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Monday,  11/29/04  10:21 PM

The new milkmen?  I found a flyer on my door handle telling me that Arrowhead now delivers Starbucks coffee as well as water.  So be it.  I'm sure the per-pound profit on coffee is a lot higher than drinking water.  Too bad we prefer Peet's... 

Interesting that the concept of a dairy that delivers daily has faded...  When I was a kid, "everyone" on our street got all their dairy products that way.  What killed it?  Price?  It sure was more convenient, a precursor to Webvan, which remains to this day my single biggest regretful memory of the dot-com era.  We loved Webvan, and eagerly look forward to the day when someone resurrects that type of service... 

New cool toy: Virtual Desktop Manager.  Maybe this is old hat to you, but it wasn't to me; VDM is a free "power tool" from Microsoft which lets you have four separate desktops, each with its own "alt-tab space" of programs.  Excellent for me; I can but email, SharpReader, Firefox, etc. on one desktop (for interacting with the outside World), Visual Studio and Perforce on another (for programming), and Citydesk and Photoshop on a third (for blogging).  I love utilities that do just one thing, and do them well. 

BW has an interesting Special Report on TV, Today and Tomorrow.  The most important trend: TV meets IP.  This is being talked about so much it is practically a cliché; so where is it?  I want my IP TV

CNet considers Video Search.  "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are quietly developing new search tools for digital video, foreshadowing a high-stakes technology arms race in the battle for control of consumers' living rooms."  I think control is wrong word; the disintermediation caused by the 'net is always about giving consumers more control.   But if Google can help me find my IP TV, I'm all for it :)  [ via John Battelle

Matt Haughey wonders Is 'Transitional Fair Use' the Wave of the Future?  No.  At best, it would be a "transitional" solution for digital content owners... 

Meanwhile Wired wonders about Tivo: TiVo Their Way: Ads, Copy Brakes.  This emphasis on advertizing is a shark jump, unfortunately. 

From entrepreneur.com: What not to do.  A pretty good list, and it concludes with the following five tips to get you on the right track: 

  1. Know your goals for the venture.
  2. Recruit and hire the best people.
  3. Develop a forgiving strategy.
  4. Be honest with yourself.
  5. Commit to the business.

And here we have - Dilbert's Ultimate House.  Not a joke, this is pretty cool, actually; readers of Dilbert emailed suggestions for Dilbert's "perfect house", and the combination is a great house, as well as a green one.  My cat Reggie would like it, too :)  [ thanks, Kevin ] 

I know, I know, this is old news.  The Scientist welcomes Google Scholar.  I didn't want to post about this 'till I had a chance to use it.  So now I have; I was doing some research on Vector Quantization, an interesting mathematical technique for compression bitstreams which has applications in pattern recognition.  Well guess what?  It works.  Nicely. 

Think the whole Intelligent Design vs. Evolution "debate" isn't out of hand?  Check out these disclaimer stickers for science textbooks.  Hint: some of them are real.  My favorite is at left; I'm thinking of putting these on my kids' textbooks even if they don't already have a sticker, just for fun :)