The always insightful Peter Coffee has a good new column that offers a couple contrarian observations. To the generally positive buzz over Cisco's new virtual meeting system (HD screens, lighting, surround-sound), Peter makes the skewering concession "If face-to-face meetings were considered the high point of organizational productivity, I'd endorse the …

John Lam, whose RubyCLR bridge has been a fascinating and seemingly highly-successful project, is joining Microsoft. Details are vague, but he says he'll "be working in the CLR team" and "I'm not going to leave the Ruby community" but makes it pretty clear that he's looking to hand off the …

Serious Magic Communicator is a nice product: it combines teleprompter and chromakey (green screen) software, so you can rapidly create "talking head" videos with video or graphics in the background, a la TV weathermen. The quality, of course, isn't exactly Lord of the Rings, but it's a very fast way …

I wasn't going to criticize FEMA for spending \$400K flying in a response to the quake. Post-Katrina, I was certainly expecting to see some highly visible Federal presence here. But it turns out that they flew 100 experts, including hazmat teams and smokejumpers, more than 2 days after the quake …

Prob'ly all real Rubists know this, but I was disappointed to discover that Ruby's threading is implemented in the Ruby interpreter's process and, within that, does not take advantage of the native system's threading capabilities. Although I assume that this is an implementation detail and not part of the language …

So far, I've heard that horses at a show up in Kamuela started bucking several seconds before and that fish at a pond in one of the resorts started jumping as much as minutes before the quake. There's even a report about cockroaches going crazy the night before.

At the …

OK, here's some trivia for you: a case fan situated 17 miles from the epicenter of a 6.6 earthquake can be shaken lose to the extent of creating a significant rattle.

Now you know.

Thank god for first-world construction codes.

This morning's earthquake, which occurred pretty much directly offshore from us, was several factors more severe than anything I experienced while living in California. I was in the city of San Francisco for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and I compare that experience to …

CNN is incredibly over-dramatizing the situation in Kona. They are getting over-wound-up quotes from people who are saying "like a war zone." This is not true!

One of the "highway blockages" is 100 yards from my house -- it's a couple big rocks in the road. Too big for a person …

That sucked. We're directly onshore from the epicenter, as we understand it.

We're okay, though, and the house (pretty incredibly, given the experience) doesn't seem to have any structural damage. Much more extensive blog posting to come.

Power is on (for the moment?) and water is back on.

On Queen …