Yesterday, November 23rd at 6:48pm EST - at Sisters Hospital in Buffalo, NY - in Birthing room 8 - my son Eric and his wife Heather gave birth to Jonas Matthew Jahn - 8 lbs 10 oz, 20.5 inches long. He is just beautiful and we are so excited for them! This is our first grandchild!



He is the cutest Jahn of all time. While Jonas can't talk yet, I suspect he will be beating his father at Erics favorite Skee Ball iPhone app in no time!

I have some nice pictures posted in a Google Picasa web Album

http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelejahn/Jonas?feat=directlink

My Son Eric is a big Weezer fan - one of his favorite songs by Weezer is "My Name Is Jonas" - hence the name.

Great new iPhone app from Code Line !

I normally am a very upbeat, super optimistic, glass is half full type.

As a product development and hype spewing evangelist, I remind my clients of a Dogbert line in a Dilbert cartoon... "there is a fine line between marketing and fraud" which I say with a big smile, and then we get to work crafting the press releases about what the product will do.

Today, I feel like a person who Spiro Agnew was speaking of when he spoke of - "Nattering nabobs of negativism" - while Agnew said this, it was actually their speechwriter William Safire who coined it... but i digress...

I am working on a project that is making my brain melt.

Today, while doing some research, I stumbled across this.

Matthew E. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, who describes what he calls the Seven Laws of Projects:

1. A major project is never completed on time, within budget, or with the original team, and it never does exactly what it was supposed to.

2. Projects progress quickly until they become 85% complete. Then they remain 85% complete forever. Think of this as the Home Improvement Law.

3. When things appear to be going well, you’ve overlooked something. When things can’t get worse, they will. (Murphy’s Law says, “If something can go wrong, it will”—this is a corollary).

4. Project teams hate weekly progress reports because they so vividly manifest the lack of progress.

5. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project will only take twice as long as expected. Also, ten estimators will estimate the same work in ten different ways. And one estimator will estimate ten different ways at ten different times.

6. The greater the project’s technical complexity, the less you need a technician to manage it.

7. If you have too few people on a project, they can’t solve the problems. If you have too many, they create more problems than they can solve.

Ain't that the truth.

Google Books Settlement Delayed Indefinitely

Read all about this --> here <--

I think that any delay is a waste of time - millions of books have been scanned and most of this is either out of copyright or orphaned works.

from the article by Miguel Helft of the New York Times;

"..Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.

“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”

Horrible! A Waste of time and lawyer fees. Google is the new library, and this case has now been pending for more than four years - enough.

How is it that Apple was able to get the artists to see the vision of iTunes and the iPhone, so anyone can listen to anything anywhere - and here we have greedy fools like the heirs of authors, including representatives of the estate of John Steinbeck, all stopping what cannot be stopped - it is not about Google Books, it is about enabling the world access to books. What has the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers done to help with THAT ? NOTHING. They are as bad - if not worse - as the RIAA.

For the record - I am all about reducing using paper as a method to exchange data / information. It is slower, takes up more physical space, can't be mirrored easily and more often than not ends up in some landfill.

I am a contributor to the CATO institute. That should help explain a lot of things to you about my views, but perhaps this post might seem contradictory to the first part of this blog post...

I had always thought that Books and Newspapers are legally different than any data or information distributed using a cable, broadcast and satellite - and it seems that they may not be !

This is one of the questions being answered in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission


Important stuff to us all...

http://reason.com/blog/show/135999.html

In the above link there is a Cato Institute video, based on the first round of arguments in Citizens United, highlights the lengths to which the government has been driven in defending Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) speech restrictions.

Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested (link is a PDF) that books are already covered by the electioneering communications ban, which applies to messages carried by satellite as well as cable and broadcasting, when they are read on devices like Amazon's Kindle.

Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart agreed.

This is totally insane.

I love books. I love eBooks even more, as they are lighter and take up far less space. I also happen to consult with IoFlex, a company that provides software that enables people to scan a book and apply image processing return it to its original, ready to print condition. We have some very large customers who scan hundreds of thousands of books. Unlike the Google Books project, where they are mostly interested in capturing book pages to make them searchable for research, IoFlex customers want to preserve the fidelity of the images. IoFlex BlackBox offers image processing that removed the halftone dot patterns from printed images, cleans up dirt and that sort of thing.

Once of IoFlex's larger customers - Bibilolife - provides services for Libraries. Below is an interesting video about that.

Shelf2Life Demo from OPP on Vimeo.

I have been working on a project that requires us to design PDF forms and a form data workflow for a homecare health service provider.

Part of the prototype will eventually be able to upload data to a Google Health account.

If you are not familair with a Personal Health Record, or PHR - this short video from Google should help.



My project is far from finished, but I thought I might share some of the concepts in a slide show - check it out here ;

http://www.myhealthcarestuff.com/presentation.html

Enjoy !