Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Tankless Water Heaters via Microwave

When my water heater inevitably breaks, I'll likely be replacing it with a tankless model. There's a been quite a bit of discussion about the technology installation costs, savings in energy expenses, and required permits and construction.

But today I came across some interesting news. Apparently a company named Pulsar Advanced Technologies has developed a microwave tankless hot water device:

Pulsar Advanced Technologies has announced will next week launch its lead product, the Vulcanus MK4, a water heater USING microwave technology to heat water on demand.

Interesting. I haven't found any photos of the device but it sounds like it's similar in size to the other tankless hot water supplies I've heard about.

Powered by electricity and unaffected by the volatile gas markets, the Vulcanus MK4 can heat water from 35 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds and can source multiple applications at once: showers, dishwasher, sink usages and more. The Vulcanus MK4 is the size of a stereo speaker with a sleek modern look, making it ideal for condos and apartments, while powerful enough to serve the needs of any size family.

I wonder how it'll compare in power consumption and performance to the more traditional tankless models?

Reporting from Deep Inside the Bubble: Geek Entertainment TV Cracks Me Up

I'm not sure if it's the amusing text overlays in the video, the fact that it's my friend Irina, or that the folks being interviewed know not to take it 100% seriously. But Geek Entertainment TV (GETV) really amuses me.

Geek Entertainment TV is an emerging global media empire, reporting from deep inside the bubble as it re-inflates. GETV covers buzzword compliant topics such as web 2.0, tagging, AJAX, social software and the bubble juice known as VCs. We like robots, so you'll hear about that too.

Irina takes her microphone and puts some of the folks "deep inside the bubble" on camera to find out what's going on. The results are both funny and informative. She once commented that it's a like a Silicon Valley version of The Colbert Report.

The best part is that Geek Entertainment TV is the result of just two people: Irina and Eddie (he handles the video and post-processing work, etc).

Give it a watch.

She's threatened to interview me in December. I can't wait. :-)

Cheap On-Line Storage Coming Soon

At the beginning of this year, I wrote Where will you store your data in which I was thinking about the move to on-line storage. With things like Flickr, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, all offering lots of disk space and the increasing availability of cheap, fast, reliable Internet access it only made sense.

I was reading about Companies I'd like to Profile (but don't exist) and noticed that the #1 idea on the list is Better and Cheaper Online File Storage.

We need a good product. Something as easy to use as the Flickr uploader on the client side, and easy web access. These tools need to go a generation or two beyond what xdrive is offering.

Features I’d like to see: drag and drop file adding and removing, an rss feed for my files, tagging of every file for easy search later, easy sharing, and the ability to publish files to the web with permanent URLs. And off location backups in case your building burns down.

I have absolutely no doubt that we'll see that product (or one like it) emerge in the next 12-18 months. The pieces are all coming together and the economics keep getting better.

The other stuff on that list is good too.

It's no coincidence that I'm currently listening to Brewster Kahle on IT Conversations talking about Universal Access to All Knowledge.

Listen to it if you get a chance.

Joyce is Getting MyWeb 2.0

I was reading Joyce's comments on MyWeb 2.0 last night and realized that I needed to write something about it, but I wasn't sure what. So I waited a bit.

Then it struck me a few minutes ago.

I think she understands MyWeb 2.0 more than some of the people who created the product. She's able to describe, in her own terms, exactly what MyWeb 2.0 is useful for and continues on to explain her problem with it:

One of the strangest things about MyWeb, and possibly the reason it hasn't caught the imagination yet, is that the three functions I mention above -- personal server-side bookmarking, social network-filtered linkstream, and human-powered search engine -- use what amounts to three different UIs, two of which are unattractive and/or hard to use.

She put her finger on something that's been bugging me for a while now, but I could never figure it out.

401k Asset Allocation Changes for 2006

Last night I spent some time looking at my 401k account to decide if I wanted to make any changes for the upcoming year. I have a 401k account managed by Vanguard and for the last few years, I've been contributing some money from each paycheck.

