Derek Scruggs

When my sister gave me the news of Charlton Heston’s death, the first thing I said was “Did they pry his gun out of his cold, dead hands?”

Tonight I did a demo of SurveyGizmo at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. I was fortunate to get a few laugh lines, but the credit really goes to Scott for putting together some nice screen shots and helping me work out exactly what to present.

A typical client demo or webinar can go on for up to an hour. Cramming the highlights into five minutes was like explaining the intricacies of quantum mechanics as “basically, a lot of weird unpredictable stuff happens.”

It’s especially gratifying to hear what David Cohen had to say:

Thank The Magic Diety in the Sky for SurveyGizmo, who is doing well and is having an open house at their new digs in downtown Boulder later this week. The room erupted with glee when they showed actual technology that was cool, as well as “a demo of Keynote transitions.” SurveyGizmo has a very deep and well established product for creating, managing, and analyzing surveys. If you’ve experienced Survey Monkey, it’s kinda like that but has a more “enterprise” feel and is targeted slightly upmarket. It has nice-to-have features such as two-way Salesforce integration and stuff like scalability (they currently handle 20-40k responses per minute). Pricing ranges from free to $159/month. Go check it out if you need to find out what people think, and you need it to be real.

Thanks David! See you Friday?

I was a fan of Arthur C. Clarke when I was a kid and, like many, was sad to hear of his death. Today I learned this:

While a radar technician in the Royal Air Force (1941-1946), Clarke had an idea which he wrote up in a 1945 technical paper: “Extra-terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” It was the invention of the geosynchronous communications satellite. He calculated that by putting a satellite at 22,300 miles above the equator, it would orbit the Earth at the same rate that the Earth rotated on its axis, making the satellite appear to always stay directly above a point on the equator. That way ground stations could always point to it, and it could relay signals. The 22,300-mile orbit is now officially known as the “Clarke Orbit”, but it took nearly 20 years for the first operational satellite to be placed there (and 10 before the first orbital rocket flight). Today, that band of space is stuffed with satellites. He mused he “lost a billion dollars in my spare time” by not patenting the idea.

Courtesy of This is True’s always-interesting Honorary Unsubscribe.

Hilarious!

“Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003 on Meet the Press.

Five years later:

Iran leader’s Iraq visit eclipses US, Arab ties

BAGHDAD, March 2 (Reuters) - Pomp and ceremony greeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his arrival in Iraq on Sunday, the fanfare a stark contrast to the rushed and secretive visits of his bitter rival U.S. President George W. Bush.

Heckuva job, W.

This post about a group of students who got to question Warren Buffet is making it’s way around the blogosphere. I particularly like what he says here:

I know a woman in her 80’s, a Polish Jew woman forced into a concentration camp with her family but not all of them came out. She says, “I am slow to make friends because when I look at people, I have one question in mind; would they hide me?” If you get to be my age, or younger for that matter, and have a lot of people that would hide you, then you can feel pretty good about how you’ve lived your life. I know people on the Forbes 400 list whose children would not hide them. “He’s in the attic, he’s in the attic.” Some of them keep compensating by joining board seats or getting honorary degrees, but it doesn’t change the fact that no one will give a damn when they are gone. The most powerful force in the world is unconditional love. To horde it is a terrible mistake in life. The more you try to give it away, the more you get it back. At an individual level, it’s important to make sure that for the people that count to you, you count to them.

Via Brad Feld, who I would feel privileged to hide in my attic.

Wow, who knew William Shatner could be so philosophical?

Q: If that horse had killed you, what would you have regretted never achieving?

A: Everything. I’ve done nothing. What have I done? I’ve blundered my way through life. So I have my picture on the wall. The minute I die, that picture will start to yellow and fade and eventually be gone. Blown in the wind and become part of the molecular structure of something else. These things we see as “success,” they’re non-accomplishments.

Q: So is that how you think of your Emmy for Boston Legal? And the millions of lives you touched as Captain James Tiberius Kirk?

A: Careers are here and they’re gone. I enjoy performing, and I feel lately like I’ve reached the apex of what I can do as a performer. Even my memory for dialogue has never been sharper. But no matter how great we think we are, we’re nothing but the temples of Ozymandias—we’re ruins in the making.

Found via Brijit.

Just got back from Cancun and decided to document it on Dopplr. Check it out.

From Gretchen:

When money or health is a problem, you think about it all the time; when it’s not a problem, you don’t think much about it. Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness. One of the greatest luxuries that money and health provide is the freedom from having to think about them.

From, of all places, a comment on Slashdot:

Imagine two baskets.

One contains all the things explained by the phrase “god did it”. The other contains all the things explained by “science”.

A long time ago, everything was in the god basket, and nothing at all was in the science basket. The weather? God did it. Pregnancy? God did it. Disease? God did it. Where does stuff come from? God did it.

Then, as humanity learned more stuff, things got taken out of the god basket and put into the science basket. The weather. Pregnancy. Disease. Where stuff comes from, right back until a few billionths of a second before the big bang, getting closer all the time.

So what’s left in the god basket? Good question — but that’s not where I’m going with this, because actually that’s irrelevant.

The point is this: there has never — never ever ever — been a single thing that has been taken out of the science basket and put back in the god basket. Not one. Ever.

The traffic is all one way.