I’ve had this theory for a long time that I call the fat man/skinny man effect.

Have you ever noticed that around certain people you find yourself acting more bad-ass than normally, more artistic, cultured etc etc? Ever notice that it seems to happen when you come across a fellow who is (respectively) a pansy, drab, or uncultured?

I call this the fat man/skinny man effect. It’s the parable about one guy, slightly underweight, and another guy, slightly overweight. The Skinny guy wants the Fat guy to be a little more like him. So he emphasizes his Skinnyness- he talks about it, he admires other people who are skinny, he even gets more skinny than he already was. He is trying to pull the Fat guy over to be more like him. He is trying to go even farther away from the Fat man’s state so that the Fat man will be pulled to be more like him by virtue of his friendship and mutual bond.

Simultaneously the Fat guy is trying to encourage the Skinny guy to put on a few. He offers the little feller some burgers, a few chocolate bars, pokes him in the ribs from time to time. Whenever the two are together the Fat Man really feels his own weight and and thinks that he is just massive, and the Skinny Man talks like he eats salads all day and runs a marathon for entertainment. But when the two separate and go home they are just one slightly overweight and one slightly underweight pair of guys.

I notice this in social gatherings all the time. A mildly dashing, occasionally exciting young woman talks to a slightly bookish, shy middle aged man. Watch how they act, how they behave. The characteristics which are different between the two that the first person wants to see mimicked in the second is emphasized and made obvious. The older man talks about great books, the young woman romanticizes her weekend adventures. They are both trying to pull the other towards “being a better person” or “being well rounded”.

This is the funniest to watch when two social gatherings are back to back with a different crowd. For example, there are a few guys I know who are more caustic than I, more aggressive in their jokes and humor. Around them I am suddenly this saintly puritan, protector of civil rights and humanity. Wait two hours and return to see me talking to a bright eyed volunteer looking for donations to help tsunami survivors: I transform on the spot to a heartless Scrooge who never loved anybody and never will. I am in truth somewhere in between- what’s more interesting is that the two other people are also shifting a little as they talk to me. My aggressive buddy breaks out a few extra minority jokes, the volunteer affects confounded dismay all out of joint with the fact that he’d only been volunteering since yesterday and hadn’t done a damned thing before that.

Is it just me?

Another quarter, another story submitted to the Writers of the Future.

This one is called “Guardian of Stonehaven” for the contest, but I just call it “Dane”. It’s available here: http://www.box.net/shared/p4pko3ackg

I am writing a few shorts as part of a longer story arc. There are 4 stories so far, each from a different character’s point of view: Grimoire, Sasha, Dane and Caldorac.

Again, share etc and if you’re famous enough I’ll even let you plagiarize.

Enjoy.

By the time I finished posting the previous image I realized that none of my friends have any idea what it is that I’m talking about.

Alright, quick refresher: Nicholas Negroponte has a project called “One Laptop Per Child“, possibly the most important thing to happen in education in the last 10 years. He has created a very small, simple laptop for the cost of $200 (soon to cheapen) that is being sold en masse to the developing nations of the world for the education of their children. The kicker is that as a condition to buy the laptops for the children the governments have to agree that the laptop belongs to the child, and can be done with as the child likes. This is an amazing educational tool- but listen to the TED talk, Nicholas says it better.

This laptop is called the XO-Laptop. It used to be called the $100 Laptop, but when the price crept up they realized marketing would need to shift…

The goal is educational, but as a marketing tool they have created a temporary offer called Give One Get One, where they allow you to buy one XO-Laptop for yourself and simultaneously donate one to the developing world. I signed up, and my copy showed up this morning.

The image in the previous post was taken off of the laptop. It has a mike, speakers and a small camera. I could have taken a video if I wanted to punish y’all.

I am currently typing this blog entry off of my XO-Laptop, logged on wirelessly to the internet.

Sweet.

I just received my OLPC XO laptop! This is the best thing ever!

This is me, on geek.

