As you can see from the counter lifted from WordPress.com, the blogging site has passed 1,000,000 blogs today. Congratulations, it’s quite an accomplishment. Now the good folks at WordPress don’t need any acclamation from a piddly little web outpost like mine, but I wanted to mention this anyway.

I use WordPress for this, my personal blog, and as a content management and publishing system for my businesses. I think it’s the rarest of all software products: it does what it claims, it does it well, and it’s simple to use and extend. This is not to say the software is perfect, no software ever is. But it is darned good, one of the best I’ve ever used and I will continue to use and promote it because of its utility and performance. Great job WordPress team, we in your user community appreciate your hard work.

If you want to start a blog, use WordPress.com as a hosted solution or download and install the software for your web server at WordPress.org. You won’t regret it.

Attribution: Unknown

A friend forwarded this to me a few weeks ago in email, it cracked me up. Sometimes Apple-heads take themselves a little too seriously…poking a little fun at the product juggernaut is fun from time to time. That being said, I do love my Apple products. I sometimes get a little weary of the “cult of Apple” though…Kudos to the creator, whoever you may be.

Now let’s all sit back and gird our loins for the iPhone release next month. I predict growth of the cult! (Seriously, I do love my Apple computers and iPods and I want an iPhone in due course…)

The image above is from a great website called the History of Branding. It’s visual, click any logo and get detail on the brand’s history and other interesting facts.

For example, the “I Love NY” campaign was launched in 1977 and was inspired in part by the earlier “Virginia is for Lovers” slogan. It’s very effective – who hasn’t seen a white T-shirt with the logo printed on it? There are hundreds of these stories out there and many of them are very interesting. I think every entrepreneur hopes and dreams of having a logo and slogan with the pull that is commonly represented here.

Let’s hope that the emission spewing into the atmosphere is steam (in plant operations this is a common case.) It’s time to start retiring these older plants in favor of newer, cleaner technology. The demand for energy is growing quickly enough, we never seem to be able to install enough new capacity to be able to retire them.

I like what the photographer has done in this image, great contrast. Here’s another great power plant image which is HDR and taken of the St. Louis Union Power Plant.

In an earlier entry I wrote about the upcoming (now running) Maker Faire in San Mateo. Yesterday, my daughter and I had the chance to visit and had a great time. There were sections on crafts, robotics, machine shop, electronics, aliens/occult, vehicles, disgusting spectacles, and all sorts of events (my favorite was the power tool drag races where we saw a metal grinder reach a speed of 19mph.)

My daughter loved, not liked, loved the robotic giraffe which had touch sensitive sensors on it’s nose and snout so that when pet, the giraffe would talk to you and tell you how much it liked being pet. See the image below of the giraffe in action at Burning Man:



This is a little better shot from last year’s Maker Faire – but the sensors aren’t present on this version of the ‘bot:

A distant second place to the giraffe were the hands-on projects where kids can make rainbow glasses, magnetic critters, and perform their own stop frame animation using clay and vegetables (you have to see it to believe it…) Other interesting bits included a monorail for transporting dogs, a Rube Goldberg inspired 12 ton mouse trap, “fire” engines (actually bleching fire from their hoses,) and of course, the giant hand that picked its nose powered by a human hamster wheel. This entry wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the robot fighting (we watched Texas Heat and another ‘bot who’s name escapes me) go at it for the full 3 minutes. Texas Heat shoots a 6 foot flame at opponents which garnered hoots and hollers. The bicycle carousel on the midway was also a fun distraction.

If you’re reading this on the day of publication (May 20) and you’re in the Bay Area, go check it out. Fun can be had by kids of all ages.