Caution: extremely nerdy post.

Back in the early days of Excite, just after we closed our first venture round, each of us received our own Sun workstation, truly a milestone moment, and a big upgrade from the surplus Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations that we shared in a Palo Alto garage using vt220 terminals we bought at Stanford’s surplus store.

We each got to name our workstation. I named mine “Elna”. Why? Because the Rot13 of “Ryan” is “Elna”. Rot13 is a convenient quick and dirty cipher to disguise plain text. Basically, you replace each letter in a string by its companion 13 places further along in the alphabet, wrapping to the beginning if necessary. The great thing about Rot13 is it is reversible. Simply apply the function again, and you are back where you started.

Yesterday, on my flight back from LAX to DEN, to my great amusement, my stewardess’s name was “Elna”. I had long since forgotten about my first workstation’s name until I saw her name tag and it jogged my memory.

For fun with Rot13, go to http://rot13.com and you can do your own translations. Try this one first: “Elna Naqerj ZpVagler”.

Technorati Tags: Excite, Rot13

Vote early, vote often (just kidding).  The Slingbox Pro is one of the contenders for Engadget’s Home Entertainment Device of the Year.  Go to Engadget to cast your vote.

Technorati Tags: Slingbox

I woke up this morning and unfolded the front page of the New York Times to discover that Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. He was a great writer whose book Cat’s Cradle was a big influence on my worldview. When I was in the ninth grade, the book was a reading assignment in my English class. At the same time, I was also engaged in classes at my local Catholic church to prepare for the sacrament of Confirmation.

While I had already had doubts about whether I actually wanted to be confirmed and had some serious misgivings about any form of organized religion, reading Cat’s Cradle pushed me squarely into the atheist (or at least deeply agnostic) camp. Shortly after reading the book (and then re-reading it) I quit my Confirmation class, stopped attending Mass (except for Christmas and Easter, to keep my mom happy) and converted to Bokononism. And years later when I spent half a year living in Germany (Berlin and Munich) during my time at Stanford, I visited Dresden and the site of the actual Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five.)

I was originally going to start this post by writing that Mr. Vonnegut had come unstuck in time, but Paul Kedrosky beat me to it. So I will simply wish Mr. Vonnegut farewell and hope that there were no suspicious traces of ice-nine found near his body.

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I came across a post today by Matt Haughey on PVRblog who writes about using his Slingbox so he can catch up on his TiVo’d Jon Stewart and Colbert Report episodes by perching his laptop on the handlebars of his elliptical trainer while working out. That’s a great use of in-the-home placeshifting and something I’ve been known to do from time to time while riding my stationary bike in the basement. Better living through technology!

I also know someone (who shall remain nameless) who uses his Slingbox so he can visit the bathroom while watching his favorite shows and not miss a moment. Why he can’t just hit pause on his PVR, I’m not sure…

Technorati Tags: excercise, Gadgets, placeshifting, Slingbox

EDN magazine gave Akustica a “2006 Innovator of the Year” award in the Mixed Signal ASSP category for their AKU2000 digital microphone chip, which has seen early adoption in laptops, most notably in Fujitsu’s Lifebooks. Akustica’s digital microphones have tremendous advantages over traditional ECM microphones, most notably EMI immunity, surface mountability, smaller size and better and far more consistent acoustic performance from part to part, which enables multiple microphone applications for noise cancellation and directionality. Multiple mic applications in the PC world will become increasingly common given Microsoft’s new audio stack in Vista, which supports multi-mic array audio input, enabling directionality and noise-reduction for audio input, something increasingly important for laptops in the VOIP/Skype era. And Akustica is now benefiting from their early collaboration with Microsoft and anticipates additional PC vendors will announce laptop designs that include one or more Akustica chips in the coming months.

Ken, Jim and the rest of the Akustica team, congrats!

Technorati Tags: Akustica, Audio, MEMS