In recent years that money has been unevenly split between two of their funds:

• T. Rowe Price Science & Technology
• Vanguard LifeStrategy Growth Fund

However, in looking over recent performance data, I was less than impressed with the T. Rowe Price fund:

The LifeStrategy fund, however, has been doing reasonably well.

So looking through the options I've found a few others that look promising. The current leader is the William Blair International Growth fund.

It's the only internaional stock fund available in my plan, and given my interest in diversifying into foreign markets, I'm tempted to shift a chunk of my new investment dollars (those which will be contributed in 2006) into that fund rather than the T. Rowe Price fund.

However, I'm still poking around and checking out other funds. There are a total of 13 funds available in our plan, so I've got a few more to check out.

Maule Flight to Petaluma

While I've spent a fair amount of time in airplanes recently, it's been quite a ways away from the controls. But today I had the chance to do a bit of flying with Mark, one of my co-workers.

Mark is a partner in a 1999 manufactured Maule (N4140P) that lives at the Palo Alto Airport. We've been talking off an on about trading rides (me getting a ride in his Maule and giving him a ride in a glider) for months now. So I met him at PAO on this cloudless morning so we could do a bit of flying.

Mark put me to work changing out the light on the left wing while he uncovered the plane and got it ready to fly. Before long, we were in the plane and I got a chance to check out the instrument panel. It's quite a bit more complicated that the Citabrias I'm used to flying, but the basics are the same anywhere.

We taxied out to the run-up area, performed the pre-takeoff checks, got a takeoff clearance, and were airborne. The plan was to fly up the peninsula, get permission to fly through San Francisco's Class B airspace, past the Golden Gate Bridge, and on to Petaluma.

I'm not accustomed to flying in the sort of crowded airspace we have in the Bay Area, so it was interesting to see how many frequency changes were necessary to accomplish this. I may have lost track, but it went something like this:

• Palo Alto Ground
• Palo Alto Tower
• San Carlos
• San Francisco
• Norcal
• Petaluma CTAF

Luckily, it's just a matter of doing what they tell you to do.

Basically, once we got airborne we headed toward San Carlos. They directed us to continue heading north but stay west of Highway 101. They eventually handed us off to San Francisco.

The folks at SFO cleared us to enter their airspace and we got to fly by the airport at a fairly close distance and get some nice views of the runway and the terminals.

Once we passed SFO, it was on toward the actual city of San Francisco (passing over South San Francisco, of course). We stayed well west of downtown and were instructed to fly to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge. The controller must have known that I had a camera and was in the right seat.

After we flew past the Sausalito VOR, Mark gave me the plane and said "get us to Petaluma." Given the onboard GPS, that wasn't terribly difficult, but it gave me a chance to feel how the Maule responds to various control inputs. I remembered being impressed on the ground at how smoothly the engine ran. The controls were similarly smooth. I especially liked the fine grained control provided by the elevator trim and the throttle.

I took us into the traffic pattern and Mark took the plane back on final to get us on the ground. We taxied off to the transient parking area and got out to stretch our legs, visit the facilities, and check out the other planes.

Small airports are always fun to visit, because you never know what you're gonna see when you get there. Sometimes it's an incredibly clean and polished RV-6. Other times it's an old war bird or a Piper Cub.

After a few minutes on the ground, we saddled up again and flew back down the east side of the bay and back across the Palo Alto. I got to do a fair amount of the flying on the return trip. The tower was so busy when we arrived that we eventually gave up waiting for them to transfer us to the ground controllers. Instead Mark just called up the ground controllers to ask them if it was okay.

I'm continually amazed at how much flying (lots of training) gets done at that little airport with its single runway.

Anyway, it was good to be back in the air with some time at the controls on a beautiful Saturday (it was clear all day and in the low 70s). I'm hoping to get back on with my own training in the coming week. I haven't had a chance to mention it, but I soloed a few weeks back!

What a blast. :-)

Vegas at Night

Vegas at Night
Originally uploaded by jzawodn.

Wow, I have a lot of catching up to do. I'm sitting in Terminal A of the Las Vegas airport right now. They have free Wifi here, which is something I wish every airport took seriously. Surprisingly, they had 802.11b and 802.11g networks.

