Doug-at-large

The Sumida River fireworks were tonight. This was taken from my 3rd floor veranda at my house in Shinkoiwa in Katsushika, Tokyo.

Here are some of the solar eclipse photos I took during today’s 11:13 am solar eclipse. Tokyo had 70% of total. I think the fact that it was cloudy adds to an other-worldly atmosphere.

Click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized photos.
doug

I have this Thorp & Martin eclipse viewer booklet from the 1925 Boston eclipse. I was hoping to use it to view tomorrow’s 70% eclipse in Tokyo – the first solar eclipse here in 46 years! But I can’t contact Thorp & Martin, and somebody else thinks the viewer provides no protection. Can I look at the LCD of my digital camera while taking a photo of the eclipse?

Click on the thumbnails to see them full size.

doug

It’s the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. I’m sure everybody who was alive then remembers where they were that day.

I didn’t get to see it live on TV because I was in the middle of the Atlantic ocean on a ship at the time.

doug

There is an interesting, balanced take on Chrome OS – why it is relevant and why it is irrelevant at:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21004&tag=nl.e550

I lean towards the skeptical points mentioned.

You know, as experience showed with the iPhone when it was first released, users just wanted to do more with the device than Apple first envisioned and thus were forced to create a SDK and allow apps to be created for it – not just the original “web apps.” People found the web apps to be too limiting.

I think that people who buy even portable netbooks will not be satisfied by being constrained by a browser and web apps and are inevitably going to want to be able to run apps directly on their devices. I don’t believe that the future is entirely in the cloud. I think it will be a mix.

I think Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) is a good vision of the future – a mix of a very cool local client that works on Mac, Windows, iPhone and other mobile devices, combined with a cloud version that lets you synchronize and also access your data in a very nice web interface. Plus you can choose which data to synchronize, which to publish to the outside world and which to keep local on your own device in 100% privacy. And it just has really cool features.

That model is the best of both worlds I think.

doug

After helping me wash the dishes and taking a bath in my hands, Hao-chan flew over to the computer to dry himself.

It’s today all over the world… Auckland 10:40 pm, here in Tokyo 7:40 pm, Mumbai 4:10 pm (they are strangely off by a 1/2 hour), London 11:40 am, Boston 6:40 am, St. Louis 5:40 am, San Francisco 3:40 am, Honolulu 12:40 am… I think everybody’s on the same day only for 2 hours each day…

We should have a name for this time of day…

doug