Dear LazyWeb,

Guess what?

I've run out of disk space yet again :(

I'm looking at the 6 Bay ReadyNas, but... I am wondering if I could also just pick up a USB case that can house half a dozen or more hot swappable drives.

Anyone have any favorite solutions right now? (please note... I hate putting together Linux based systems so I am for plug/play or appliance). The Drobo used to look nice but the last time I looked they were charging for bug fixes and that just pisses me off :(

Thanks!
-Brian

The Romans celebrated the solstice today, December 25. (Today this is when the days begin to grow visibly longer, but their date was probably based on the true solstice in the Julian calendar.) It became Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Day of Birth of the Unconquered Sun. This festival celebrated the sun god, Deus Sol Invictus - a inclusive concept that covered the agrarian Roman god Sol Indiges, the god Sol (sometimes Sol Invictus) who was promoted by Emperor Aurelian, the rising sun Oriens, the Syrian god El-Gabal, the Persian god Mithras, and possibly that upstart Jesus Christus, whose church decided to separately celebrate his birth this day.

Wishing you all a joyous and bright Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or Cristes mæsse (old English) if you prefer. Also enjoyment of your pagan tree, gifts, gingerbread, poisonous hemi-parasitic mistletoe, and eggnog (or lait de poule, hen's milk, as the French call it - long known as a cold remedy), as relevant.

First, all the ads that sneak thru AdBlock in the new versions of FireFox.

Now, I'm finding that in 3.5, Firefox doesn't honor the user's settings in the javascript panel; and it is allowing websites to disable menus.

Why are the newer versions of Firefox more user-hostile? Is there a lot of content/advertising corporation money behind the Firefox development team now, such that this sort of abuse is mandated?

When browsers are designed for the web developer rather than the user, things tend to get shitty fast. I hope this isn't what's going on.

UPDATE: Setting "javascript.options.strict" seems to have fixed the right click menu problem. Maybe? Strict as in "Yes, I actually MEANT to set that?" WTF? Does this effect anything else, or does it just return things to a sane state, where the user gets to set options exactly as they intended in the first place?

I was writing a letter to a friend with an update, and figured some of yall would like the update too.

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For an update, things have been pretty bipolar here but with luck 2010 is looking to be an amazing turnaround.

2009 is one of the most memorable years of my life..and not just because it's the most recent :)

I'm still in Los Angeles, still in the same semi-commune. We are having a largish Christmas dinner (16 people or so!) which is wonderful. I've been here for almost 4 years which I think is a new record (I usually move every 2 years) . Life is good, don't see this changing/moving but who knows. Life is hard to predict!

I'm uber busy. I have basically 3 jobs right now so not much of a life outside of that, no art, music, not even that much in the ways of movies, I gave up TV a long time ago and normally have no idea what people are talking about when it comes to popular shows and stars. But the sacrifice is worth it,investing in the future.

A couple years ago I read Timothy Ferris's bestseller "the 4 hour work week", which was an eye opening way to conceive of business and lifestyle. So my goal ever since was to develop a "Muse"

mostly passive income on highly automated profitable products, training and services. Nothing super fancy just enough to cover my basic living plus some to play. The internet makes this actually much easier than doing the same in an offline way...at least it can be easy. Apparently I like to do things the hard way :) If any business is just a scaled up version of a lemonaide stand, instead of just selling lemonaide I've been working on setting up a lemon farm and a stand factory and distribution chain.

There is a large upfront cost to once things are setup and working, it's easy to have a better balance in life, as right now it's pretty much off the deep end on the work side. But things only need to be built once, and provide years of return at scales way beyond a couplee, then the needle can point the opposite direction.

I think one of the largest unexpected changes in 2009 is I'm back in school (nonacredited) to study marketing, with a focus on online. There's a great quote from William Deming that all business is, is marketing and innovation. I've had the innovation part down for years (ever since legos!) , but had to many innovative products on the bleeding edge end up in the trash can because they didn't understand the marketing or market. Got tired of that happening so figured out I needed to change.

Studying marketing for the current internet connected wireless world has been quite the eye opener so much has changed! With my roots as an engineer, some aspects of marketing are extremely counter intuitive -harder than calculus. It's like learning Japanese, it's not just the words and syntax there is many cultural things that have to be respected for the message to get across. But to my surprise my improv theater background gives me almost super powers into stepping into the right mindset to get marketing. In conjunction with my tech background, and I've been able to help many of my classmates both in message and in implementation.