Anyway, I haven't posted for a few days 'cause I was pretty busy with WebmasterWorld PubCon and stuff. I'll wrap that up in a few days, but suffice it so say I had a good time, met lots of great people, had some good food & drink, and even saw a few sights along the way.

The picture you see in this post is one of several I shot tonight from the outdoor observation deck of the Stratosphere. The view up there is incredible. I need to go back again during daylight house sometime.

Heading to PubCon

I'm headed out to the annual WebmasterWorld "PubCon" in Las Vegas this morning. I'm participating in two panel discussions: the Blogging for Fun and Profit super session and RSS Feeds and Pod Casting.

I'll be there for the whole conference this time, so look me up if you're in the neighborhood. And don't forget the Yahoo! Party tonight at Cesar's. It should be a lot of fun again this year.

PR Spam to Bloggers Continues

Back in July when I half-jokingly suggested that we create An Email Blacklist of Technology PR Agencies, it stirred up quite a bit of discussion on my site and among PR bloggers. [See Bloglines citations and Technorati links.]

Today a message arrived at the search-blog-admin@yahoo-inc.com address (the feedback address we publish on the Yahoo! Search blog) which started off like this:

Hi News,

As you may know, AOL today announced a trial for the new "AOL Hi-Q" high quality video format, allowing broadband users to access to video on demand features to watch online movie trailers, music videos and soon a selection of hundreds of classic TV titles from the Warner Bros collection. Kontiki, the leader in legal, secure peer-to-peer networking, is providing AOL with its Kontiki 5.0 grid delivery networking solution that enables the distribution of DVD-quality videos to consumers more quickly and efficiently.

It went on to include more text as well as a full copy of the press release.

Now here's the best part. Krause Taylor Associates, the PR agency that's spamming bloggers, also does work for a high-profile blogging company: SixApart. (Check their client list) They really ought to know better!

I wonder if the folks at SixApart can help get the message across to their PR agency: DO NOT SPAM US.

Do they honestly think that a news release about AOL's Hi-Q video format is going to have any bearing on the Yahoo! Search blog?

I'm pretty certain we never opted into a mailing list using that address. Its sole purpose is a point of contact for people reporting problems about or asking questions related to our official blog. The mailto: link is even labeled "Email us your feedback and suggestions" not "click here for an address you can add to your PR spam database!"

Sigh.

What will it take?

Dried Fruit Recommendations?

I'm not entirely sure why, but I have recently sampled a few varieties of dried fruit. Most recently I grabbed a bag of dried pineapple and another of dried apples from Whole Foods. A company called
Made in Nature sells 3oz resealable packages of numerous dried fruits. There are no other ingredients in them, just dried fruit.

I was pleasantly surprised at the apples. They're tasty, light, and somewhat filling. I'll likely be buying those again sometime. That got me motivated enough to start sampling other fruits.

The pineapple, on the other hand, is a complete disaster. The texture is funky, there's virtually no flavor, and there's just not much to like. I'm a big fan of real pineapple, but all the sweetness and good flavor has been drained out of these.

Before I try any others, I'm curious to know what your favorite dried fruits are. I'm a big fan of peaches and am hoping they're more like the apples than the pineapple.

Are there others I should avoid? Some to put on my "must try" list?

The Simple Things

Sometimes the simple things amaze me (or amuse me) most. Here are a few I've come across on this trip:

• My Yahoo employee badge works in Taiwan. Yes, I can go half way around the world and my badge still unlocks the door so that I can work. Nice!
• I was having breakfast this morning at the hotel and ended up sitting next to a guy who grew up in Toledo, Ohio (so did I). He's been working at his current job for 8 years and lives less than 10 minutes from my parents. Apparently the farther I go from home, the greater the odds of running into someone "from home" seem to be.
• Bubble Tea. The guys in Taiwan got me some Bubble Tea at lunch today. Yum.
• MySQL 5.0 has a "blackhole" storage engine. It's basically an idea I suggested to them 2-3 years ago. I'm glad to see they've implemented it even though I no longer need it.
• The hotel left me another apple yesterday. It was yum. I love free apples when they're still crispy.

