October 2nd, 2007, 8 Comments »
Last week I was talking to IT journalist Danny Bradbury about a forthcoming story. He booked the call using a virtual personal assistant. Coincidentally, he wrote a blog post describing his search for and in praise of his newfound sidekick:
The cost? Less than the revenue from a feature article each month. The benefits? Time, which as both a writer and a parent, is the most precious commodity for me. If I wanted to fill the time I’m saving with more work, I could sell more articles and make more dough, but I don’t think I will. I’m hitting my financial targets, (with the cost of the service factored in), and for the first time in years, I’m relishing the ability to take some ‘me’ time and some more family time.
He sounds sold. Subsequently, I read about virtual PAs on Boing Boing, who referenced this Los Angeles Times article:
But I was surprised at how much they could do. Once I had registered at the website, I uploaded some personal data, such as my frequent-flier account numbers, and the names and phone numbers of my dentist, hairdresser and doctor. If I wanted an assistant to make purchases on my behalf, I could also load credit-card information in encrypted form.
That second article also discusses local assistants, should your demands be more of the ‘pick up my dry-cleaning’ variety.
For the average middle-class person living in this post-consumer age, time is increasingly replacing money as our scarcest asset. It’s funny (though not particularly surprising) how moving to Malta has freed up a ton of my time. If I were back in Vancouver, though, I can see how five or ten hours of somebody else doing mundane tasks would be quite useful.
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August 23rd, 2007, 2 Comments »
Yesterday the Texas Rangers walloped the Baltimore Orioles 30-3. They became the first major league baseball team in 110 years to score 30 runs:
“That was ridiculous,” said Saltalamacchia, who went 4-for-6 with a walk and scored five runs. “I have never been in anything like that in my life.”
The Rangers erased a 3-0 deficit with five runs in the fourth inning, nine more in the sixth, 10 in the eighth and six in the ninth.
To add insult to injury, it was a double-header, and Texas won the second game (by the far more reasonable score of) 9-7.
Incidentally, I submitted this story to Boing Boing, because I dream of one day getting a sports-related story on that site. I gather that the editors all loathe sports, so it’s kind of a personal challenge to try and break them. I explained the rarity of the event thusly:
To translate, this is as rare as, say, Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman collaborating on a LOLCat image while debating Pastafarianism.
So far, no joy, but I’m undaunted.
Speaking of Boing Boing and sports, I had an idea a while back: why not create the BoingBoing.net of sports? That is, ‘a directory of wonderful sports things’. I did a search at the time and couldn’t easily find such a site.
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July 13th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Via Boing Boing, I read this great essay on Burning Man and the counter-culture’s problematic resistance to corporations:
But Burning Man is rife with the products of corporations, and always has been. And has always had to be. The prepared food items and bottled water we live on out there; the portajohns our wastes go in after eating that food and drinking that water; the tents we sleep in, the pipe and metal domes we lounge under, the clothes we wear, either exotic or normal—all sold to us not for fellow-feeling but by monied interests, usually corporate, who just want our cash.
I first read about Burning Man courtesy of Bruce Sterling’s 1996 article in Wired. It struck me as a cool idea, though certainly not for me.
In about 2001, I heard about somebody I knew going to Burning Man. They were two publicists from Victoria, and I concluded that it had probably jumped the shark. Cool is a moving target, after all.
I suspect that somewhere out there, people have started a Burning Man 2.0 (or 3.0) which I haven’t heard of. That’s where the real anarchists are headed.
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