Mike Axelrod’s blog
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Two revolutionary discoveries reported in the same month. These are headlines you shouldn’t miss in your lifetime.
It doesn’t get any better than this. Well maybe, now if we can only solve world hunger an end all wars. You think I’m joking? Hey, let’s give it a try.
I am told ClearForest Gnosis is yet another essential power tool for exploration of the Semantic web. Powered by Calais, Gnosis provides real time semantic processing in firefox. Gnosis analyzes page content and highlights (underlines in color) information such as people, organizations, companies, products and geographies. Sort of an auto highliegter for the web. hovering over any of the identified topics, I discovered news, blog entries, maps, company information and Wikipedia entries. Is this useful? I’d say so. A nice feature is that I can configure a list of sites that will be processed automatically. Other pages can be analyzed “on demand” by right clicking on the page or using the keyboard shortcut.
LinkedFacts.com lets me search news articles using semantic web technologies. No this is not a news portal, but I can read the news. What I like about this experiment is that unlike traditional news sites I fell more like I’m in the driver seat. It’s a good idea, with some refinement it might even be a great idea.
This handmade box took me over a year to complete with various stops and starts along the way. It is made of Cherry, Maple and Cocobolo inlay. All the joinery was done by hand. This box started as an exercise in building an 18th century replica during a class taught by Tom Meiller during the winter of 2007. The frame for the lid was shaped using one of Tom’s antique molding planes. Using one of these is an incredible experience and I’m gald I got the chance to try. All the joints are reinforced with either splines or dovetails.
The lid uses special “butterfly” inserts to reinforce the miter joints. These are small hand cut double dovetail shaped pieces of cocobolo that were inlayed after the miter joints were glued up.The course was offered by the Rochester Woodworkers Society where you can also see some of Tom’s Work. Last week I gave the box to my daughter Melanie as a much belated Bat Mitzvah present. (She’s 14 now, so I’m oh so late on this.) Didn’t matter. She loved it.
So my friend Jim asks “Cool, I see you have beer in your title but where’s the beer?”. Answer: Beer is everywhere, yet nowhere. Ok, so no beer really, perhaps “beer talk”. The real question is what do I blog about. Well, woodworking, that’s the wood, Computer “stuff” that’s the silicon, and well, everything else I might want to blog if I was sitting around talking to you and having a beer, “beer talk”. But its not. Its just beer.
It’s interesting to see what happens after you get quoted in computer world. It’s not really that exciting after the intial excitement is over. Mostly you get cold calls by sales people trying to sell you competitive technologies. Please… Anyway the other effect is the follow on interviews by other journalists that want to ride the coat tails of the big press. So I get another 5 minutes of fame in this article from AIS Health.com
Thursday I was quoted in by Computerworld regarding some of my current research at Excellus. I was a guest speaker at a webinar for hosted by Just Systems earlier in the day discussing various aspects of Enterprise mashups and how we might improve customer service by better empowering our service representatives with more powerful client applications. Apparently Heather Havenstein from computerworld was in the audience and wrote up the event in blinding speed. Literally a couple hours after the webinar I got a call from someone in operations telling me I’m in the news. Wow that’s fast.
20 hours of travel time later we have returned home. This has been truly a remarkable trip but it is good to be back.
More pictures of Amsterdam are now available.
Yesterday (7/14) was a trip to the Zuider Zeemuseum in Enkhuizen, a historic “reproduction” of an old 18th and19th century village by the sea. Think “Dutch” version Sturbridge Village.
Today (7/15) was The Jewish History Museum, Portuguese Synagogue from the 17th century, still in use. An hour at the Botanical Gardens. A bike ride to Vondel Park for free music, juggling and dinner.