Author: Sol Young

2009 Philadelphia Car Show

Posted on by Sol Young with 2 Comments

Some ramblings from the Philly Auto Show…

Chevy Click

We visit the Philadelphia Auto Show every year. This year was a little bit different since I walk past the convention center every day and have been peeking in the windows to see everyone setting up.

My favorite car for the last three years has been the Audi R8. The Philadelphia High School / UPenn Engineering team is a very close second with their Attack supercar).

There was disappointment around not seeing a plug-in electric at the show. Lots, and lots, of hybrids, but no plug-ins. The meaty exhaust note from 600 raw horsepower is freakin’ exhilarating, but a car that outperforms those 600 horses, while whisper quiet, and plugs in to the outlet in my garage… That’s what I want to own.

The show is on until February 8th. If you’re in Philadelphia you should drop in and see it… It’s not often you get to walk through a hall full of Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Austin-Martins, etc.

You can also see the Ford booth using OS X and VLC Media Player to demonstrate their Microsoft Sync integration :)

Ford and Microsoft Sync

Ford uses OS X at its Microsoft Sync booth

Visit the Flickr set here.

Posted in Driving, Philadelphia, Photography

Flying Cars and Creative Commons

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

I came across this fun post on CNET News because my photos on Flickr are licensed Creative Commons Attribution and the page came up in a Google Search on my name. Chris Matyszczyk wrote an article on why people are the gating factor to the release of a decent flying car (or any flying car for that matter). It’s a fun read, more on a fear of road-rage-in-the-sky than anything else, but successfully points out one of the reasons we don’t have flying cars.

Flying Car

I love to read anything on aviation, and am in agreement with Chris that most of human-kind isn’t capable of flying. That’s why we have flight schools and a vast amount of training, and why there are ~400,000 pilots out of the entire United States. In order to have flying cars, we can’t have human control.

When I think flying car, I think robotically controlled aerial taxi cab.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is Create Commons and offering to share one’s work. I use plain Attribution because I want people to use my content. I don’t care how. Trackbacks and notification of use isn’t ubiquitous or standardized, so planting one’s name makes it easy to see where things are used.

And again, I don’t care where or how my stuff is used, I just want to be able to find the fun stuff that builds upon it. I came across Chris’s post through a Google Alert on my name. There wasn’t a trackback. If there hadn’t been attribution, I wouldn’t have known and wouldn’t have read his post.

Maybe we’ll get to a trackback standard for content usage. It’ll probably get here around the time we have those flying cars.

Posted in Aviation, Flying

Apple Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adapter works great on Dell 30

Posted on by Sol Young

No Distortion No Distortion

I received the Mini DisplayPort Dual-Link DVI adapter yesterday. It works great on my 30-inch Dell monitor. From my point of view, the reports on distortion are just hype. The adapter is still a pile of junk compared to having a true DVI port, but at least it works and we can get on with our 30-inch lives.

It had been since October 15th that I’d been trying to get my hands on one. It certainly hasn’t been worth the wait. The adapter is big, bulky, and feels light and frail. Pretty un-Applesque.

But it does what it’s supposed to. The display is clear and crisp. And it does something else. It has a pass-through USB port that isn’t in any of the marketing images (or maybe I couldn’t see the tiny USB port on the hideously big adapter?).

Instead of two cables dragged across the desk (1 DVI and 1 USB – you other MBPro users know what I mean), the Dell’s built-in card-reader-USB-hub and the DVI are plugged in to the adapter just under the monitor, and then the adapter’s long chord runs across the desk. It relieved a little bit of clutter and made for a cleaner, easier, experience when attaching and detaching.

For those of you having problems, check out displayblog’s post, which includes Apple’s recommendation on how to fix the distortion.

Posted in Apple, Dell

Currently Reading: Reality Check and Into Thin Air

Posted on by Sol Young

I’m currently reading two books…

The first is Guy Kawasaki‘s latest, Reality Check, 2008, published by Penguin Group. I follow @guykawasaki on Twitter and bounce over to his site from time to time. To be honest, I didn’t plan on buying the book but I was browsing in Barnes and Noble and two sentences on the back cover hooked me.

“An evangelist who cannot give a great demo is an oxymoron. A person simply cannot be an evangelist if she cannot demo the product.”

I’m not big on business books, especially books by marketers, and I may never finish it (Sorry Guy) but the above and some recommendations on business plans and pitching were enough to make it worth checking out. If it’s worth your time, I’ll post again.

The other is Jon Krakauer‘s personal account of the 1996 Everest tragedy, Into Thin Air, 1997, published by The Anchor Books (division of Random House) by arrangement with Villard Books. I’m in to any climbing book, and this is one of the must-reads (if you’re in to Everest and alpine climbing). I’d read Ed Viestur‘s No Shortcuts to the Top and had been looking forward to catching Krakauer’s take on the incident.

Krakauer includes some Everest history (2nd chapter, I just finished the 3rd). I think it’s pretty amazing when they discovered Everest and how they measured it. It was only about 150 years ago that they even discovered it, and the measurement method was all by hand calculations (yeah, I’m too young to remember slide rulers, so anything by hand calculation is impressive).

“To the surveyors who shot it, all but the summit numb of Peak XV was obscured by various high escarpments in the foreground, several of which gave the illusion of being much greater in stature. But according to Sikhdar’s meticulous trigonometric reckoning (which took into account such factors as curvature of the earth, atmospheric refraction, and plumb-line deflection) Peak XV stood 29,002 feet above sea level, the planet’s loftiest point.”

The lasers, satellites, and the technology of today determined that Everest was actually 29,028 feet. He was only 26 feet off.

Posted in Books, Reading