DeepDarkSee

Merriam-Webster’s list of favorite non-words.

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous
2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time
3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement
4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends
5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway
6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: “My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription.”
7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number
8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed
10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

Link from /.

Highest in Pesticides

• Apples
• Bell Peppers
• Celery
• Cherries
• Grapes (imported)
• Nectarines
• Peaches
• Pears
• Potatoes
• Red Raspberries
• Spinach
• Strawberries

“These 12 popular fresh fruits and vegetables are consistently the most contaminated with pesticides — buy these organic.”

From RawFood

Had a fantastic time helping drive a group of 4th graders to their end-of-year camping trip this year. They are on the coast in Half Moon Bay. Check out the TP…and more photos here.

When you begin cleaning your internal world, both physically & mentally, naturally the next step is cleaning up your external world. TreeHugger is your guide to creating that external world:

“TreeHugger is the definitive, modern yet green lifestyle filter. It will help you improve your course, yet still maintain your aesthetic.”

from We Like it Raw

Audrey and I had the greatest time on Saturday visiting the Life Sized Mousetrap. Remember the board game where you build the contraption, the ball rolls and flips around (via a bathtub) and the cage drops down? Picture this in life size with a safe dropping instead of a cage, in a funky SF waterfront performance art environment. It was created by Mark Perez and the actual mouse trap, and the overall event experience, is a riot! More performances coming up, along with some fund raisers to get it to Burning Man this year. I got some good photos, but also check out this little video clip for the full effect!.

I think this blog post by Marc Canter is worth looking at…. not so much for the comments on Dodgeball, as how it illustrates the “if you build it and get buzz, they will buy you” mentality that is spreading in the valley lately. Marc points out some successes, but I think it’s dangerous criteria for spending time and money. It’s going to overheat, and a lot of resources will be wasted. Look for the companies that show a sound model to make money (even if they aren’t at that level yet). Flickr never showed one. Buzznet doesn’t even seem to be trying to (looking pretty, waiting to be bought). Reminds me of a bubble I vaguely remember from a few years ago.

Mobile phones open many doors in the medical space. I expect that we will see heart monitoring harnesses, home diabetic test equipment, and many other home health monitoring and treatment systems enabled with communications in the future. It’s getting really inexpensive to build in a data connection based on mobile phone technology. Textuallly.org has some good links up today for applications in this area.

From Impaq Group’s recenly published MOBILE LIFE 1 research via The Mobile Technology Weblog.

Top 10 ways people use their mobiles:

1. Voice
2. SMS
3. Switching to silent mode
4. Calculator
5. Taking pictures
6. Surfing WAP sites
7. Using operator portals
8. Mobile search
9. Bluetooth pairing
10. Alert subscriptions

So where are the downloadable applications (games, weather, ringtones, email, etc)? If this list is accurate, I’m living in even more of a mobile tech microcosm than I imagined!

And the wish list rankings for future capabilities?

1. Mobile coupon redemption
2. Parking meter payment
3. Loyalty cards
4. Season tickets
5. Credit/Debit cards
6. Flight check-in
7. Vending machine payment
8. Retail checkout
9. Marketing communications
10. Mobile as a key

Again no games, no GPS, no email, no maps, no turn by turn directions, no video conferencing. There is lots of talk about Loyalty Cards…people carrying too many and not redeeming most of the pseudo value they garner from the cards.

Hmmmm…… using the phone to improve on behaviors they already do every day or do in different contexts, rather than thinking about new behaviors. Maybe there is a concept here!

Introducing a product that requires people to change behaviors? It had better represent a valuable new paradigm, or expect a failure.

I hear people dis TV on mobile handsets (like MobiTV and others) because it’s the same thing people already have, but mobile. Guess what? That’s why it will succeed. Lots of people like ‘their shows’, and tune into TV to zone out for short or extended periods of time. Sure some people will start surfing for short form video content, and this is cool, but it’s a long road….because it is a different behavior with watching video.

Going to create the next killer mobile ’social’ app? If you’re Crunkie and targeting young people out clubbing, you’ve got a problem. People sit and fiddle with their phone when they are hanging out, not when out at a hot club. Go look around, notice the existing behaviors, enhance the activity, but don’t try to get people to change their fundamental behavior (that said, there are other contexts in which Crunkie could excel…like which class am in and bored out of my skull).

Creating a GPS app to track people while doing outdoor activities? Make sure ‘I’ can set it and forget it, with minimal hastle to get started, and continue my activity the way I always do it - and ‘opt in’ to check status or use other features when I want to. Make it easy, simple, transparent, and a value add in the context and paradigm in which ‘I’ already operate.

There are some good web sites and newsletters out there that have been reluctant to produce RSS feeds because of their dependence on advertising revenue (like Fierce Wireless, one of my favorites). Google has now stepped in with a solution that could be a win-win. We’ll have to see if it turns out to have been done well, but that’s a fairly safe assumption when Google is involved. This is huge (we’ve seen Feedster Media Network and Blogads, but now things are popping).

I’ve become addicted to RSS as a way of gathering and reading the sources I care about…it’s so much more effecient. My reader of choice these days is Shrook on Mac OS X, and I’ve been playing around with Ecto for blog posting.