This blew me away.  I was watching Headline News and saw a story on how NYC is going to start requiring fast food chains to specify the nutrition facts of their food on the menu.  Their effort is to help people understand what they are consuming so they know how they are killing themselves.  I’m all for it.  There is so much bad stuff in that food.  For a little empirical data, they reported on the Awesome Blossom from Chili’s.  Just think up a picture in your head of how many calories and how fattening it is.  Would you guess 2,710 calories and 203 grams of fat?  How about 36g of saturated fat and 6,360 milligrams of sodium?  Damn gina! You can see the details here: http://www.calorieking.com/foods/food.php?category_id=21&brand_id=205&food_id=106848

You would have to jog for over 5 hours to burn that off! The damage you do to your heart is an entirely different story…

I’m cleaning my room while I have the time, just clearing out old files and stuff. Of course when doing this its expected to run into nostalgic items. I found something I was excited about when I wrote it, but since has collected dust. Now it can be permanently archived on the web:

“Rules? Here are my rules: what path one person creates will not be duplicated by another. No two people have the same tragedies. no two people have the same successes. No two people see with the same eyes. No soul can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea. A life isn’t borrowed hunks of other souls. Its maker gives it the soul and every action, thought and passion to express it.” Howard Roard + AAK

This was a little adaptation to a passage from The Fountainhead, definitely one of my favorite books ever. Enjoy…

Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where your picture was taken along with when it was taken? I have mentioned this to a handful of friends, and its not that its an entirely novel idea, but I would love a camera with built-in GPS. It seems that they can make cell phones and all sorts of other GPS enabled devices, but why aren’t more cameras GPS enabled?

There are a number of useful applications that can come from this small amount of captured data, but here are a few that come to my mind:

• Keeping track of the route of a trip. Lets say you go from Rome, to Florence, to Naples, to Capri, etc… Having GPS and time, you can know the path you traveled.
• Being able to categorize pictures by location. Lets say every time you were at home taking pictures or at a venue.
• When sharing pictures, you can quickly compare pictures with other friends where your pictures were taken.
• On Google, when searching for images, if they were geotagged, it would be incredibly easy to find pictures that were taken in a certain city, landmark, etc.
• Picasa and Google Earth (and I think Flikr too) already will plot your pictures on a map.
• Helping you recall where you went on a certain drunken night.

But imagine publicly sharing your pictures that were geotagged from a party at your house and for some total stranger to figure view them and find out where you live… Not as much fun in that light.

Here is a story that provides some info on GPS and digital cameras.

One really cool thing that is a good immediately accessible solution is a GPS device that will capture your GPS position at an interval.  You just carry this around with you and then later you can use software provided with the GPS device associate your photos with where you have been.  That would most definitely do the trick. And the gps tracking device is only 2oz.  Unfortunately, the battery life of this device is between 10-14 hours… But it should do the trick. Here is the device: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0608/06080202sonygpscs1.asp

I love technology. And when used for good, it can be used to create cool, interesting, useful, and wonderful things. My goal in the past, now and in the future is to contribute to the building of systems or applications that can achieve all of the above. Technology can help us connect with people, make us more efficient, keep in touch with our loved ones, discover new ideas or concepts, and simplify our lives, all of which make us happier humans. In the end, when everything we do is boiled down to its most raw form, we realize that happiness should rule all above. For me, that happiness comes from pursuing what I enjoy, and that is technology. And as it is something that I am passionate about, it is the successes, whether small or large, that make me happy. I also love music.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkhadiwala

Reality Distortion Field

I found this while looking for Damn Gina on urban dictionary. Its a term the former VP of Software Technology (Bud Tribble) coined at Apple in 1981 speaking of how Steve Jobs would hype small advances as breakthroughs but how that hype would excite many people. Now they certainly have some impressive new technology’s that have come out in the past few years that have been breakthroughs, iPod & iPhone mainly. Though I will say that their OS and hardware are definitely badass, but not including the iPhone, none of it is really revolutionary. The iPhone arguably is revolutionary, though certain things included in it like multi-touch were adapted from others rather than created by Apple, but it is the first mainstream introduction of it.

One thing I love about Apple though is how they push everyone to have much more thoughtful and beautiful design in their products. Take the iPhone, it was incredibly disruptive (maybe a better term then revolutionary or breakthrough) as many cell phone manufacturers starting adopting certain features of the iPhone to their devices.

As soon as v2 of the iPhone comes out, I’ll be all over it. Hopefully it will have a chat application thats not jailbreak.

The Millionaire Delusion

I just read an interesting story on inflation and the Consumer Price Index.  $1 million in 1999, the year the show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” first went on air, is now worth about $793,00 the CPI has gone from about 166 to 210, or a 30% increase. Damn Gina!  This means that becoming a millionaire in 2010 will mean that you are a just a yuppie and not actually rich.  But those millionaires in the 70s, those people were the true badasses.

This track is totally feminine, but lovely. It is on an EP they put out, but should be on a full album. Its great.

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The Postal Service – Be still my heart

List of Music Genome Project Attributes

Pandora is one of my favorite sites as it combines both music and technology, the 2 things I spend most of my time exploring. It was started by the Music Genome Project, who has worked to catalog songs based on a common set of musical attributes. Examples of how specific this gets are: synth rock arranging, electronica influences, subtle use of vocal harmony, a vocal-centric aesthetic, major key tonality, prominent use of synth, a prominent accordion part, romantic lyrics. This cataloging, along with some important licensing contracts, make it possible to create a technology that will create radio stations around particular artists or songs.

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Tweetin’ Right from AlexKing.org

It was recommended I use this guide to prevent from posting embarrassingly improper tweets.  Thank you Alex.

http://www.emotionmeetsbusiness.com

Oooohhh this is what happens when metal and Italian designers combine: sexy metal. This is most certainly the car I will purchase when I have enough money for two cars, and the other one will be practical.