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Although I work in the tech field, I’m actually a rather slow adopter of technology. So when my wife announced to some friends last night that I had purchased a PDA, their response was, “Welcome to the new millenium!”

This, of course, was an overestimation of the leap I’d taken. Considering that my purchase was of a Palm VIIx the more appropriate response would have been, “Welcome to the 1990s!”.

Anyways, a local liquidator, XS Cargo was selling them for $49.99CAN. I’ve been thinking of buying a PDA since I finished reading Getting Things Done. As I was just looking for something that I could store and transport my todo lists around on, the Palm VIIx seemed like the perfect fit. And the price was right.

I’ve played around with it a bit, and it looks like it will do the trick. I just need to get a holster so I can carry it around with me.

When I was young, I played piano.

For the longest time this was a forced activity. My parents wanted me to have some musical training as a child, so from the age of 7 that’s what I got. And hated it. They always justified it by saying that I’d thank them when I was older.

And you know what? Now I do.

When I got to high school, I came to enjoy it. I’ll always remember the day that Rob Brown and Brett Humber, having heard that I’d already spent years of my life practicing piano, approached me in 9th grade to ask if I’d be interested in getting together for a jam session. So began my career as a high-school rocker.

Fuelled by wild dreams of fame and fortune, we jammed constantly. We spent every lunch hour in the high school music room. We’d get together on evenings and weekends. Any opportunity we had to play, we’d take it.

Of course, I needed equipment if I was going to become famous. This was the argument that I used to convince my parents to buy me my first keyboard, anyway. Mind you, they were so delighted that I was finally taking an interest in music, that they were practically racing to the store to buy me a Yamaha PSR-6 the moment I mentioned it. It was a nice little unit, but hardly professional grade. That would have to wait another year, when I bought a Yamaha DX11, followed up a couple years later with the purchase of a Korg M1.

At the same time, I continued to study classical piano. I even achieved some level of recognized competence with it, receiving my Grade 8 certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music. I continued to take lessons afterwards, but never worked towards any kind of certificate.

I gave after-school lessons to neighbourhood children, a nice little side business that provided some spending cash for whatever adolescent adventures in which I found myself engaging.

I gave up piano when I graduated from high school and left for university. The keyboards were simply too bulky to keep in my dorm room. Besides, in the course of my years of jamming, I had picked up guitar and was slowly considering myself to be a guitarist rather than a keyboard player. And a guitar could fit in a dorm room. So just like that, I gave up what until then had been an fundamental part of my life.

Now it has been years since I played anything. In the past decade, I’ve spent maybe 15 minutes at a keyboard, and all of these have been at the houses of friends and family. I sit down at their pianos just long enough to punch out a few chords and confirm that I’ve completely lost all my skills.

Somehow, I’m starting to feel the itch to play again. I don’t know what triggered it, but I find myself missing the feel of ivory beneath my fingers. I miss the challenge of learning that comes with playing an instrument. I miss the feeling of gradual, but steady improvement that I’ve only ever felt with music. Most of all, I miss the ability to express myself in music, the medium to which I’ve always felt most attuned.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I’ve decided that I’m going get back into playing piano. Though I no longer have dreams of becoming famous or wealthy by it, I’d like to get competent again, at least enough to play some music that moves and interests me.

As much as I can, I’m planning to keep a record of my journey back to the piano here. Stay tuned for more posts on the topic, the first of which will probably be about shopping for a piano.

Steve Pavlina:

Sure there are some goals that would be really tough for you to accomplish. Maybe you’re right about certain things being impossible for you. So let’s see your battle scars then. Show me the wounds you’ve endured as a result of pursuing goals you couldn’t achieve. Let’s see that bankruptcy, that broken heart, the rejection letter, the lawsuit, the divorce, the public humiliation. Show me the total failures, the brutal disappointments, the smack-downs.

Let’s see them battle scars.

Do you wear an aluminum foil hat to block the government’s mind control rays? It might not be doing what you think. Here’s a study from Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, Noah Vawter:

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Dan Briklin has released an initial version of some software he’s been working on:

The product is the wikiCalc program — a web authoring tool that creates web pages. It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data this is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. While you edit using a browser-based UI in a spreadsheet, with the A-B-C 1-2-3 grid showing, the final output, like printout from the productivity product, is static and only shows cell borders where you explicitly set them. It handles freeform text in a wiki-like manner and works well with large blocks of text.

I haven’t tried it out yet, but it sounds like an interesting concept. Something to keep an eye on, anyway.

Mark Cuban has some ideas on how to eliminate content theft:

The entire content industry is missing a unique opportunity to eliminate most content piracy and more importantly, to generate a whole lot more revenue by offering revenue sharing. If the NYTimes, to use them an example, were to offer 50 pct of the revenue generated from traffic delivered by affiliated websites, not a single website with half a clue would steal your content. Instead, every blogger, splogger and small content creator would look to find ways to link to your content and drive you traffic. Companies like LinkShare offer revenue sharing programs for product sales, why not offer the same for advertising sales ?

This is an interesting idea. I have no doubt that such a system would eliminate the benefit of content scraping. If I can make more money with a link to somebody’s content than with the content itself, why would I choose to steal the content?

However, I wonder if this solution would only shift the problem. Couldn’t you game such a system by renting a few thousand zombie machines to follow the link on your splog and collect a fat cheque from the content producer?

Larry Borsato is available for work.

He’s a smart guy who I’m sure won’t be available for very long given his credentials. If you are looking to hire a product management/marketing guy, you’d better act now.

After reading about polyphasic sleep on lifehack, Steve Pavlina decided to try it for himself and blog about the exprience.

For those of you unfamiliar with polyphasic sleep, it is a schedule that requires only 3 hours of sleep each day, taken in half-hour naps every four hours. This is in contrast to the so-called monophasic sleep schedule that has most of us spend eight or nine continuous hours each night in bed.

Naturally, the transition to polyphasic sleep can be quite a shock for people who have spent their entire lives sleeping through the night. And Steve has done us the service of finding out just what it entails in a series of blog posts:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5
• Day 6
• Day 7
• Day 8-11

To make the long story short, it sounds like the the change is difficult, but once you get past the hump it is possible to feel as alert and well-rested with only 3 hours of sleep each day as you might with eight to nine hours.

I find the idea of gaining an extra 5-6 hours a day very tempting, although I wonder what the long-term health risks might be.

A while ago, I blogged about a story in New Scientist where scientists had identified the “sleep” gene in fruitflies, allowing them to cut their sleeping time by 30%. The last line of the story reads, “There is a snag, though, since the lifespan of [the genetically manipulated fruitflies that slept 30% less] was about 30% shorter than normal.”

I wonder whether polyphasic sleep has the same trade-off. And if it does, is that enough reason not to try it.

After way too much fiddling around with the layout of it, I’m happy to announce the launch of Startup Fever, the new blog that I warned about in October.

The plan remains the same: all the linking to startup-related articles that I usually do will now be done at Startup Fever. This space will be used for more general blogging.

If you’d like to continue getting links to articles about startups, you should subscribe to the RSS feed, which you can do by clicking on the appropriate button below:

There’s also an option to receive subscribe by email. Just enter your email address in the form on the main page.

Joshua Steimle:

A lot of people think they’ve got entrepreneurial experience. After all, they started or ran a business, and isn’t that what an entrepreneur is? Maybe, depending on your own definition. Well, here’s mine. These are not all necessarily descriptive of what I’m going through right now, and they are not all things I’m proud of or would recommend for other people, and most of them certainly were not intentional, but they are all taken from my personal experiences. Some are humorous, some are not.