Author: Rick Klau

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things Federal court approves cellular number portabilityHallelujah. Today, a federal court rejected an appeal from wireless companies and ruled that consumers should have the right to retain their old phone numbers when switching carriers. Consumer advocates say the inability to retain numbers is one of the biggest barriers preventing…

(Editor’s note: Apparently an e-mail of Michael Colby’s attack on Howard Dean from February is in wide circulation. One individual, Jeff Kaufman, took time to draft a reply – which itself is now circulating by e-mail. In the interest of balancing the debate, I thought it a good idea to let Kaufman’s comments get some…

A number of people (Sabrina Pacifici, Jerry Lawson, Larry Staton, to name a few) linked to my article in this month’s LPM about how to add functionality to your browser. Larry quite rightly pointed out that it’s focused on IE for Windows. As a result of Larry’s post, not to mention several e-mails I got,…

HOLLYWOOD MEETUP REPORT The Hollywood California meetup continues to hold strong. This month we had 115 people, up from 75 last month. We spent a good deal of time recapping the past month and Gov. Dean’s visit last Sunday for the CTA speech. We also recruited donors for a series of fund raisers Dean will…

I’m looking for some statistics about the costs of homegrown development. A firm I’ve been talking to is fighting a battle with their IT department – the IT department insists on building every application themselves, while marketing and management are now leaning towards buying us (a fully-built CRM system tailored to their market). What I…

McGee’s Musings Punting the SAT Scholastic Aptitude Test: Answering All Questions Incorrectly. This is a knee-slapping account of one person’s attempt to achive the lowest possible score on a SAT examination. The project is fully documented, with lavish illustrations, from the original application to take the test to the white-knuckle stress of finding the wrong…

New gig in the private sector: I’ve actually spent the bulk of my post-doctoral career on the non-academic side of the fence and I’m headed back there again. You can see the details here, although I try to avoid wearing a tie whenever possible. I find that I’m happiest working in rapidly growing environments. Kellogg…

Great press for ActiveWords in USA Today: Information springs from your fingertips. Like Tivo, Active Words is one of those things that doesn’t seem to make much sense until you try it – at which point you can’t imagine why others don’t use it. Check it out.

The Meetup phenomenon is continuing for the Dean campaign. Last month there were just around 20,000 people signed up on the Monday prior to the Meetup; in the next 36 hours more than 2,000 more people signed up. The same thing has happened again – this month there were 29,000 signed up on the Monday…

It’s raining inside my car – I wonder if that is the sign of a major design flaw? Well the drought finally ended last night, and it looks like we got about 2 inches of rain. I know this because I measured the rain collection in my BMW X5’s center console cup holder. So how…