I’ve always wondered why there wasn’t a simple verilog tutorial explaining how to use fileio for use in simulation. Well, now there is.

I have some code examples for a verilog module that opens, reads and writes binary or text files. Unfortunately, Modelsim doesn’t have the ability to write to a binary file (lame!) so I wrote a simple c program to help me do the conversions to/from binary and text files.

The verilog example shows the use of: $fopen, $fwrite, $fdisplay, $fread, $fclose, $readmemh.

Create_binary_files.cpp

Verilog_Fileio_tutorial.v (Server issue prevents me from called it a .v file. My apologies in advance for this lameness. Rename the .txt to a .v at will)

If you want, you can get the entire zip file that contains all the output products of these two files. The zip file also includes a project file for Xilinx ISE 7.1 as well as a project file for Visual Studio 2005. Verilog_fileio_tutorial.zip
Enjoy.

So many artists around the world are driven by social change, but the parts they are offered are for gangsters, sluts or alcoholics. They do their best to convert their limited role into a story of life, a guidepost to Life’s Lessons, but in the end they are constrained by the script.
There is an option (b): Make your own movie.

Jeff Skoll: Making movies that make change
Official Spiel-Jeff Skoll made his fortune as the first president of eBay. Now he’s spending it at the movies. His company, Participant Productions, makes entertaining, issues-driven films that inspire real change — Murderball, Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth … Here, he talks about the people who’ve inspired him to do good, and about some upcoming films that will open your eyes.

My Spiel-Jeff Skoll wanted to write stories when he was a kid to inspire people to become interested in the issues that affected us all, but he instead went off into engineering because he feared writing wasn’t certain enough to make a living. So he hoped to become financially independent and then return to his original dream (damn this sounds familiar). He ended up becoming a billionaire and using that wealth to get hordes of other people to create their own stories that would change the world. He quotes John Gardner as his inspiration, “Bet on good people doing good things.” So he chose people he trusted and created Participant Productions to provide the financial backing to make Murderball, Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, An Inconvenient Truth, North Country, Fast Food Nation, The Kite Runner, et al. that all went on to be successful artistically, critically and financially but more important have all created social change. My good friend Taron Lexton is following a parallel path in the director’s seat (note to self: step 1- become a billionaire, step 2- hire Taron). This is the road less traveled, but abundant in its rewards.

The key to this talk is not merely the genius and the power of Jeff Skoll but the insight that people want to make movies that make change, want to make art that makes a difference. The art will be better and more beautiful because of it, but it takes a leader with the drive to make it happen or all those artistic, socially inclined individuals won’t present themselves. They’ll show up for whatever they can get a role in. Between ‘Syriana’ and ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ George Clooney won his first Academy Award and his second Golden Globe- his last movie before that was Ocean’s Twelve. Enough said.

You have to create the structure for people to make a difference in. Most of us don’t have the energy to go it alone, to be the first, but most of us would show up in a Jeff Skoll’s movie if given half a chance.

One more thing- check out the Skoll Foundation for Jeff Skoll’s other humanitarian work. Very clever selection of priorities, great work, well worth supporting.

I’ve been on the internet for a few years now, and all I’ve got to say is…. where’s all the funny at? I figured I’d be buried by now by all the comedians out there.

I decided to do a review of all my favorite bits out there and write ‘em down, but I couldn’t think of anything. I’ll have to edit this list as I think of things
In no particular order:

- www.youtube.com, enter “laughing baby”. Damn near any clip will do. Thanks to Tieg and Ben for this one. You can’t help but smile.
- www.dilbert.com, because it IS half of corporate america. Go to the archives pages if you really need to kill time.
- www.basicinstructions.net, even better than dilbert. The logo is a picture of the author whacking a friend with a 2×4 labeled “knowledge” with the caption “You will learn”. My favorite comic out there. See this, this or this for an example of my humor.
- Flintlocke, for gamer geeks, preferably those who know what World of Warcraft is. My personal favorite comic strip section is where flicklocke goes on autorun, it’s broken into 10 sections or so (click ‘next’ each time to get the full comic… damned funny). It also has the best Valentine’s Day comic ever

- ???

