My Uncle David — David Livingston — was one of the most incredible people I have every known and his recent passing has left me feeling a strange combination of loss, regret (that I didn’t have more time with him), and happiness through the realisation of how many people were touched by him and in the belief that his memory will live on.
We’ll miss you David, you’re spirit was a benefit to all those who knew you.
Ken
p.s. there is now a memorial site for David, setup by friends in Vancouver:
Several years ago I feel in love with Squeezebox streaming audio. It was an cost effective and hip alternative to Sonos. Then Logitech bought Squeezebox and at first all was right with the world … more updates, big company backing, etc.
Then things change …
Logitech stopped caring. Their strategy for both Squeezebox and Harmony remotes was at best “on pause” and now for the Squeezebox is formally over. Why? I don’t understand this one but in any case I have found myself spending more
time doing *tech support* on my Squeezebox network than listening to it over the past 6-9 months and have decided to stop trying.
Endings, of course, lead to new beginnings and as of today I’m using AirPlay. I bought the B&W A5 speakers for the living room and an Airport Express to power the stereo in the Kitchen. If this works I’ll find something for the bedroom to complete the house coverage. Looking forward to this next audio chapter.

Melody came to visit us this week. I always feel so lucky when I’m able to get into the same geography with good friends especially those from so far away.
I’ve used Last.fm for years now but I was really getting annoyed at it because the player didn’t integrate with my media controls. Such an easy thing to do and so very useful. How could this be left off? Well I’m happy to say they’ve finally gotten around to fixing it.
On a side note, I’d love to know more about their business model, they are clearly motivated by some things other than the B2C business that I’m a subscriber to and those interests seem to make more of an impression on them than other B2B businesses with a strong B2C brand.

I’m happy to say … I finally got my MyBasis watch. I ordered it many moons ago but they’re now shipping to the folks who registered early and — via my mother in the states (they only ship to the US at the moment) — I am a proud owner as of last night. What has it told me so far? Well apparently I sweat more while sleeping than I do during the day. Is this abnormal? Who knows. Does it matter? Probably not. Am I excited to know this …. yeah kind of.

I’ve spent the past year exclusively working on my startup LifeGadget. Today is my last day of doing this full time (at least for now). This is in no way an indication that I’m less excited or committed to LifeGadget but instead a need to lower my cash-flow risk. For this reason i’m starting a 4 days/week consulting assignment to bring in money and feed the development of LifeGadget.
Life’s going to be busy in this next phase but it was the right choice and I’m feeling good at the moment about the decision.
Some while back I signed up for a free service from Google that runs analysis on my email patterns. I often don’t look at it but when I do it’s kind of interesting. From this chart I can see the amount of emails I write steadily declines during the week from Monday through Saturday but then bounces back on Sunday. That seems right. What does it tell me? How does it help? Not really sure yet. It may make no difference at all and in which case I’d still give it some value as it was enjoyable to see this data and ponder what it meant.
According to my iPad (and courtesy of ESPN) today’s a good to fire your NFL coach if you were contemplating doing that. Oh and it’s also a good day to play Pong World if you’re into that sort of thing.
Yesterday was my second “calorie restricted” day as part of my “5/2 Calorie Restricted” diet. It wasn’t easy eating only 600 calories but I think the overall pattern is probably quite sustainable. For those not familiar with the diet, it’s worth looking at as it posits that you can do incredibly good things for your longevity (mental and physical) but shocking the system twice a week with low calorie intake (the other days you eat what you want).
I’d probably be paying dietary science too much of a service by calling it a science as it has quite a few soft spots in it. And if you’re someone who needs scientific evidence to get you try something you’ll not find it in the 5/2 diet but then you’ll not find it in any diet. It’s the nature of the complexity of food, people, and their interaction that makes this a more elusive target that we think it should be. Anyway, I’m not one of those people. I like experimenting with things on myself so long as I can do it in a safe way. In this case I don’t have any conclusions yet but what I’m looking at is:
Managing your contacts, your calendar, and your email used to be relatively easy things. Sure there were problems but you could compartmentalise them to a particular application and solve them there. Now we have the “cloud”. Yes clouds are supposed to be white fluffy creatures with not a care in the world and if you listen to the marketeers you would know by now that those fluffy clouds make things easier. Right? Well not always. I now have Google, Apple, and Facebook competing to out-cloud one another by getting all my devices the latest mail, calendar, birthdays, events, contacts, etc. Add to that that it these cloud services are all a little different on the mobile platforms than they are on the desktops but that doesn’t mean that the mobile platform shouldn’t talk it’s broken dialect to the desktop. Oh no, they talk. They talk, sometimes they agree, sometimes they disagree but rarely does each other know if there was agreement or not. It’s all leading to complexity. I mean I supposed predicting the weather or predicting climate change is still marginally harder but for fuck’s sake my calendar is giving these accepted “big problems” a run for their money.
I’ll leave it there for now and hope that my next post is about how I’ve achieved world peace (within my computing ecosystem of course).