And now for something "completely different", er controversial

I came across this on Facebook today (thanks Chris)!!

After spending a good 15 years making and supporting vaccine quality at Merck, I got a little tired of the anti-vaccination movements supported by charlatans like Andrew Wakefield. This british gastroentreologist conducted some poorly designed "research" showing linkages between autism and administration of childhood vaccines containing thimerosal, a mercury containing preservative since banned.

The studies were flawed, an outbreak of measles and other controllable diseases were easily attributable to the anti vaccine movement, but none speak how I feel better than Penn and Teller!

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Ride to Hellertown

A beautifully cool Saturday morning to finish July!



Ran into some friends on a different route 30 miles from home and then a second time (Steve and Michele). A great time. still working out kinks for vibration from camera.

Where is my iPad?

Ok.

So for a self-proclaimed gadgetophile, I reacted slowly...

 

 

But now my friends are rubbing it in. By the time I decided I had to have one (acting like the South Park characters in the famous Best Buy video). Is it a big iPhone? "I don't care."

So I start my search. Realize that Best Buy's online inventory isn't worth a hill of beans and make 40 calls for a 16 or 32 gig wifi..to no avail. I dismiss the 3G versions as more than I want to pay and, of course, I knew then about the Library of Congress ruling to make jailbreaking legal :)

So why pay 2 data plans. Jailbreak the phone, make it a 3G hotspot and connect the WIFI iPad!

Easy if you can find one.

So I continue my quest at the local Apple retailer Mac Outfitters, locally in beautiful Doylestown. I put myself on waiting lists for 2 models, 23 and 8-deep respectively. After a week, they get no shipments!

I go to Apple online and place my order for a 32 gig WIFI with protection plan and a camera adaptor to attach camera via USB.

Then the idea for a Doylestown Bar Camp comes together. On the 22nd of July, I attend a planning meeting and am subjected to the scene below. 

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0925.MOV (3564 KB)

Yesterday, my friend Angela at Bucks Happening tweets "I got an IPAD!!!!". This is the final straw! Where did she get one, I ask. "Oh, I planned a friends wedding and she gave it to me as a gift!" Here I am turning over every blessed rock on the East Coast and some one drops one on her door step and says "enjoy!"

The fina straw today was when the item below arrived from China (on a slow boat, I presume). Great, I can really find a use for this!

So I wait until August 9th to get mine. How much more angst by then?

 

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M.O.M.'s Beer tasting Dinner

Attended a 4 course beer tasting meal at Maxwell's on Main (M.O.M.'s) last night. Some intersting beers including some California microbrews and a local one infused with tea from Prism Brewery in North Wales, PA. Second and third course served with Coronado's Idiot IPA and the Bruery's Trade Wind Tripel.

All in all, company was good, beers were interesting and food and service was great. My only opportunity for improvement would be that they had 8-10 oz pours and the portions of food were miniscule (main course served on a saucer size plate).

Given the volume of beer and the hour, the expecation was a normal size meal! 

some of the group of beer aficionados

friends Geoff and Chris

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0042.mov (10091 KB)

a pan of the 20 or so attendees

 

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Patriot Triathlon - near Wind Gap, PA

This morning I cycled up to see my CyclePA traning partners Joanna and Jerry race in this race. It was about 8 miles north of Bath, PA. Even though I left at 5 am, I didnt make it for the swim leg. Arrived just in time to change and see my friends finishing the cycle leg

a mile south of the race. shooting toward Blue Mountain

Jerry coming in after the cycle leg

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0040.mov (5371 KB)

Jerry sprinted toward the finish. 13th overall!

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patriot.wmv (23208 KB)

Joanna gets 3rd overall despite injury

Joanna and Ginny (3rd and 2nd respectively)

Team Nutrition in Motion

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River to River Ride

This ride benefits the Heritage Conservancy, a great cause to preserve our area. This was our first year doing the ride with my CyclePA bud, Mike Rubillo and beau of my friend Angela Giovine of Bucks Happening and LimeEvents. His name was Sal and he's a great guy.

We wrangled with the ride organizers about the sanity of doing the 50 mile Bucks loop first followed by the 50 mile Montgomery loop (Its set up as 25,50 and 100 miles). We were going to ride the 100, but due to the less shady and more trafficked Montgomery loop being second in the heat of the day, we opted for the 50.

 

It was a very nice route, but one of the rest stops at mile 13 was well secreted or missing. Consensus was the latter. Though we had fun (see above), the rudeness of the organizers when both my friend and I asked questions will leave me looking to find another way to support the Conservancy in the future!

