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First day of biking!
You'll notice from these photos lots and lots of trees!
Distance: 66 miles
Well I wasn't ready for this one - my laptop's power supply just exploded. A small crackle, a poof of smoke, and the smell of burnt electronics. And so it is now impossible for me to charge the laptop.
So I have two hours of power for the next week I'm here in Israel. Yikes!
I can use other people's machines to sort the photos from the last few days, but i might not be able to upload new photos until I get back to Virginia on the 21st.
Anybody in Israel have a charge cable for an old Compaq Armada M700? 
Today is the second day of riding and I'm tired but not sore, partly thanks to the free massages today!
I have to go to bed now so I won't have time to upload and sort the photos but I should tomorrow. I've even been tracking the ride with GPS using my phone and some cool software so you'll be able to see satellite images of our route.
Here's a preview photo of my dad and me, more to come soon!
Also, we are still accepting donations!
Donate here: http://arava.kintera.org/2006israelride/dylangreene
$1 or $100, every bit helps!
Together the riders have raised almost $500,000 already!
(More about IsraelRide)
Last day before the ride starts!
The first thing we did today was set our bikes up. Most people brought their bikes in shipping containers on the plane. I have a pretty crappy bike back at home so I opted to use one of their bikes - a brand new Fuji road bike.
After setting our bikes up and a picnic lunch we got a tour of the Old City again. You might recognize a few views from our first day in Jerusalem we entered a different gate and saw a few different things.
Tommorrow we'll be waking up at 4:45 to begin our jouney!
More photos!
Today we went to Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust museum and memorial.
We also went to the Jerusalem Mall, a mall very similar to any in the US. A perfect place to pick up some extra socks and t-shirts I neglected to pack.
Just two more days until we begin our 300 mile ride!
By the way - I am still accepting donations! Donations go to two institutes that promote peace and better treatment and awareness of the environment in the middle east. I've raised over $3000 so far and I'd like to try to get to $4000 by the end of the ride next week.
Donate Here!
All credit cards accepted, tax deductible, etc etc.
Photos from Day 1 are here!
- 10 hour flight from Newark, NJ to Tel Aviv, Israel. I caught up on Lost and started watching V for Vendetta.
- Arrive at our hotel - Mount Zion Hotel, a converted Turkish mansion.
- Explore the Old City - the ancient part of Jerusalem.
- Walk around Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda street, and other surrounding areas.
In preparation for IsraelRide next week my dad and I biked 75 miles on Saturday. It took us 8 hours, including some snack breaks and a stop for lunch. It was the longest he and I have ever rode in one day.
The weather was nice again on Monday, so I did it again - all 75 miles, but as fast as possible. I did it in just six hours. The best part is that I'm not even sore today. I think I'm ready for the IsraelRide, which totals about 300 miles over five days of riding.
The WO&D Trail - not too crowded on a Monday.
Speaking of the IsraelRide - which starts a week from today - it's not too late to donate. I've reached my goal of $3000, but I'd like to raise even more. It's a simple form, they accept all credit cards, 100% goes to the organizations I'm raising money for, and they'll send you a receipt so you can deduct your donation on your taxes next year.
Donate here:
http://arava.kintera.org/2006israelride/dylangreene
If everyone who reads my blog today gives just $10 I'd raise an additional $30,000!
I'm in New York till Wednesday at 7.
Anybody want to meet for an early dinner Wednesday, say 5pm?
On May 9th, 2006, my father and I will be joining 120 other amateur cyclists for a 300 mile 7-day bike ride across Israel.
My father and I have been training for the last 12 months. Before we learned about this neither of us had touched our bikes in years. We think we're ready for a trip like you see in the photo here.
Before I can go I need to reach my fundraising goal of $3000. Can you help? If I reach my goal by April 15th then I get first choice of bikes!
Donate here: http://arava.kintera.org/2006israelride/dylangreene
(Tax deductible - they'll mail you the receipt for your records.)
More about IsraelRide 2006.
Donations are for The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Hazon to support environmental studies and environmental protection in Israel and peaceful coexistence in the Middle East, solidarity & partnership between America and Israel.
I'll be posting photos of this journey here on my blog. Thank you to everyone who has donated!
