see a puffin eat a fish

The company i’ve been working at for years, QuitNet (HealthWays), got a mention in the New York Times today. We’re getting closer and closer to the ‘Oprah’ moment, the inevitable mention of QuitNet on Oprah that Nate had predicted.

After close to a a year of manually entering ssh credentials to connect to four different hosts ( + constantly getting logged out when the wireless dies or the remote host times out) I decided to finally take the time to figure out how to get openssh running on os x so I could ssh without a password. I got the key pairs working but still had the problem of being prompted for my key password which wasn’t any better than getting prompted for my remote host password. Turns out I also needed to run SSHAgent, a program that keeps my passwords in memory and has the best icon ever – an unphased blowfish going to work.

Well except for the fact that people can’t help but put an ‘r’ on the end of their web offerings (for example, WayMarkr). First twitter blows up, now we have tumblelogs, abbreviated web logs for people who don’t have the time to keep up their blog. According to wikipedia, the word was coined in October of 2005 but maybe the time wasn’t right then.

So here is the trend for content: the words are getting shorter as are the entries. The individual entries are loosing their substance as their value is the aggregate. We are being overwhelmed and this is how we react.

Again, you’ve got to be kidding me. This is the misguided, post-9/11 hysteria we’re living in now? I mostly love the ‘article’ the hard hitting globe has on the Mass Art grad who put up the dangerous lite-brights:

On his website, he also lists several authors who have inspired him, including Douglas Adams and Leo Tolstoy, and included passages that moved him. One sentence from Tolstoy’s “Confession” was underlined: “It became clear to me that art is an ornamentation of life, something that lures us into life. But life had lost its charm for me so how was I to charm others?”

It’s like the used wget to scrape typepad and then rearranged it to sound like news. Last week a took the fireball of savings back to Boston and had time to read the Times and the Globe in succession. I know it’s the same owners but there’s no comparison.

Right before Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out a website got passed around by everyone. It was called Lacuna Inc. and would have been Digged if Digg existed. I got it via email a couple of times with the same addendum, “is this for real?!”. Well it wasn’t. Someone did a whois and figured out that Lacuna Inc.’s hostname was registered to a movie studio. It was a prop for the Michel Gondry movie. Well here’s another website like that except this time it’s real.

Ever had a brilliant idea while driving, but couldn’t write it down? Had something that you needed to remember but simply weren’t able to? Here at QTech we’re trying to solve these problems. We’re developing simple applications that transform smart phones into tools for jogging your memory by integrating your conversations and verbal notes into your daily working, searching, and phoning environment.

If you dig around, it isn’t as creepy and invasive as it sounds. No one is reading your mind, yet anyway. They record you talking, convert it to text and then mine it. But they have very ambitious goals.