Political Perception

This made me laugh out loud (LOL for those under 30).

I was reading the NY Times and Wall Street Journal tonight online and clicked back and forth between the two. The lead story was about the $700b package.

Can you guess which picture headlines which paper?

A.



B.



Regardless of whether you lean Left or Right, if you are not reading both sides you're missing half the story.

Stew.

Deer in the Driveway

Every day these three visit to eat down our Hosta. They also seem to have a taste for the acorns falling. This year the deer family has been the most bold and as long as we stay on the deck they will move around the yard. This movie was shot at 5pm and not 5am when you would normally expect deer to be moving around.

Is Google Involved With Break Through Surveillance Capability?

Maybe I've been reading too many Robert Ludlum novels this Summer, but tell me if this doesn't make you think.

Last night Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes tells us that the success of the surge in Iraq was turned by a powerful new surveillance technology.

"This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders. That is one of the true breakthroughs," Woodward told Pelley. "From what I know about it, it's one of those things that go back to any war, World War I, World War II, the role of the tank, and the airplane. And it is the stuff of which military novels are written," Woodward said. "If you were an al Qaeda leader or part of the insurgency in Iraq, or one of these renegade militias, and you knew about what they were able to do, you'd get your ass outta town."

(He starts talking about it at 8:00 minutes into the video)
Use the scroll to fast forward if you want to.

That kind of statement made me start thinking what it could possibly be? I think, what is the most powerful surveillance tool I know of? Google Earth. On Saturday I read that Google had launched it's own satellite and thought "wow that's power". Then I start remembering things I've read recently that fill in some blanks.

• U.S. general laments Google Earth capability
• Google execs take off with landing privileges at Moffett Field
• Google leases acreage at Moffett for complex
• Google Gets Use of Land and 767 Runway For 40 Years
• Google Satellite Now Watching You From 423 Miles Up

What do you bet the military now has a real-time Google Earth?

While action movies show the government with kewl toyz, reality was that they probably didn't have them. What do bet in the last year that changed?

I guess if I get a knock at the door, then I know I'm right ...

Cloud Computing File Server and Internet Fax for only $11.50 a month

In my quest to move iNetMedia "into the cloud" I have found an amazingly inexpensive way to reproduce my office file server and fax machine.

Fax machine - MyFax.com - for $10/month I choose a local phone number and faxes are sent to up to 5 email addresses and saved online for year. Less expensive than the dedicated phone the fax machine was plugged into. Unplugged that puppy!

Office file server - Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk - This is a little more techie but not much. Amazon sells online storage for $.15/Gbyte per month and you only pay for what you use. Say you need 10Gb of storage, it costs you $1.50 a month. Jungle Disk is a $20 program that makes the Amazon storage look like a hard drive. So, sign up with Amazon, install the program and create your new "S Drive". Copy files from from your PC to the "S Drive". You can now install Jungle Disk on your laptop, connect to the "S Drive" and you're done. Your PC and your laptop are now both connected to your Amazon S3 file server. So take your $5k RAID file server and UPS, and unplug that puppy!



Did I mention Jungle Disk is available for PC, Mac & Linux?

And since you can now access your files from anywhere, you never have an excuse to stop working!


Reference Docs:

• How Cloud Computing is Changing the World
• Jungle Disk 2.0 released