Every blog has to begin somewhere...

Welcome to Cobb's Blog, the blog, at cobbsblog.com, the site.

This blog uses WordPress and at some point it will incorporate most of my other blogs, in one common blog space, with content distinguished by categories.

The look and feel (theme) will also be changing, as soon as I have chosen something suitable and figured out how to install it.

I hope you find it worth dropping by from time to time.

When Law and Politics Don't Mix: Weasel words from Gonzales

Did anyone else see Attorney General Gonzales saying to CNN, in an attempt to brush aside questions about abuse of FBI security letters, that the letters had been around "long before I became AG" ? Then shortly thereafter I see in the Denver Post that use of national security letters has grown exponentially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "In 2005 alone, the audit found, the FBI issued more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests for information." Here's more about what these letters are:

The letters enable an FBI field office to compel the release of private information without the authority of a grand jury or judge.

The USA Patriot Act, enacted after the 2001 attacks, eliminated the requirement that the FBI show "specific and articulable" reasons to believe that the records it demands belong to a foreign intelligence agent or terrorist.

That law, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed national security letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

Now the bureau needs only to certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

Amid some pretty credible claims that these letters are being abused under Gonzales he has the nerve to say they were around long before his watch. A classic case of weasel words.

Clock Update

Finally getting over that whole DST thing with the US/EU offset. Here's a nice applet that lets you set a bunch of clocks for reference based on a bunch of world city listings. And My Google has a nice clock for tracking a couple of time zones at once.

Oh, and here is how you set the clock on my JVC KD-G720 car stereo. Took me ages to find this.

Free to the World: Cobb's $30 heart sound monitor

Okay, here's a nice way to combine some simple tech items to get high value results at a low cost.

The Challenge: Doctors need a way to listen to the heart beat of patients who are experiencing episodes of irregular heart beat. Past technology has focused on recording heart beat for extended periods of time hoping to catch the episode, useful for some things, but not this intermittent, periodic problem. Plus they are costly and inconvenient to use.

The Solution: Provide patients with a small and convenient device that records heart beat on demand in a format that is easy to transmit to the doctor.

Background: A few years ago my heart started beating funny, not all the time, just sometimes. No, let me re-phrase that: A few years ago, this friend I have, his heart started to beat funny (you never know when the insurance companies will start spidering blogs for evidence of health conditions that could justify even higher premiums).

This friend went to a cardiologist whose nurse wired him [my friend] into a harness that listened to his heart and was supposed to fit under his shirt (like the kind of 'wire' you might see in a crime caper comedy). After 24 uncomfortable hours my friend reported back and a reading was taken from the listening device. But not much showed up and my friend was finding it hard to time his visits to the doctor with the odd heart beat.

So I invented a cheap portable patient-operated heart sound reporting system. I bought a $30 Wombsong foetal monitor at Walmart, the kind you use to listen to your baby before it is born. Then I connected an audio recorder via the monitor's headphone output socket.

When my friend felt his heart beating 'funny' he could lay this thing on his chest and record the sound. This setup could record the sound digitally, with an iPod, a Treo, or any number of digital recorders, so this friend could then, theoretically, email the file to his cardiologist (if his cardiologist would only read his email).

In Practice: It worked like this. We recorded an episode on a pocket tape recorder then transferred that to the computer, reduced the background noise with Gold Wave (a terrific shareware audio editor) and saved it as an mp3. At his next visit with his cardiologist my friend pulled out his Treo and played the recording to a very impressed doctor. Much medical enlightenment was gained.

Of course, he could also have blogged the recording like this (click arrow to play, or click the song title to play in your default player):

Heartbeat recorded on $30 device

Now, after that fleeting moment in which I dreamed of a multi-million dollar IPO of Cobb's Cool Cardio Kit [NASDAQ: CCCK] the right thing to do reared its beautiful head: share this with the world for free. Now anyone with $30 and a little bit of tech-savvy (or a friend thus endowed) can take the sound of their heart to the doctor. Hopefully some lives can be saved, as well as a lot of money better spent on other things.

But woe betide anyone who seeks to cash in on this invention, with the possible exception of the people who already make the foetal monitors and can easily re-purpose them for this (add the instructions for recording to an iPod or rework design to include an mp3 recorder and/or USB connection and/or removable flash storage).

