Transparent Screens

I’m not going to have time in the near future to setup my own transparent screen shot, but these are so cool I had to share what others have done. The image above is by W00kie; many more images of transparent screens are available.

A Visit from Mayor Ron

Mayor Ron Rolander, as part of his voter outreach effort, dropped by the house this afternoon. As those who care about Lindsborg are aware, there are a number of issues being debated during this mayoral and city council campaign. For years I’ve been watching the whole situation with interest, first via the local paper, and … Read more

Anything Besides eTech ‘Round Here?

If you’re overwhelmed by all the recent eTech postings, you can see our latest travel photos, or view images of our hometown of Lindsborg, (scroll past the political articles) or view some images of our glowrocks. Normal posting, or what passes for that around here, will now resume.

eTech05: Whew!

Wow! I’ve never done anything quite like this before. 27 eTech posts over a 4 day period. Written pretty much in real time, with only a quick scan for outright stupidness before posting. I created a new category, eTech, so all of the postings can be found in one spot. Was it worth it? Time … Read more

eTech05: From the Garage

Mark Fletcher, CEO and founder of bloglines, shared with the eTech audience his experiences with starting a couple of different web services companies. Garage philosophy: * passion for the idea * cheap technologies * keep it simple * release early/release often * involve your users More on philosophy: * moonlighting limits risk * friends/family funding … Read more

eTech05: Making Web Services Personal

Ben Trott, co-founder of SixApart, the creators of MovableType, presented this afternoon at eTech. Talking on the subject of building personal web services, he talked about building tools for personal use. Remixing of code, not content, though not with an eye towards replacing existing web services, but rather with an eye towards personal use and … Read more

eTech05: Life Hacks Live

One of the most enjoyable eTech presentations was the return of last year’s Life Hacks talk. Like last year it covered a wide range of topics related to techniques that geeks and hackers worldwide use to increase their personal effectiveness. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a seat (the talk was SRO), and so didn’t take any … Read more

eTech05: Google Code

Google announced a new web site at eTech, Google Code. It’s appears to be an open-source portal, with a focus on google technologies such as their API, info on their open source involvement, and so on. Chris DiBona, google’s open source program manager introduced the site and then ran through a brief list of current … Read more

eTech05: Ask Jeeves Alpha

One of the meta tracks here at eTech seems to be “a peak inside modern software research labs”. Today, we heard from Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves provides an alternate search engine. In their words, not better than google, just different. Ask Jeeves Alpha, a double-secret codename for their research group. They will eventually have a … Read more

eTech05: Economics of the Long Tail

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, gave spoke at eTech on the topic of the economics of the Long Tail. The Long Tail refers to a distribution curve that has many points to the right of the curve. The number of different words folks use to find this site demonstrate the Long Tail; … Read more