Up late on the computer last night then friends coming over made for a great alarm clock again. Fat Boy brought his dog who is bright and super-affectionate which was a nice thing to wake up to. The Beach Flats Community Center is doing a day-before-Thanksgiving meal today which will be a good chance to get more connected to the neighborhood, I'm still the new kid on the block and in the process of meeting people.
Looked up J-pop, K-pop and C-pop artists to download on Limewire. I'm shuffling songs in foreign languages into my music mix, as a good way to start to inundate myself. My mid-term goal is to be a fluent speaker in these and other languages, and be able to do business providing services for overseas visitors. Tourism is a $513 a year industry here in Santa Cruz, so it's a big market to tap into.

Day Eleven

Innocentive has a crowd-sourced business model, it pays "solvers" to suggest solutions to scientific or business development problems posted by answer seekers. It's congruent with ideas espouse in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Both men appeared on the Maria Bartiromo- hosted panel discussion The Business of Education: Rethinking Work, which is highly recommended thing for you to take the time to view.

Day Nine

I live right next to the Boardwalk. The one that's in The Lost Boys. It's a relatively begign, entertaining institution to have as one's neighbor. It's the linchpin of this town's tourist economy. It has rollercoasters, a revolving pendulum ride, one of those old shooting galleries with the piano player and little animals that pop up and down when you hit the target (there's a hilarious trick to activate the targets at once...), Guitar Hero, the old Atari Star Wars game, and Dance Dance Revolution. Which makes it an interesting laboratory for observing the sociology of how people interact with entertaining machines. I've been studying this topic with a friend of mine since over the summer, our objective is to identify underlying principals that could point toward improved designs. More on that later.

Day Seven

I didn't reset my alarm clock after I blew the fuse from running too many appliances at once, but if I sleep in at all, my friends act as a de facto alarm clock, so it all worked out. Chatter about Sarah Palin's addictions (fawning adulation, lying). CNBC inspired enthusiastic chatter over the state of the economy and what to invest in during a recession. Finally got some audio on this computer which means I can study foreign languages over the internet. Kicked everyone out to have the place to myself for a bit. Thanks to the miracle of cable, I'm watching Sesame Street in Spanish (Plaza Sesamo!) and Woody Allen's sexy 1965 romp What's New Pussycat?
Santa Cruz Geeks is a good networking place.
The Large Hadron Collider went back online today, but sounds like no actual particle collisions so far.

Day Five

up all night sleep all day.
my buddy came over and discussed auto body detail. Cash Cab is an interesting concept show. I like the fact that it's just one guy in a cab running his on television show business. I think he's got some camera people that you never see. There's an outside camera at all the stops - the camera crew must follow him around in another vehicle. The other thing I like about it is that everybody who gets in the cab has their 15 minutes of fame, just for riding the cab. It's been a project of mine to learn Manhattan geography, and watching this show is great for that with lots of street footage and maps.

Annie Little has done some acting and sings "Will You Fly Me Away" featured in this advert for the Amazon Kindle. The ad, directed by Los Angeles photographers Angela Kohler and Ithyle Griffiths, is filmed beautifully in stop-motion - it's an animation process employing the use of an actual person, the lovely miss Little. Her song reminds me of the sort of music that came out of my old stomping grounds, Olympia Washington.

I've been looking for info about telecommuting, work at home, work over the internet, here's some links:
work-at-home
Telecommuting Jobs
Flex Jobs
I'm planning a tour of the Pacific Northwest where I grew up to see family and friends. All these people I hadn't seen in years started popping up on my Facebook account, so now I'm going to go visit people. I'll be blogging the trip, and use it as an opportunity to network and solidify connections for lots of happy collaborations and future prosperity.

Day Four, ahhhhhh.....

Glitches fixed, it seems.
Lost fictional money on the virtual trading game. Apple was a good pick, but Amazon took a dive. Sold some of the crappy Amazon and bought a virtual piece of Google.
Sunday I went to a meeting about a theatrical show that I'm writing a piece for, I don't want to spoiler it, but I will say that it's thematically risque and will involve elaborate alien makeup. I have some experience with theater makeup but nothing on the level of the kind of alien costumes you see in sci-fi movies and such, which is what the piece that I'm writing calls for. So... research research research. So far I've found some makeup vendors, and application tips, and this video and that video.
that's it for now...

Glitches

Hard drive keeps crashing what a pain in the ass. My favorite is when I get all excited it looks like it's about to work, and then it waits right until I'm well involved in writing an email, THEN it crashes. So I've got to use the library to get online again...... Might be a bit of time before I can post daily blog entries like I plan to.

Day Two

Day Two, an associate who we'll be helping manage the game company came by dropped off some books for RPG night.
This early in the game I'm just settling into having a new internet connection and all that that means, working on developing new working habits, and researching, lot of researching with the goal in mind of being able to work at home over the internet. Here's some initial fruits of my efforts:

a friend recommended ExpertBee, a website where you can get paid to do research for other people. Looks intriguing, but so far the the research question postings have been inactive.
This is stock market simulation game I'm going to play it for a while to see if I can get consistently good at picking winners, by then I'll have saved to enough $$$$$ to start investing for real.
LEGO mindstorms is a fascinating example of a crowd-sourced business model. When you purchase the product, you're not just acquiring configurable robot kits, you're also buying a membership into an online community of robot builders, allowing for the customer base to help drive innovation. I think Mindstorms an interesting case study and will be using it as a reference point for discussing the implications new socioeconomic relationships enabled by novel information technologies.
A good conceptual lens for analyze Mindstorms and other thematically similar changes to our market economy is available to readers of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, which is highly recommended reading to everybody, and required reading to anyone who wants to have the basic vocabulary to take a part in the discussion that I hope to cultivate with this blog. It's a fascinating survey of the many ways that computers, cellphones, internet, texting, etc are opening new ways for people to from groups and coordinate their collaboration across geographic distance and social barriers.

Ok, that's a start, I have more to post later, now I'm on my way to have a meeting about a theatrical production....

Day 1, sunny Saturday

Good times dancing at the Veterans Hall last night, and good thing they come knocking on the door in the morning or I might have slept in a few more hours. We all discuss business, dial-up National Geographics and Squidbillies on the cable, my buddy looks at pictures from the Vietnam war on the 'net. I live about 2 blocks away from the Roller Coaster and the beach. I've got collages of maps, diagrams, Chinese writing, and pictures cut from magazines all over my walls, from where I sit I can see a chart of the US national nonprofit infrastructure, a circuit map for an amplifier, a satellite picture of Salinas. Now I'm getting into doing research.....

check out
myspace.com/largehadroncollider

Day Zero

Today is Day Zero. Less than two months ago I was homeless and living on the streets. Now I have an apartment, cable and internet access. I now have all I need to go global. In this blog I will document the creation of new start-up companies and innovative new business models. A geek, a swingin' bungalow, all hours access to information technology.... Lets see just how far we can take this. Starting from ground zero - just a wee bit of $$$$$, a healthy social network, and the basic necessary hardware configuration for blogging and web projects. I intend to use this blog as an experiment to pioneer new kinds of web-based home-workplaces. Starting from scratch, from right here in my lovely bungalow, typing on a keyboard as I'm watching the president give a speech in Japan on CNN. Stay tuned folks, I'm going to blogging the emergence of evolving projects, as well as posting updates and commentary and current events and fascinating web tidbits.