Gushlak.com

By Myron Gushlak
There's a fascinating article in the Economist this month about the changing face of the diamond industry. Apparently the DeBeers diamond cartel has loosened its grip on the industry to allow competition (aka appease European regulators). DeBeers has also pledged to stop buying "blood diamonds" and has invested heavily in chains of jewelry stores and in new exploration in Canada -- so much for my long held belief that our greatest export was really great bacon!

DeBeers is also facing competition from man-made diamonds. I'm not sure why these have not caught on yet. I've heard that they are indistinguishable from normal diamonds other than that they have no flaws and only come in yellow.

The article can be found at:

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8743058

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 3:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever since I started reading

The Singularity is Near

By Myron Gushlak

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Family night. We rented Superman Returns and I have to say that I just wasn't crazy about it. The actor is a dead-ringer for Christopher Reeve and seemed to go out of his way to adopt Reeve's mannerisms and vocal tone which I think was a mistake because those old Superman moves are painfully dated and almost unbearable to watch. Plus, why try and out-do Reeves? Why not reinvent and do something new with the role?

I should qualify this pseudo-review by admitting that Superman has never been my favorite hero. The whole father sending the son to earth to help us poor stupid earthlings plot line is just too didactic. And as a hero Superman is lacking any real personality. With Batman you’ve got gadgets and training and commitment and the internal conflict of hero vs. vigilante. Spiderman has this too to a lesser extent. With Superman you’ve got what . . . a guy who grew up in a corn field and flies around in tights? The guy is bulletproof, heat resistant, can fly and has no sense of humor. His day job is also weak and Jimmy Olsen is annoying. I think this franchise needs to be radically reinvented or scrapped entirely. My kids were bored.

By Myron Gushlak

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are looking to take on a big big book, I recommend The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a well-regarded futurist who writes for the New York Times, Wired and others and also has a storied career as a technologist.

The premise of the book is that biotechnology and health sciences in general are currently where computers were in the 60's. This means that in the next 30-40 years there will be an exponential growth in the number of treatments and cures and that if you can live another 30 years than you should probably live to be 110-120 years old! Even more interesting is the bigger picture effects that this will have on economies and the social landscape. The rub for Kurzweil is that he is in his fifties and he is worried about missing the boat and dying from something that will be cured within a year or two of his death.

The book provides a lot of compelling evidence -- ranging from the dramatic drop in computing costs that will make it less expensive than ever before to test drugs -- to the sequencing of the DNA and the treatments that could arise from targeted drugs.

I will admit something friends, reading this book made me start taking a multi-vitamin.

By Myron Gushlak

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't have time to see a lot of movies and when I do I tend to see science fiction or family fare. I think the last movie I wrote about was Eragon -- which apparently nobody liked except for me. I blogged about it -- my summary: Give me a break people, it's a movie about a giant fire breathing dragon. Just relax and enjoy and stop taking things so seriously!

I was flying recently and I had the choice between

Garfield 2: A Tale of Two Kitties

The Last King of Scotland.

By Myron Gushlak

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 7:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yelp.com is a site I use when visiting the U.S. to find restaurants, stores and other services. It pretty much covers all the bases. I first heard about it when I was telling a friend in New York that I needed to find a dentist. She said

Just yelp it

Just yelp it.

Basically you just select the City you want to search in and what you are looking for and user-generated reviews appear. I prefer these types of reviews to Zagat guides that don't cover things intangibles like the vibe of a place, and that only look at a few menu items. My friend Dave found a veterinarian for his dog on yelp. Good stuff. Though I have to say that I am steadfastly against inventing verbs out of website names. Yelp should not be added to the dictionary people.

By Myron Gushlak

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve had my eye on a few high-definition video cameras for a while. I finally made the jump this weekend and picked up a Canon HV10. There are a lot of cameras out there but I think this one is the best (until xmas when a better one comes out of course). It's as small as a HI-8 but the video is incredibly sharp and the colors have terrific contrast. It also has a very fast optical zoom and an internal stabilization feature that comes in handy because I never feel like schlepping a tri-pod around. Finally, it is a good all-in-one device because it shoots 3 mega-pixel stills that are saved on a separate SD card. This is a key feature for me because I don't like traveling with a suitcase filled with power adapters.