Tech Notes:

Recording--direct to digital makes a lot of sense but a lot of digital recorders don't record to mp3 (I have used Sony and Panasonic devices that record in their own formats) and this means you often have to do some sort of conversion so that the file is in a format accessible to the doctor or the playback device. Dumping the recording to a PC/Mac app like GoldWave makes conversion easy and allows clean-up. GoldWave has this great filter that lets you select a 'silent' section and filter based on that, in other words, a moment of space between explicit sounds will show the background noise and that can be filtered out in one step. , or play the sound back from the recording device, which is easy enough to do with an iPod or Treo).

Foetal monitor--is used for the recording because it is already designed to make internal body sounds audible. There is no great rick to this, just a properly tuned pickup at the narrow end of a cone-shaped, sound-focusing opening on the bottom surface of the unit that lays on the patient's body (over the heart when used in this invention). I used a WombSong, so named because it also allows you to play music to your unborn child (a scary notion given the musical tastes of some parents). These are now available for quite a bit less than $30 and since you can get a cheapr recorder for about $10, you can still make the whole thing for around $30.

Note that this is NOT your fancy "medical quality" foetal monitoring unit. It does not need to be. Check the recording above and you will hear that this is exactly what the cardiologist needed to hear, and would probably not have heard if "my friend" had not recorded it.

Did You Survive DST? The difference in US/EU time difference is the one to watch

Hopefully everyone's technology handled DST okay last night. I got a last minute reminder to update my Treo 650 which was handled very smoothly.

I already blogged the US/EU disconnect elsewhere, but it is worth repeating here, especially for people working trans-Atlantic, which I happen to be at the moment.

I am working on a security project for a fairly large UK company, together with someone from California, as part of a team based in London. The "DST offset" makes figuring flight times and setting up conference calls tricky.

This particular project will be over before the Autumn, but check out the time lag that happens in October of this year. New York goes six hours behind London, and of course that puts LA a full nine hours behind...which is darned inconvenient. When you have a London office meeting at 4PM and that is 7AM for LA, some folks are going to be sleepy from a hard day's work and others will be dozy from a hard day's night.

So, has anyone calculated the supposed energy savings of this whole fiasco, versus the technology upgrade costs?

Still Confused About US v. EU DST? Maybe this will help you

I made a small chart to help me with this problem of the time change changes between the US and the EU. I am working on a project for a British company right now and traveling between the US and the UK so I wanted a quick way to check when the time in London will be 4 versus 5 hours difference.

I printed it out small enough to fit in my wallet. Don't know if this makes me sound memory-deficient, but I am finding it really hard to keep track of this one.

I am certainly not looking forward to the week in the Fall where London will be 6 hours different. Or next Spring when the shift will last for three weeks.

At least I got all my hardware upgrades to handle the switch.

Hot Week for Art Events: Starring friends of mine!

Wow! It's not often that two seriously hot art events featuring personal friends go down in the same week. But that's what's happening this week, and so here they are:

The Photon Ballet, Tuesday, March 13th, Hollywood, California. Featuring numerous pioneering digital artists including our good friends Michael Masucci and Kate Johnson of EZTV Media. In fact, EZTV is co-producing the event with Microsoft and Maxxon. This promises to be an awesome event to mark the 25th Anniversary of the LA branch of SIGGRAPH. Time and ticket info is here.

TELOORIKA: Thursday, March 15, the Embassy of Argentina in Washington, DC cordially invites you to the first art show to be hold simultaneously at the Embassy and in the virtual metaverse Second Life, created by our good friend Socorro Villa. For our Spanish readers, check out this very interesting discussion of the show's origins. Soco is a wonderful and uplifting artist (not surprising since she is also a wonderful and uplifting person).

Enjoy!

A Classic Hatteras For Sale: Sad but true

That day has finally come, the one where the boat owners realize they just don't have the time (or energy) to enjoy their boat, in this case a gorgeous 36 foot Hatteras convertible, built by AMF in 1983 and as solid a motor yacht as you could ever want to sail on, sleep on, fish from, cruise in.