Part 1 - Community and Contacts
One of the important concepts of Web 2.0 is community. The problem is that there is no method to integrate all of the Web 2.0 communities we now belong to.
When I meet somebody I want to keep in contact with I need to add their contact info to most of the these systems:
- Outlook Contacts for email.
- MSN Instant Messenger for IM.
- GoogleTalk if they don't MSN IM.
- Skype if they don't use MSN or Gtalk (AIM is for kids!).
- LinkedIn for business contacts.
- Cell phone for calling on the go and knowing who's calling me.
- MySpace if I want to pretend to be hip.
- XBOX Live Friends List if the person is a gamer.
- Subscribe to their blog if they have a blog worth subscribing to.
- And if I wanted to do this right... add this person as a friend on TagWorld, Flappr, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Consumating, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Tagworld, and a dozen others I'm forgetting or leaving off on purpose...
Web 2.0 was supposed to make my life better! Now I spend more time managing my friends and contacts than talking to them. Half the people in my Web 2.0 communities I no longer remember who they are or why I added them. The problem is that we have too many collections of contacts to manage and they communities are not working together.
The Web 3.0 Fix:
One community system to rule them all!
I envision a decentralized contact storage network for storing our contacts. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and small companies would all offer this as a free service. Use the one you trust the most, with the best UI, or run your own service, it doesn't matter.
For each contact we describe how we know that person [friend, co-worker, family, customer, school, common interests, met at conference, etc] and who can see them [just friends, just co-workers, everyone, nobody, etc].
You choose which services can see your contacts, and what types of contacts they can see. Maybe you don't want the people you MySpace just because they had a nice photo listed as business contacts on LinkedIn.
Some cool benefits:
- One place to add and store our contacts.
- When we get an email from somebody we don't recognize, our email programs will inform us how we know that person using information from LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of our others services.
- When joining a new service, instantly add contacts instead of manually finding them again.
- Services without communities could use this to add community features without more work for the users. For example, Amazon could show recommended books based on what your friends are buying.
Who is building this?
As far as I know, nobody is. If you know otherwise, let me know!
With all of the hype behind Web 2.0, my hope that people aren't thinking this is the answer, the end game, the best that we can do. This part one of a six-part series. I will describe problems with Web 2.0 and how they can be fixed. Look forward to radical new ideas, insider interviews, and heavy usage of bulleted lists.
- dylan
A friend IM'ed me this:
would you buy this book?
http://www.bbrandonbarker.com/
Heck yeah! I have no idea what the book is about, but in my opinion the best reason to buy a book (vs library) is for how it looks on the bookshelf. With art like this, it should make a fine addition to even the most particular of literary collections.
Click for the full image.
No Amazon link yet - according to the author it won't be out until this summer.
The screenshot to the right is from a brand new Lenovo N100 laptop (formally IBM) .
Why do hardware manufactures ship machines with such abuse of the Start Menu?
"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- New Yorker, 1943
I hope Windows Vista gets a major overhaul in this area, and not just a way to search this mess. Companies should be disciplined for littering our Start Menus like this.
Look - a sexy consumer device that doesn't try to look like Razr or iPod. Is boxy the next new thing?
Now only if they'd the silly trend of black-and-silver trend almost all cell phones and laptops have today. Black-and-silver has become the fake-woodgrain of the '00's.
The feature list is mighty impressive too. I don't know if this will ever come out in the US.
Wondering what Microsoft is showing off at Mix 06 in Vegas this week?
Thanks to a friend at Microsoft you can watch it live:
Watch Mix '06 Video Stream (Windows Media)
Not seeing anything? Check the schedule for the next session.
My friend strongly recommend tuning in at around 11:30 PST (2:30 EST) for an unexpected and very cool demonstration from Yahoo.
If you miss the live video stream then check out the daily re-caps from the Mix 06 blog.
Who says all the cool new web stuff has to happen in the San Francisco area? Tomorrow evening I'll be attending DC 2.0, our own local unconference on the next generation web.
Some local companies that will be represented:
Time and place:
Mar. 15, 2006
7 to 10 PMMintz Levin
12010 Sunset Hills Rd
Reston, Virginia 20190
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