Month: October 2008

The election is next week, and it’s clear from my previous posts that I’m an Obama supporter, and have been since he announced his candidacy in January 2007. (I’ve gotten a very good return on my investment in him at Betfair!)

For people that are interested in Obama, his grassroots/volunteer movement, or politics in general, I would encourage you to watch this short (2.5 minute) video. It’s a very touching story about an elderly volunteer in one of his Colorado offices.

i made a step by step series of screenshots here of these notes here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7601158/Uploading-Key…

and

http://www.slideshare.net/joshuascottpaul/uploa…

Originally posted as a comment by joshuascottpaul on Jed Christiansen’s Blog using Disqus.

A little over a year ago I had been having some problems uploading Keynote presentations (slides and audio) to YouTube and keeping some of the cool transitions between slides. After playing around with Keynote and iMovie for a bit, I detailed a workaround here.

Just a few days ago “joshuascottpaul” put my written instructions into a series of screenshots with everything you need to take a fully-featured Keynote presentation and upload it to YouTube. I just wanted to say thank you to him, and share his work with you below.

Uploading Keynote Presentations To You Tube With Transitions!

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayerd.swf?doc=uploading-keynote-presentations-to-youtube-with-transitions-1225269940190193-9&stripped_title=uploading-keynote-presentations-to-you-tube-with-transitions-presentation

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: uploading keynote)

So there are a few things I’ve been meaning to post for a while, but haven’t gotten around to. I’m going to un-clog my mind and post a round-up of stuff here.

• Stephen Hawking will be retiring from the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Apparently it’s traditional for the person in the post to retire at 67, which he’ll be next year. I didn’t realize he was so old! But he’s certainly still active at the University… a friend of mine has seen him a couple of mornings as he heads to work. For the history buffs out there, this is the same professorship that Isaac Newton held from 1669, as he did most of his pioneering work.
• Speaking of Stephen Hawking, he dedicated a new clock at Corpus Christi College (the Chronophage, or the Corpus Clock) just a couple of days before I arrived at Cambridge. It’s really amazing; it’s a huge pendulum clock, has a big grasshopper at the top, and doesn’t have any hands. (It uses LED’s instead.)
• Here’s a video:
• http://www.youtube.com/v/cCqGtvTA36k&hl=en&fs=1
• What’s perhaps most amazing is that virtually every time I walk or bicycle past it between 2 and 10 times a day people are standing by it, watching it, and taking photos. No matter the time of day or night! I think there’s only been four times in five weeks that I’ve gone by it without someone there! It’s really that captivating.
• I recently saw an interesting article on Gordon Ramsey. Yes, he’s making tons of money from TV, books, restaurants, etc. But what’s most amazing to me is that he owns:
• 1 — Three-star Michelin restaurant
  2 — Two-star Michelin restaurants
  2 — One-star Michelin restaurants
• For my birthday dinner a year ago, LondonAnnie and I went to Maze, his one-star restaurant on Grosvenor Square in London. It was absolutely amazing; the food was incredible, the service was brilliant and we had such a great time. The article mentioned this is his highest-earning restaurant, with revenue in excess of £10million a year!
• This is a great quote from Evan Williams:
• Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island
• You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain life — or convince someone to send you more.
• You don’t know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.
• There’s always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.
• Eventually, if you’re successful, you’ll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you’ll die — or, at least, have to go home.
• Either way, it’s a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).
• I really feel for Barack Obama. Just as he’s about to achieve the triumph of a lifetime, his last family member is in her final days. I simply hope that his grandmother will live to see him elected.
• If you’re fascinated by the current US election, and haven’t gone to fivethirtyeight.com, GO THERE RIGHT NOW. It’s a site run by a legendary baseball statistician, Nate Silver, who has turned his attention this year to the election. In the primaries he made some calls that were well outside the conventional mainstream (in particular Hillary barely winning Indiana and Obama winning North Carolina huge) that were spot on. As of right now, it looks like McCain has about a 5% chance of winning the Presidential election.

Today we had the great pleasure of hearing Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media speak at Judge Business School. He was a speaker I was really looking forward to hearing, and he didn’t disappoint. (He’s on the left in the photo above.)

Tim has a very engaging speaking style, and his presentation was 100 slides of great photos, examples, and quotes. (Much better than the 5–6 slides of 13-point that Bob Diamond of Barclays used!)

The topic of the day was “Watching the Alpha Geeks,” which is something he’s been doing for 20+ years. (He’s been giving a version of the talk for about 7–8 years…) The technology and things that geeks and hackers use or do day-to-day is the stuff that becomes cultural mainstream in 5/10/15 years. It was nearly twenty years ago when the first webcam was hooked up to the Internet at the University of Cambridge. This was pre-WWW, by the way, and the sole purpose of the webcam was to show the level in the office coffeepot so that “the hackers” didn’t have to walk down the hall to check it! Now webcams are clearly mainstream. (Tim didn’t mention this, but I wanted to throw in a little Cambridge-specific info.)

The great phrase that Tim used a couple of times was:

The future is here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet.

That’s a really powerful statement, and so very true. The future of the next 5/10/15 years is in research labs, startups, and homes of hackers right now. It just takes time and cultivation to get society to use it.

Tim talked quite a bit about Web2.0; not about the technology but instead about the principles behind the technology. His thesis was that there is an incredible amount of data that already exists; Web2.0 is the way different threads tie together to change the world. The most prominent example is Google. Google took information that already existed (links between web pages) and used it to provide the dataset for a much more powerful and useful search engine. Mashups that merge public data on crime with webmaps is another example of two datasets that are poor on their own, but very useful when tied together.

As Web2.0 becomes Enterprise2.0, this is going to shift even further. Sensors which already exist are going to be leveraged in new ways. The data that companies have in their ERP systems in regards to their customers, their suppliers, and their internal operations will be utilized in new ways to provide incredible new insights. And most importantly this will be done real-time, without judgement.

He clearly cares about the environment a lot, and spent a good chuck of his talk on technologies and ideas that are at the forefront of changing how we as a global society think and act in relation to global warming.

Another interesting note came in the Q&A portion; he was asked what technologies that he had been bullish about that didn’t pan out. After saying that quite a few didn’t mature on the timescale he had originally envisioned, he was a bit of a loss for words. But then he simply said, “I don’t think about failure a lot.” I think it was important for the room to hear this for two reasons:

1. Failure’s not bad. While Europe is getting better with this attitude, it’s not quite as acceptable as it is in the US.
2. There’s going to be lots of failure on the bleeding edge of innovation. Get used to it.

I highly recommend hearing him speak. (You can check out his recent talk at the Web2.0 conference by clicking this link.) If you are fascinated by technology, he’ll lead you on a fascinating journey.

It was great to hear Tim O’Reilly speak today, and highly recommend seeing one of his talks if you’re ever able to.