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Bucks County on Two Wheels (in motion)

After two tries, I found a mount for my newest gadget: my waterproof 1080p videocam the Kodak ZX3 (Playsport). I hope to be able to continue my Bucks County on Two Wheels series from Facebook and Flickr.

A few of these are below.

Peace Valley Park, my favorite spot in the county

Rickerts Road Farm, Doylestown

Cutalossa Farm, Solebury

Cabin Run Covered Bridge

So I hope to be able to add video to this now that I have found a safe way to ride shoot video. A first raw clip is below.

 

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Jerry We miss you!

My cycling bud and engineer extraordinaire Jerry had the nerve to send me this photo today at WORK. I believe he is playing hookie as this does not look like a PENNDOT civil engineering job but more like an all inclusive spot in Jamaica... YA MON. rest up, J, I will be at your tri this Sunday, even if I have to ride 50 miles in the dark to get there. You supported me in CyclePA2010, bud!

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Frenchtown Bastille Fête 2010

The 12th annual celebration to celebrate Bastille Day in Frenchtown, NJ. Though the only thing about it that's French is the name. We did have a nice time though. Lots of nice merchants, live music and food. And I maintained my mayoralty on Foursquare of two local venues!!

 

National Inn

Flags everywhere

Lisa browsing in CB studio

Elizabeth Gilbert's store Two Buttons (author of Eat Pray Love). It was Buddha Central

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0012.mov (787 KB)

Panorama of Main Street

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0020.mov (3495 KB)

These kids were playing at CB studio, where Lisa minced up her wallet. Nice stuff though!

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Now that CyclePA 2010 is Over...

Our campaign to hit our fundraising goal for Make a Wish still continues. You can find our page here to make a tax deductible contribution!  The great memories from the trip are located on the CyclePA blog. 

Mike Rubillo and I appreciate your support!

Much of our trip followed the PA South route shown below, which was a total accident! Working with PennDot to gain one of these sign as a momento.

We are hoping to do another fundraising effort next year and hope we can solicit your participation then!

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Cycle PA 2010

Please check my other blog here and consider helping our Make a Wish drive here!!

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Open Lands on Martha's Vineyards

We explored this one on foot today since it was a gloriously clear and moderately warm Friday in June. No one was there. Located on North road about .7 miles west of Tabor House Rd, it is marked by a small sign.

Some spectacular vistas and beautiful land. Believe its about 211 acres. Learn more about it on the Trustees website here. You can find it on a Google map here!

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Cycling on Martha's Vineyard

I live in Bucks County, PA, which has some of the most beautiful countryside with untravelled roads. I am moving to Greenville, SC in the next year which has more of the same, especially north of town toward the NC border.

I come to Martha's Vineyard each year of the last 12 to relax in June. the cycling and countryside here is superb (at least this time of year). Count all the cars in the video below!

 

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Spring in the Northeast

Each year I look forward to April and May. Moderate temperatures, beautiful colors and nature comes alive once more. As much as I love to vacation and dive in tropical climates, living in an area where we can experience all four seasons and the wonderful annual cycle of nature is hard to beat! 

Click for large Flickr image.

 

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Welcome to Googleville?

By Dan Fletcher / Greenville Monday, Apr. 12, 2010 (via TIME magazine)

 

 

Scott Barbour / Getty Images

It would have been easy to mistake the thousands of people assembled in Greenville clutching their colored glow sticks and chanting the name of an all-knowing entity for worshippers at some sort of kooky New Age outdoor revival. But it wasn't God who inspired this crowd of 2,200 to gather on a recent Saturday night. It was Google — and the chance that this South Carolina city might be able to coax down the manna of super-high-speed Internet from tech-giant heaven. (See 10 tech trends for 2010.)

Since Google unveiled plans in February to build — for free — an ultra-fast fiber-optic network in one or more U.S. cities, local officials across the land have been engaged in quirky battles of one-upmanship to get their hometown chosen as a demo site. Topeka, Kans., renamed itself Google for the month of March. The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., went swimming in a shark tank as a publicity stunt. And Greenville organized a "We Are Feeling Lucky" campaign — a play on Google's second most famous search button — with enough glow sticks to form a massive Google logo in a downtown park. (See historical photos on Google Earth.)