Now back to your regularly scheduled... Well, whatever you come here for.

Google is Building Yahoo 2.0

In his posting titled Reading the Google Tea Leaves, Tristan compares various product offerings from Google against those of the "big three" (AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) and concludes:

Google does innovate in some spaces but has largely innovated in order to gain entry in markets that already existed. As a rule of thumb, they've been very smart at breathing new innovations in those markets. However, their competitors are generally quick to notice and are catching up.

I've been giving a much shorter verbal version of his post for many months now. Typically when I'm interviewing someone or talking to random folks who are trying to figure out this industry we're in. They'll ask a question like "what do you think Google is doing?" or "where is Google really headed?"

My answer is this: Google is trying to build Yahoo 2.0.

It's really that simple.

If they press me for details on this theory (that only happens about half the time) I say that it's as if someone decided to re-invent more and more of Yahoo's popular services in random order, giving them a fresh user interface, less historical baggage, and usually one feature that really stands out (such as Gmail's storage limit or Google Talk's use of Jabber).

When Google Calendar and Google Finance (more in a future post) finally show their faces, I suspect they'll follow the same pattern. They'll look like someone sat down and thought "I'm starting with a clean slate, so how would I build a modern version of Yahoo! Calendar, with a newer and more interactive UI, one killer feature, and fixing the various things we've learned since Yahoo! Calendar launched many years ago?"

A few people have recently told me that I'm not "stirring the pot" enough on my blog anymore. I assume that by "stirring the pot" they mean "talking trash about Google", so maybe this counts? Or maybe it's not trashy enough?

Anyway, what's your theory? Is Tristan right? Am I right?

Will Microsoft try to build Yahoo 3.0 in 24-36 moths when their newfound "services" vision finally trickles down through the ranks?

Can You Afford the American Dream?

I can't!

As part of their "special edition" content, Yahoo! Finance is running a four part series from Forbes.com titled "Buying the American Dream." It looks at what it costs to live the American Dream in four regions of the U.S. (northeast, south, midwest, and west)

How they define the American Dream is interesting:

We're breaking down the costs of maintaining a nice, but not opulent, life--private schools for the kids, a large house in an upscale neighborhood, a weekend retreat, a pricey night out once a week, a couple of very nice cars.

We find more detail about that dream in the details of their methodology:

We tabulated the annual costs for a family of four with one child in a private college and one in eighth-grade and attending a private school. If your kids aren't college-age yet, this gives you a chance to plan ahead. Our fictional clan has two houses--one in a nice neighborhood and one in the country or at the beach.

And on the weekend house...

We also wanted our imaginary family to have a weekend retreat. So we chose a likely location for a country or beach house (Lake Tahoe, Jackson Hole). Some resort areas, like Idaho's Sun Valley, draw affluent visitors from around the country and the world, so vacation home prices were sometimes higher than the costs of primary homes in the state. We looked at last year's median sales price when we could obtain it, and used it to estimate what a nice second home might cost today. We used the same mortgage assumptions as we did for the primary home.

And on the cars to own...

Our family has two very upscale cars; a sporty BMW 325i sedan and a capacious Lexus RX 330 with front-wheel drive, both 2005 models.

And on eating out...

Since the Fictionals like to eat at nice restaurants, we figured out how much it would cost them to have dinner each week (including appetizer, main course, dessert, a bottle of nice--though not amazing--wine and tip) at a pricey local place. We then multiplied that figure by 52 to get the annual spending total.

And on vacations and travel...

This high-income family also likes to travel. We had them take three vacations each year: A week-long winter stay in Palm Beach for the parents; a romantic three-day jaunt to Paris in the spring; and a seven-day ski vacation for the whole family.

And on schooling the kids...

We figured our family would send its children to private colleges, which could be anywhere in the country. For this, we used the average annual cost for a resident student at an American college, including room, board and other expenses, according to the 2004 Annual Survey of Colleges performed by The College Board.

After reading through the section on the West, I've decided that I'm still pretty far from living the American Dream in California:

The costliest place in the region (dude!) turned out to be California. We have to hand it to West Coasters--it must be hard to be laid-back when you have to pull in nearly $370,000 per year after taxes to live well.

