My daughter's laptop

Several months ago my wife and I taught Jordan (our 3 year old) the concept of IMing. We both have laptops and we put them next to each other so Jordan could see how IMing worked. She typed on one computer and knew to look on the other computer to see the result (turning on the sound helped). She was rather fascinated for around 30 seconds, I guess since she can't read yet she didn't quite understand the beauty.

The point is that email, IM, and computers in general are going to come very naturally to kids growing up these days. Jordan already knows how to move the mouse, type in Word, and turn off the computer. She also understands where CDs and DVDs go in a laptop. Her favorite thing to do with my laptop though is close the cover so that I will get the hint that it is time to play, LOL.

I'm sure when she's going off to college my current laptop won't get the job done, but it makes me wonder what will laptops look like 15 years from now. My guess is that there won't be battery cables, no network cables, and my biggest prediction of all...no operating system! The computer will simply boot up from the internet....sorry Microsoft. I'm sure we are a lot closer to Internet booting than 15 years, probably more like 5 years.

Scheduled Downtime

I saw this when logging into blogger today:

*******************************************
A Bit More Scheduled Downtime
Sorry folks, we've got to bring Blogger down again at 2pm PST today, for a bit more network maintenance. It should be back up by 2:45pm. – Eric [5/13/2005 10:09:00 AM]

Scheduled Downtime
We will have 1 hour of scheduled downtime on Tuesday, May 10th at 4pm (Pacific Time), to do some database maintenance. – Eric [5/9/2005 05:11:00 PM]
*******************************************

Boy oh Boy, our customer support team would kill me if I tried to do maintenance at those times...even if it was announced 4 hours ahead of time, LOL.

Virginia Tech Commencement 2005

This Friday Virginia Tech is holding its 133rd commencement ceremony. I'm excited to say that we are hiring 3 graduating members of this class. I hope they realize the great achievement they have accomplished. I graduated from Virginia Tech back in May of 2000. I'll never forget staying up all night coding (we started this business about a semester before graduation) the night before graduation. I slept for about an hour and then headed over to the graduation ceremony. I remember seeing pictures of myself looking like I had been out all night partying, pretty funny how things change but are still the same. Myself and some members of our team have put in some long nights this past weekend, it's pretty amazing how much you can accomplish at night, it's so much easier to focus without the buzz of the office during the day.

For this year's graduating class I have one piece of advice: Don't be afraid to take chances!

And for you lucky three that are joining our team... You have made an excellent decision, now make the most it!

Google For It

I was watching the show "Numb3rs" late Friday night, which I enjoy for it's mathematical background, although the show is somewhat unrealistic, it touched upon three of my favorite topics. Google, Money Ball, and baseball.

In this episode the math nerd used the phrase "I Googled for ..." which struck me as fascinating that this phrase is now so mainstream. It was expected that everyone watching this show knows what the phrase means, which really shows how much power Google has in the search world.

The show also talked about the book "Money Ball" which is one of my favorite books. The show discussed using saber metrics to predict if someone would be a criminal based on where they lived, how much money they had growing up, etc. Mony Ball discusses how the Oakland A's use math to compete with much larger teams like the Yankees, interesting use of math in both cases.