2009 has been a bit of a "days of our startup" soap opera. My last startup company (kids education) which I left back in April, which I have a significant (almost 2 years of salaray paid in stock) investment in, ran out of money in November, and the board is currently feuding, and the CEO has been stripped of all power but not fired due to some positioning on his part. It's been an eye-opening experience in human nature when significant investments are competing against being friends and family ties (as the board is). On the dark side, I believed so strongly in the company, that I gave up about 2 years of salary in the form of stock in anticipation of the continual "just 2 months away" from the service actually being built and acquirig major funding, ...neither of which happened. So emerging with a significant amount of personal debt, and burnout made it a hard restart of my life. On the brightside, despite the drama, there are still many passionate and commited people trying to put things back together, and my new marketing skills may be able to help give it a fresh start, and getting into consulting my rate doubled. I'm very fortunate given the current economy.

Based on what I've learned in my marketing, back in August I started my first "real" company which helps small business owners make way more sales by amplifying and automating the sales process. I built the service primarily for myself, but now have 22 unsolicited beta users. It's been a rollercoaster of a ride so far, and we are getting ready to open the doors again in Jan, with a public launch in Feb at present velocity, which I am hoping will do well. With only 200 users it will support all my team to continue building the service out and all my meager living expenses.

To help build that and other things out, I've had an amazing connection to a great company in Pakistan, we have been building out a custom team for with amazing rates and super high quality people. This is going to be great as historically I haven't been able to scale well, as I couldn't delegate much, especially in Los Angeles where people charge $100 hour for rather mediocre work.

Since school is pricey and development is expensive, to pay the bills I still run a consulting company, with my role primarily doing fulltime doing information visualization for semantic webs. We are actually getting into the trendy multi-touch this month so should be fun and a perfect fit for me, and maybe even another showcase product.

That consulting company reached new heights, in helping out a friend with his showcase product I had the unique opportunity to get an major industry award, in front of thousands of people, and which got some 1 on 1 time with Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker and voice of The Joker).

Healthwise hitting Age 35 was a bit of hitting a wall. Notably having RSI (repetitive strain injuries) from pretty much all day every day computing get to the point I need to stop working at all for some days to combat it's various hydra symptoms. Plus also Rosacea+digestive issues. In theory these are both environment related so I'm doubly motivated to be successful so that I can get into an environment that is more natural + sustainable (I generally am healthy other than that).

I'm dating a French Grad student at UCLA. Though between our super busy schedules we rarely get to see each other. She's currently in Paris and London for the holiday, and as par for the course in our schedules, just when she gets back ..I'll be out in Vegas some high school friends I haven't seen together since over a decade ago.

Warm Regards

Troy

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Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to transform human skin cells into stem cells in 2006 came the frustration of actually trying to make a sufficient amount of these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells . The process is so inefficient that scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human skin, or fibroblast, cells to form iPS cell colonies after they infect fibroblasts with the retroviruses used to induce pluripotency. "We almost gave up three years ago," says Dr. Duanqing Pei, director general and professor at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in Guangzhou, China. [More]

Did Firefox just update? I think it did. It's suddenly started making extra close buttons appear on my tabs when I hover over them, which makes the title of the tab jump to the right in a most distracting way. Is there any way of making it stop? I can't find anything that looks like it would stop it in either Options, Tab Mix Plus options or about:config, and Google isn't being much help either.

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Reports of maples on the march northward and butterflies flitting far afield are already flooding in, and climate scientists predict that with escalating temperature changes more species will need to either get out of dodge, or hope for emissions reductions that will help the planet dodge the climate bullet. [More]

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For the past few months, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been little more than deadweight--a body as massive as a small car, zooming idly in orbit high above the surface of the Red Planet. After the orbiter's computer suffered a series of unplanned reboots, mission engineers decided in August to hold the probe in "safe mode" to buy time to look for the trouble source while the spacecraft remained in the protective state of limited functionality. [More]

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Network Challenge earlier this month demonstrated that social networks, more than being platforms for self-promotion, can be also be highly effective tools for rapidly gathering and disseminating very precise information. With the help of Facebook , Twitter and a homemade Web site, a winning team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) was able to within nine hours identify the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 of DARPA's red weather balloons, which were lofted 30.5 meters into the air at locations scattered throughout the U.S. [More]

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COPENHAGEN--Pleasure yachts and tall ships line the wharves and quays of Nyhavn here in the Danish capital. Shipping in Denmark goes back to the Vikings and their long ships that made perilous sea crossings even beyond Greenland. Now what may be the future of shipping is docked around the corner from Nyhavn at Kvaesthusmolen pier, a bright orange and yellow North Sea supply ship from Norway dubbed " Viking Lady "--the first ship to employ a fuel cell in history. [More]