Chronicles of Mario

I get interviewed with my girlfriend, her mom, and her family friends on Bethesda Cares’s Red Parking Meters for the Homeless.

This is a pretty telling description of why PIPA/SOPA was going so smoothly through Congress. West-coast tech companies don’t really pay much attention to east-coast politics … unless it starts meddling in their business. I could understand their initial reaction — when I read these bills, I thought they’d be dead in the water because  [ Read More ]

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Why ask a bunch of “nerds” what the right thing to do is?

A social scientist’s dream is to be able to do experiments with policy. One of my personal favorite ideas has been to cut all entitlements for 12 months. Especially if done by a Democratic President during his second year in office, I imagine that there might be a dramatic change in electorate opinion. Republicans can tout  [ Read More ]

HP announced today that its Personal System Group that manufacture’s PCs is here to stay. The newly hired CEO, Meg Whitman, was good on her promise to make a quick decision on it. In some respects, the decision was not all that unexpected because the PC unit was still profitable — and the logistics/supply chain  [ Read More ]

Yelp is the juggernaut of food and entertainment reviews but there’s always room for a little guy to move in and do things better. A service called Loku finds news and recommends places in neighborhoods based on its algorithms that apply natural language processing and sentiment analysis to the reviews, posts, and social media updates  [ Read More ]

I’m in favor of the new energy efficient light bulbs mandated by U.S. law. Incandescents are inefficient with a short life-span and burn hot to the touch. Compact Florescents (CFs) solve some of this by being more efficient and having a longer lifespan but are a touch more expensive. Same goes with LED bulbs, they’re  [ Read More ]

Here’s an interesting thought — will Amazon release a smartphone the way it has released a tablet? In the grand scheme of things, Amazon’s Kindle and subsequent Kindle Fire will likely pay off well for the company. It makes sense to sell them with only a small profit margin, at-cost, or even at a loss  [ Read More ]

I’m not particularly sure what all the hype surrounding Siri is all about — the newest feature of the iPhone 4S. In a sense, I do understand how people want to feel like the rich guy (or gal) who owns a mansion, has a butler, and his own concierge. You ask a question, Siri answers  [ Read More ]