Doh!

I guess I should have bought A LOT more Google stock back when it was cheap, huh. My 30 or so shares have to go way, way up in value before I have any hope. Maybe if I had bought 30,000 shares...

Then again, I'm also short a wife and two teenage kids, so I guess there's a lot of time before I have to strike it rich!

Not that I'm really think this whole "american dream" has much to do with what I personally want out of life. But it's still fun to see what's required to live up to a stereotype.

Yahoo! China Home Page is All About Search

Holy Crap!

During one of today's cab rides, a Yahoo! Taiwan engineer was telling me about the re-launch yesterday of Yahoo! China's home page. He said it was search focused and uncluttered.

I decided to have a look for myself and was even more surprised than I expected to be (does that even make sense?). They have several tabs, just like Yahoo! US and Google do. But get this...

They have a MP3 as a full-blown tab!

Wow.

And it even lets you search by all the common formats too: mp3, wma, etc.

I'm not sure why this impresses me so much. AltaVista has had an MP3/Audio tab for quite some time. Maybe it's the terminology that gets me? Having "MP3" front and center feels like a throwback to the Napster days or something.

The Taiwan Trip So Far

Travel Pillow
Originally uploaded by jzawodn.

This trip has been unusual in many respects so far. Here I enumerate and comment on them for my own amusement and because I'm running on limited mental power—you know, that feeling when you've slept several hours in 20 minute bursts on a loud plane?

Anyway...

It's about 11:30am here, which is 7:30pm "yesterday" at home. That's weird enough.

• It all started when I arrived at SFO and went to the EVA Air counter to check in. They struggled for a long time and eventually told me that they couldn't find a record of me in the system. I presented the paperwork from the travel agency that handles Yahoo corporate travel, they hit a few more keys, and changed their story. The EVA system said I had a paper ticket. My printout said I had an electronic ticket. Grr.
• I called the "emergency" travel number for our agency to see if they could sort it out in the next hour or so, allowing me to actually go to Taiwan. They did a bit of checking and learned that I was, in fact, booked with a paper ticket. Nobody knew where that paper ticket was, so I had to buy a new one on the spot and the travel agency (since it was their screw-up) would likely eat the cost of the first one.
• Amusingly, the second ticket was $0.10 cheaper than the first. But it involved far more effort.
• With 30 minutes to spare I wandered into one of those airport stores that sells luggage locks, power converters, and other random crap. I decided that it was time to buy a nice travel pillow to ease the 14 hours of sitting in (and attempting to sleep in) a 747 seat. The verdict? The pillow represents the best $12 I will probably ever spend at a major airport.
• Once inside the plane, I realized that seat 37A offered a pretty good view of the left wing of the 747. But it was destined to be dark for the entire flight anyway. Worse, the ventilation system was the loudest I've ever experienced. And I left my noise canceling headphone at home due to lack of space. Doh!
• Luckily my little headphones did the job and my iPod Shuffle lasted the whole trip.
• The airline food was decent.
• The 747 was an older model, thus did not have individual LCD screens at each seat. My hope of spending half the flight watching movies and the second half sleeping (so that I could get on the "right" sleep schedule) didn't pan out.
• When they handed out the little form you must complete before they let you in the country, I noticed that it asked for a "Visa Type" and a "Visa Number." I then freaked out a bit because I don't have a Taiwan Visa and nobody told me to get one. I was about to get really pissed at the travel folks but then had a thought. I looked at the stamps from my last visit to Taiwan and realized that I didn't one back then 'cause it was a short trip (or something).
• My transportation from the airport to the hotel was flawless. Yay!
• The Sheraton Taipei is a nice place. They leave some fresh fruit in your room, so my lunch today consisted of an apple, banana, and one of the granola bars I brought along. It's like I never even left California!
• Yahoo has a deal that gets me free breakfast and free Internet access here. That kicks ass too.
• I'm tired but cannot sleep. I hope to solve that later this afternoon.
• It was foggy this morning (kinda like my head) and is now bright, warm, and overcast.

I'll try to say something more substantial tomorrow along with having more interesting pictures.