If you’ve got a favorite, send it to me.

Sasa Vucinic is trying to keep a free press alive across the world. Along the way he came up with a new way of helping charities (listen carefully at the end of the talk).

Official Spiel:In this quietly persuasive talk, Sasa Vucinic tells how being an independent radio broadcaster in the former Yugoslavia led him to create the Media Development Loan Fund, a radically new way to support independent media. He explains the importance of creating media businesses rather than mere journalistic entities, and proposes his vision (since realized) to issue “free press bonds,” publicly traded securities that support independent media in developing and transitioning countries.

My Spiel:
The discussion of the value of free press and the difficulties in keeping it alive was interesting, but what gets this talk onto my favorite list is the idea he has at the end of the talk to create bonds for companies that have charitable aims, and provide those bonds on the open market. This is genius.
It is important that it be bonds and not stocks because you don’t want the charity going out of business because of a temporary swing in public opinion- you cannot afford to have a charity catering to investors first, and their public second. A bond bridges the gap between charity and pure commercialism as a bond is repayed in full, with or without interest.
Many investors want not only to make money (or at least break even) but also to be socially conscious about it. Many if not most mutual funds today have notations on them that they will not invest in Tobacco, Firearms or similar industries that the investor may find reprehensible. It is known and acknowledged in the investing community that the effect of the investment matters to the investor- this idea takes that knowledge one step further.
Right now most charitable organizations rely on a mixture of angel donations, commercial loans from banks and revenue (if any) from their charity model. This leaves out the opportunity for an investor that would happily loan them the money at less than market rate as long as he was guaranteed his money back.
Two examples:
Grameen Bank when it was started by Muhammed Yunus was funded off of his personal cash out of his pocket (literally). As it grew he needed larger loans from a commercial bank. The commercial banks were not set up to loan to the very poor directly so every loan was in Yunus’ name, and on his behalf Grameen bank loaned the money to the poor. They had donations as time went by, but not enough to match the massive volume of loans they were handling and so they had to suffer with the awkward constraints of dealing with commercial banks.
www.kiva.org is a microlending organization that is a mini example of this bond idea. Kiva searches out and finds worthy microlending causes across the world, takes a picture of the guy who wants a loan and gets a description of what business venture he needs the loan for. Socially concious investors go to www.kiva.org and find one of these microlending borrowers they like. They lend that guy some part or all of his loan (usually 100 to 1000 dollars). As the borrower pays off his loan the investor gets his money back with no interest. This is exactly like a bond, but from person to person, me to some guy in Tibet. If he fails to repay the loan he will find it very difficult to get another microloan, and as a result the repayment rate is typically 95-99 percent, far above American credit repayment rates.

The beauty of the bond idea is that it is so flexible. There can be no interest, some interest or even negative interest if the cause is worthy enough.
The bonds could be rated for their charitable performance much like stocks are rated by Morningstar for their financial performance.
I cannot emphasize how much I love this idea.

Anna Deavere Smith displays some of the best acting I’ve ever seen, becoming her characters rather than just acting like them.

Official Spiel:
Actor Anna Deavere Smith brings the TED audience to their feet as she gives life to a series of quintessential Americans. Smith transforms herself in and out of character as she embodies legendary author Studs Terkel, followed by convict Paulette Jenkins, a Korean merchant in Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, and finally a rodeo bull rider. The monologues are drawn verbatim from interviews she conducted for On the Road: A Search for American Character.

My spiel:
Everyone has a native ability to behave like someone else, pick up a few of their characteristics as time goes on. Watch an entire season of your favorite TV show in one evening and you’ll begin to sound like the cast (I’m looking at you Jess). But to be able to pick up and put down a personality like garment is where Anna stands apart. To be able to turn it on and turn it off at will- I’ve never quite seen anything like it.