Did I mention that the Canon was $1200 USD and change? I love this toy friends!!!

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of the time I write about information based websites. Gizmodo, Panbo and Cribcandy provide me with countless hours of distraction during tedious and boring times.

Once in a while though I come across a web service that is truly compelling and makes me think,

Wow, these guys are really on to something

Whenever you want to make a reservation you log-in and select from a list of restaurants or search by cuisine or location or price based on the time you want to eat and the size of your party. Once you have selected where you want to eat the available seating times are displayed and you can just choose what you want. Opentable will even send an email confirmation to all of the people in your party with directions to the restaurant. Need to change or cancel the reservation? No problem. Just log-in and do it. The hostess will receive a notification of your change. Best of all, the more you use the service, the more points you earn towards dining gift certificates. If this company is ever taken public I'm going to buy buy buy!
By Myron Gushlak

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you have spoken to me in the last year than you have undoubtedly heard me complain about the state of smart phones. I have tried them all. The Treo is the worst -- I had three of them break in six months, maybe that’s why they are called Treo -- and the HTC TyTN is a big brick of a phone with limited battery life, a worthless Microsoft operating system, and the least intuitive design of any device to be called

smart

After much trial and ever more error I finally found the phone of my dreams: The Blackberry Pearl. It's small, sleek, and most importantly it just WORKS people. I had it up and running in 10 minutes and it has never crashed. The only downside is the keyboard -- it has two letters on each button and uses an algorithm to determines which letter you are trying to type. It is very good, but it took me a few days to adjust and trust this feature.

The best part about this story is that the Pearl was only $200. 75% less than the HTC TyTN which I’m going to sell on Ebay.

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I was at a party the other day and somebody accidentally knocked over a candle. Luckily the candle was on a table so the house did not burn down but a LOT of wax spilled onto a very nice carpet.

When that wax hit that carpet there was a collective Oh Sh #! because the carpet had a heavy pile. Fortunately there was a woman there named Joy who jumped in to save the day. Without further ado I present to you her technique for getting wax out of carpet (because you never know when this might happen to you):

Step 1: Place butchers paper on the wax - shiny side up
Step 2: Cover the butchers paper with a paper bag -- standard grocery store brown bag will work
Step 3: Press the bag with a hot iron and the wax will lift right off

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 6:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

http://www.cargolaw.com/2007nightmare_msc.napoli.html

This is one of the best posts on Cargolaw.com and it documents an ongoing operation to salvage a ship that ran into some extremely rough weather in the English Channel earlier this month.

The photos are incredible – including actual shots of people looting BMW motorcycles that were in cargo containers that fell into the sea and were washed ashore. Imagine the force it takes to wash a container weighing several tons onto dry land!

Having lived through a few Hurricanes in the Caymans and having paid the price for the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to my home I feel for this shipping company. As far as the looting goes; it’s tempting but come on people, it's just wrong. And, if you don’t have a moral issue with stealing, at least be smart enough to not do it in front of somebody holding a camera and taking pictures!

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Check out http://www.cargolaw.com/2006nightmare_tradewinds.html and scroll down to the bottom to see what happens when winds blow a plane back onto the ground and crack it in half. Yikes. I'm flying tomorrow and did not need to see that.

I also like http://www.cargolaw.com/2006nightmare_mv.alvastar.html this Captain just rams a giant cargo ship into the side of a mountain. No storm caused this and it happened during the day! You could spend hours on this site (I do all the time) just reading about maritime disasters. I shouldn't give this Captain such a hard time. For all I know piloting a container ship is even more difficult than parallel parking a semi-truck. Then again, it's a mountain folks. A frigging mountain!

Posted by Myron Gushlak at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)