all the installs go well, I may even track down a USB wireless connector so that I can do the write and post thing from almost anywhere. It is a master of portability, and at 3lbs, easy to take on trips and to coffee shops to help me get significantly more writing productivity.

With 4+ kids and Ogre on a mission to get significant progress done on the office storage cupboards, this should be a geek adventure indeed. I will tag all the posts on the ups, downs and progress as I go under "admin".