How much speed does it take to inspire such fervor? The broadband network that Google is offering may cost as much as $1 billion to build and will be able to transmit 1 gigabit per second. That's fast enough to download a feature-length DVD movie in about 70 seconds — and more than 100 times as fast as the typical connection available in the U.S., which ranks 22nd in the world in network speed, according to Akamai, an Internet-analytics firm. The Google guys are doing this to help spur the U.S. to overtake Romania and other we-can't-believe-we're-slower-than-they-are countries.

Greenville's geek-savvy campaign was a fast operation too; it came together in less than 14 days. Highlights included a YouTube channel and a cartoon with instructions on how to participate in the glow-stick event (plus a tout for the town as the birthplace of a co-inventor of the laser, which gave rise to fiber optics). "We're a city in the midst of reinventing itself as a tech community, and we think Google Fiber could really help," says Aaron von Frank, the baby-faced 31-year-old tech developer who spearheaded the effort to get Google's attention as local officials completed the documentation necessary to keep the city in the running. (See the story of Google's doodles.)

Competition is stiff: as of March 26, the deadline for cities to submit information, Google said it had received more than 1,100 applications. It will analyze each city's demographics and infrastructure before deciding on one or more locations by the end of the year. "One of the top things we're looking for is to develop the network as quickly and efficiently as possible," spokesman Dan Martin says. "We're not looking for special treatment, but we do want to find a community that wants to work with us."

If efficiency is Google's main criterion, von Frank says he likes Greenville's chances. "It's a tight-knit community that comes together to get things done," he says. In short order, thousands of people formed a Google chain. Now Greenville has to wait to see whether faster connections will follow.

See the best pictures from Google's candid camera.

See the 50 best websites of 2009.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1977123,00.html#ixzz0jyVKHUfj

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#GoogleonMain Celebration: Greenville, SC

A brief video clip from my iPhone taken from the "e" as 2,000 of us spelled out G-o-o-g-l-e in Reedy Park on the first day of spring. Electric, er battery-powered experience

 

 

 

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Dogs of the Vineyard

In 2006, snapped these goldens while waiting for the ferry from Woods Hole to MV

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Dogs of the Vineyard

In 2006, snapped these goldens while waiting for the ferry from Woods Hole to MV

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Google on Main!! Greenville and Google Fiber!!

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Sunrises are beautiful anywhere!

Barry
Sent from my 3GS

* Please excuse my brevity and typos!

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Blue Spotted Ray

Close-up from trip to Malaysia last year ((Kapalai near Sipadan)

 

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Singapore Botanic Gardens: National Orchid Farms

This beautiful attraction has been in existence over 150 years. You can learn more about at their website. We spent 6 hours there last march and it was amazing. Spotless (as is everything else) in Singapore, well marked, and easy to navigate.

The highlight was the National Orchid Garden where this photo was taken. The Google synopsis of the garden is found here. My advice is to not do one of the multi-stop bus tours to the Botanic Gardens; they will give you an hour that will leave you aching for more.

Every item in the entire facility is meticoulously tagged for the avid botanist (not me; I just enjoyed the beauty).

On our trip, there were a handful of other sites recommended to us, this was not among them. Hopefully if someone reads this and is headed to Singapore soon, they won't make a mistake by missing this!!

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Siri: Awesome new mobile app for iPhone with AI

Well, I said that if it was as cool as adveritsed I'd be blogging here. Almost better than the app is the pedigree of the senior management team. Read on!!

 

Siri is created by an all-star team of designers and engineers drawn from Google, Yahoo, Apple, Motorola, Netscape, eBay, RealTravel, SRI, NASA, and Xerox PARC.

Siri's Founders: Tom, Dag and Adam

Dag Kittlaus

Co-founder and CEO

Siri's CEO is Dag Kittlaus, who founded the company as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI.
A serial innovator and consumer wireless internet veteran of 10 years in Scandinavia and the US, Dag is working on creating his third consecutive mobile internet product with over a million users.

Dag has held leadership roles as VP of Consumer Internet Services at Scandinavian telecom giant Telenor Mobile, and several consumer product groups at Motorola including GM of xProducts and founder and GM of Motorola's Interactive Media Group. He conceived and launched Screen3, a breakthrough consumer mobile application currently used by millions of users and adopted by Cingular, China Mobile, and Telefonica.

Adam Cheyer

Co-founder and VP of Engineering

Siri's VP of Engineering is Adam Cheyer, who joined the company from SRI, where he was the Program Director in SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center and Chief Architect of the CALO/PAL project. A pioneer in the areas of distributed computing, intelligent agents, and advanced user interfaces, Adam is the author of more than fifty peer-reviewed publications and nine patents. He was previously the VP of Engineering at Dejima and the VP of Engineering at Verticalnet. Adam is also a founding member of Change.org and Genetic Finance, LLC.