Sadly my wife's health just isn't what it used to be and, since she is the captain of the boat and I am just the lowly deck hand, the boat has got to go. You will find some nice pics at a web site I just created: hatterasforsale.net and a mirror at hatterasyachts.net. The sites are identical and have links to the broker handling the sale, A1A Yacht Brokers of St. Augustine. the boat is moored at the fun and funky Oyster Creek Marina. Asking price is $79,900.

Cool New Car Ideas Part Two: Tilt and glide

I recently mentioned a Yahoo group devited to titling cars in the Gyro Car blog. Here are two examples. The first is Carver. This vehicle--shown from the rear in the shot on the left--has a power unit with two wheels at the rear plus a body for driver and one passenger. The front 'people module' has one wheel and is linked to the drive unit in a way that allows it to lean in corners.

This design offers great aerodynamic potential and an amazing driving experience if the cool videos on the web site are anything to go by. So, you get the design possibilities of a three wheeler with a lot less chance of tipping over.

Second up in this post is BMW's Clever, which looks a lot like the Carver. I'm not implying anything by this, and BMW has plenty of cred in the alternative [and less than 4 wheels] vehicle space, notably with the C1. It would seem that something both designs have in common is the ability to alter the power source/drive train fairly easily. In other words, the vehicle consists of two main parts: the driver/passenger module and the drive unit. These are connected by the tilting mechanism. As alternative fuels and more efficient motors come online, it would seem that this design is well-placed to implement them quickly.

What is not entirely clear from either the Carver or Clever sites is how you would go about buying one of these vehicles. I realize that there are huge hurdles between a working prototype and a street legal vehicle. Crash testing and emissions being the two big ones I would think. Does anyone know if there is a category of road vehicle equivalent to the experimental aircraft? That would seem to make sense at a time like this, when rapid improvement and innovation in vehicle design and efficiency could reap huge dividends for the environment and global politics, not to mention driving fun.

The last item for this post, the Loremo, looks more conventional, but is actually quite radical. It has four wheels, but is very light in weight. Together with excellent aerodynamics this yields over 100 miles per US gallon. The light weight is achieved with space age materials and a design that features no side doors. Apparently this results in much greater cabin strength at lower weight.

The driver and front passenger step into the car from the front. The entire dashboard and steering wheel lift up. The rear passengers enter at the rear through a large hatch-back. Check out the web site for more photos.

Again, not clear when you will be able to buy one, but if I was an oil-dependent sheik, I'd be worried that designs like these are well-advanced and threatening to cut gasoline consumption as they become street legal.

Have Banks Screwed the Pouch in the Affordable (Sub-Prime) Housing Market?

Of course, I am using "screw the pouch" in the technical sense of "really made a rotten mess of." Here's the Washington Post waving a warning flag a few days ago:

Is a blowout taking shape in the impaired-credit mortgage market? Could lax underwriting standards during the housing boom years--no verification of applicants' incomes or assets, low or no down payments, and big mortgages to people already saddled with heavy consumer debt--finally be coming home to roost? Post article.

I think the answer is going to be yes. And who will pay the price? The people who need the banks the most right now, people who are trying to buy an affordable place to live before prices take another up-tick. Already we are seeing the negative impact on people's lives (in this case "we" is me and my construction business partner, master builder Don Davino). And here's what we see: People come and look at the homes we are selling (you can look here).

Quite a lot of these people like the houses and ask the real estate agent what kind of income they will need to pay the mortgage. Many figure out they can afford it and head to the bank. And the bank would love to help BUT, oh dear, there is now huge pressure on banks to avoid loans with anything but perfect credentials. So people who can afford a relatively small mortgage--and have a huge incentive to keep current with their payments--can't get one because they don't have unblemished credit.

Come on! Who does? Particularly in a sector of the market where buyers often lack credit history altogether or are emerging from a period of financial strain. So, because some banks screwed up in their greed for business, consumers are penalized. And the economy, which could use an up-tick in home sales, suffers too.

You might think "negative impact on people's lives" is a bit over-dramatic. I don't. Renting is still more expensive than buying and buying is a great way for families to cement their long-term financial security. If the next rising tide in property prices does not raise everyone's fortunes, including those suffering from the "sub-prime pouch screwing fallout," potentially dangerous gaps in social equity will continue to widen.