Obviously, the “Migratory Bird Stamp” is not postage. As December passed and January settled in, I came to understand that the Chesapeake Bay *is* a premiere bird watching (and hunting) destination. Whereas farmers may get their wakeup call from the barn roosters, I get an average of 50-100 Canadian Geese each day. The “squadrons” of Geese setting into the front field most mornings and forage for the soy beans that were left from the harvest. By afternoon they move to the creek. Over night “guests” tend to stay in the creek as well.

At times, there are so many, you can hear the wings flapping overhead … that is when they are not honking like crazy. Yesterday they were splashing about in the creek.

Zen has learned to ignore them (more or less). At first she thought it was a “target rich environment” but she has taken my “advice” and left them alone.

When I got the unit home I started reading the user manual. that is when I found the gold mine - this thing can be setup to “scan to network storage”. I already wrote about my use of the ReadyNAS NV+ for backups and file storage. Now, it is also my electronic document management solution.

With the HP’s ability to scan directly to storage I am that much closer to a paperless office. As soon as I pick up the mail, I open up all the bills, bank statements, etc. and start to scan them. I have programmed the speed dial keys to perform “digital filing”. One key is for new bills, another for bank and financial statements, etc. I stick the mail in the document feeder and press the speed dial key. That’s it. After the scanning is done, I toss the mail through the shredder.

When I sit down to pay bills, I open my file explorer to the unpaid-bills folder and preview the bills. As I pay each one, I move the files to the paid folder.

The document filing system now keeps my financial records all in one place as well.

The only thing I now want to consider is “off site backup” as a safety precaution. I may be a new customer of Amazon S3 sooner than I thought!

1) Arrived with a problem to solve. It can be real or made up but it should be something that the collective attendance could solve if they were working together on the problem. You now have something real to be thinking about as you choose sessions to attend,. The problem will also help your attention to the speakers and their content. It will also help you form good questions for the Q&A session. A real world problem to discuss will also make you memorable when you talk to product vendors and technical professionals. You might even end up with one of the coveted chachkies for vendors.

2) Have a professional goal to achieve or agenda to present. You will want to have a well rehearsed elevator pitch of not more than 30 seconds. You want a more in depth answer but only if your recipient shows interest. You want to seek out decision makers. The environment of a professional conference provides a captive audience and a much higher than normal concentration of prime candidates.

To start a conversation when you meet a candidate to pitch your idea, you will also want a good answer to the question of “what do you do” or if you are renewing a contact, “what are you doing now”. It should be interesting, truthful, and if you are lucky, it will lead to a conversation. Professional conferences are a great opportunity to network, build professional relationships, investigate job opportunities, etc. The conference is not the place to close deals. The goal is to build interest in you or your idea. Remember to establish a follow-up plan. Don’t for get to say “thank you” - regardless of how the meeting went.

3) Pace your self. You want to last the entire conference. You also don’t want to appear to “force your idea” or “yourself” onto others. Remember, you want to impress your target audience not alienate them. You also may run into a key contact later in the conference or have a request for a follow-up. You want to be able to deliver your idea as crisp and fresh as at the start of the conference.

The above will make your experience much more enjoyable and more productive - both positive results!

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

$90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

Specifically, the researchers found that, with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Posted by Stephen Shankland

So I guess it’s the money not the wine that makes people happy … well, at least a bunch of stuffy test subjects.

I realize, looking over my past few blog entries, that I have little if any consistency with regard to content. Personally, I’m not all too concerned with that realization. I’m just not yet sure where I’m headed - or where I want to head for that matter.

The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

- Mary Schmich

So, if you are in the same boat as me, I hope you won’t mind if I ask that you paddle from time to time. I’m not one to carry too much dead weight for too long without asking to put idle hands to work - even if only to make the boat go in circles.

I’ve been curious when MySQL would be acquired. I have read a number of accounts that it would not happen and MySQL AB would rather go public. I bought most of the arguments in favor of those rumors and had a few arguments of my own. First, I could not see MySQL being bought by one of the large database providers. There would be too much risk that the openness of MySQL would be lost or at the very least not as trusted. Next, none of the large database companies truly get open source and the necessary business model behind it. So, the Sun announcement was very interesting to me because it addresses both of those concerns. Sun is not a big database company so MySQL is not likely to be subsumed and lost. Further, Sun has proven it can make a business with open source technology. It’s Linux platform is a good example (and hopefully Java will be too one day).

More interesting is what a Solaris + MySQL package could mean. In the WebOS ecosystem, this union bumps Sun further up the evolutionary tree. Late last year, Red Hat announced the inclusion of virtualization technology into the core. At the same time, Red Hat and Amazon announced its intent to use Red Hat for “Amazon Web Services” and its elastic computer (or cloud computing or CPUs for hire, however you like to look at it). the Amazon+RedHat alliance moved that partnership up the evolutionary tree.

So that begs the question, where does this leave the other big players like Google, Facebook, and [Sales]Force.com not to forget the current generation giants. That could well be the billion dollar question (or as Carl Sagan might say, “billions and billions”).

But I can attest that neither Time Machine nor Time Capsule would have saved me a couple of weeks ago when I was traveling and I managed to hose (technical term) my laptop. What I needed was an “internet storage solution”. What I needed was Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service).

So, will internet based storage be the next offering for iTunes ? Probably not - at least not with that name. But, Apple must be considering how to get some form of monthly reoccurring revenue from its consumer base. An Apple equivalent of S3 could appeal to owners of MacBooks, iPhones, and even iPods (specifically the iTouch).

My backup strategy already does periodic full system images and daily incremental backups to a network storage device. It could be easily adapted to a service like Amazon S3. I did a quick estimate and with my “unusually high volumne for a consumer” 25GB worth of backups (and assuming half of that changes every month) I only would pay $6.25/month. If you think 25GB is low, don’t forget that compression reduced most files other than your music and video. If you still think it is low, then assume no compression and your whole laptop will likely only run you about $12.50/month. (Here is a calculator to see what your backup storage would cost.)

It is only a matter of time before the notion of giving consumers a backup strategy that is easy to use, nearly seamless, and “out in the internet cloud” is too obvious to ignore and if it comes form Google or Apple, it may be too easy to avoid. The only barrier is marketing and Apple seems to have that in spades.

Related: There are already rumors of Google storage offerings. Amanda Networks has already delivered a backup solution that leverage Amazon S3 in the background. You can use JungleDisk to connect Amazon S3 as a network drive under OS X, Windows, and Linux.

So, how *do* you make a backup image of a USB memory stick or SD card ? I thought the answer would be partimage but that didn’t get the boot info correct and it was overkill to boot <intentional pun >. It turns out there are only two command needed from a Linux terminal window …

Code:
#command to make backup image of SD card
#in this example case the SD card reader appears as “/dev/sdb”
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb | bzip2 >sdb-xbuntu.image.bz2

Code:
#restore backup image of SD card
#in this example case the SD card reader appears as “/dev/sdb”
sudo bunzip2 -c sdb-xbuntu.image.bz2 >/dev/sdb