Tom Gruber

Co-founder, CTO, and VP Design

Siri's CTO is Tom Gruber, a recognized expert in Artificial Intelligence, intelligent interfaces, and semantic technologies. Tom was a founder and CTO of RealTravel, a knowledge sharing site for travel; a founder and CTO of Intraspect, a collaborative knowledge management application for business; and a founder and Chief Scientist at Consider Solutions. Products designed by Tom are used by millions of consumer and professional users. He was a pioneering researcher at Stanford in the use of Web for knowledge sharing and semantic integration, and helped establish the technical foundations of the Semantic Web.Tom has served as advisor to SocialText, LinkedIn, Powerset, and others.

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"The Gates"

Going through the archives, I came about this 2005 trip to New York to see this amazing exhibit. Details below

The Gates is a site-specific work of art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The artists installed 7,503 vinyl "gates" along 23 miles (37 km) of pathways in Central Park in New York City. From each gate hung a panel of deep saffron-colored nylon fabric. The exhibit ran from February 12, 2005 through February 27, 2005.

The books and other memorabilia distributed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude refer to the project as The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 in reference to the time that passed from the artists' initial proposal until they were able to go ahead with it.
The Gates were greeted with mixed reactions. Some people loved them for brightening the bleak winter landscape; others hated them, accusing them of defacing the landscape. Some cyclists saw them as an obstruction which could cause accidents, although cycling is not legal on those paths. They received a great deal of their nationwide fame as a frequent object of ridicule by David Letterman as well as Keith Olbermann, whose apartment was nearby. (notes courtesy of Wikipedia).

My Social Media Personae 

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Apple reports record revenue and profits for Q1 2010

by Kelly Hodgkins on January 25th, 2010 at 5:21pm
Filed under: Apple, Breaking News20 Comments

Apple reported its financial results for Q1 2010 which ended December 26, 2009 and the results were nothing short of impressive. Apple posted its all time highest quarterly revenue, its all time highest quarterly profit and when annualized, these numbers will push Apple into a $50+ billion per year company. Dollar figures that are so impressive they don’t require an explanation, so we will let the numbers speak for themselves:

• Revenue of $15.68 billion ($11.88 billion in Q1 2009)
• 58% of revenue derived from international sales
• Net quarterly profit of $3.38 billion or $3.67 per diluted share ($2.26 billion, or $2.50 per diluted share in Q1 2009)
• Gross margin of 40.9 percent (37.9 % in Q1 2009)
• $5.8 billion generated in cash

 

Sales of Macintosh computers and iPhones went through the roof in Q1 2010 with Apple selling 3.36 million computers and 8.7 million iPhones, representing a 33% unit increase for Macintosh sales and 100% unit growth for the iPhone when compared to Q1 2009. The only blotch on an otherwise stellar performance was the iPod which sold 21 million units in Q1 2010, an 8% unit drop from the same quarter last year. Estimates for Q2 2010 remain equally as optimistic with the Cupertino company expecting another quarter of impressive revenue that will top out at an expected $11.4 billion. And oh yeah, Steve Jobs said, “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.”

Read

Tags: Apple, Financials, iPhone, iPod, Macintosh

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Taveuni, Fiji looking toward Matagi

Taveuni, Fiji looking toward Matagi
Originally uploaded by petersbar

Going through my old photos, I found this and some other shots of our 3 trips to Taveuni in Fiji.

Its about a 90 minute flight on a small plane form the international entry point of Nadi (pronounced NAN-dee).

One of the most beautiful places I have been on my travels over 6 continents and 55 countries. Its the Kauai of Fiji, boasting beautiful waterfalls, beaches and spectacular diving in the Somosomo straits.

We stayed all visits at Dive Taveuni, owned by New Zealanders Rick and Do Cammick. They sold it a while back and returned to NZ after almost 20 years there.

A great vacation retreat and if you enjoy diving, a treasure!

Get Ready for 14-Megapixel Camera Phones

Camera phones may soon offer more megapixels than some DSLR cameras. Imaging company OmniVision announced today that they have developed a 14.6-megapixel image sensor that will fit in cell phones. These sensors are capable of both high-resolution still photography and 1080p high-definition video recording.

I wonder how long it will be before camera phone imaging quality rivals the quality of the best point-and-shoot cameras.

(via Photography Bay)

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via petapixel.com

soon to carry only a phone, no camera...

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iPhone posterous test

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