Now this is impressive. A log book filled out by the flight crews of every flight taken over 31 years (and by a consultant no less…we fly a LOT!).

I didn’t even realize you could do this sort of thing - coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

My wife and I are currently in Kazakhstan to adopt a little girl. I’m blogging our adventure at www.kzadoption.com

Fortune interviewed me awhile back as I just took on a new role with Sapient as a consultant in their Trading and Risk Management practice. The resulting article ran today and is a good read if you are looking for your next gig.

One of the questions I regularly get asked when I’m out trying to raise money from VCs for my latest brainstorm is whether I have a patent behind the idea. I’ve never bothered as I don’t really think that the majority of the businesses out there are successful because they’ve protected their intellectual property with a patent, but rather because they just out-compete their competitors. Plus new businesses have a habit of radically changing as you put them together which can easily invalidate the defense a patent provides. Plus I’m a fan of open source…and so on.

What I didn’t realize until I read a post in the Patent Law Blog on the cost of maintaining a patent (after shelling out all the cash to get it in the first place) is that maintenance feeds are rather pricey - especially if you aren’t making money from the patent and have to write a check from your personal checking account.

For most categories of patent owners, the maintenance fees after issuance are $980, $2,480 and $4,110 at 3.5 years, 7.5 and 11.5 years, respectively (I did wonder about the reason for the 0.5…). If the fee is not paid, the patent is forfeited and this cost results in a of patents expiring before their time.

Something to think about before you take that napkin into your lawyer for a quote. I wonder if this is why Lego lost its patent years ago? Perhaps they forgot to pay the bill.

I’ve been renovating part of my basement for the last while in an attempt to turn an old, musty space that was poorly finished into a combination gym and playroom for my daughter. We are almost done with what turned into a six month project and one of the last steps was installing a dehumidifier to keep it from getting too moist in the summer months.

After killing two portable units in years past I finally went looking for something a bit stronger and that could handle the entire basement area (almost 1500 sq feet). Thanks to the mighty Google gods I stumbled upon Sylvane’s website and more specifically a Sante Fe dehumidifier that seemed to be just about perfect. It could handle the size of room, would allow me to duct it in and was EnergyStar rated.

Everything showed up exactly as ordered and very fast (two days!) by UPS truck. I installed the unit in a closet that I had wired up specifically for this type of dehumidifier (it had a drain available) and mounted the remote controller on the outside of the wall. I then ran ducting into two rooms (a trick - buy flexible 10″ ducting at your local Lowes or Home Depot and strip off the insulation…it works perfectly and is really easy to work with).

The one issue I ran into was that I forgot to order a special switched plug for the external controller - so I just wired in a new receptacle that was powered off the controller. Problem solved. All in the installation took me about 4 hours including some head scratching to get the ducting to fit (I forgot to include it when I measured the space).

I insulated the walls of the closet to cut down on the noise but the unit is actually not that loud despite pushing a lot of air. You can definitely hear it but you need to be in the same room as where it is running or very close. It is about as loud as a forced air furnace when running.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apparently the police in France have got a lot more to do rather than walk up and down the street looking for parking violators so they have made their parking meters intelligent so they notify them when a car overstays its welcome.

With the exception of eliminating that feeling of relief you get when you get back to your car, you are over your time yet there is no ticket, this seems to me to be one of those ideas where the only comment is “about time”. I’d rather have the police out catching bad guys as opposed to checking meters. Now if we could only convince the meters to email us when they are getting close to being out of time so we can add money virtually and avoid that mad dash outside in the middle of a meeting to feed the meter. Better yet, just have the meter read an RFID tag on the car and bill me for the time used.

Welcome to Web 2.0…parking meter style.

The blogsphere has been going crazy the last few days speculating on what Steve Job’s “hormonal imbalance” and decision to skip the MacWorld keynote means for Apple and more importantly all the cool toys they release a couple of times per year.

I think xkcd has the best take on it though:

This is pretty amazing - the Air Force has actually formalized a “counter-blogging” process that they deploy when a blogger writes something that is negative concerning Air Force or the US government.

Wired did a full article on this process but suffice it to say, the Air Force is treating blogging like everything else they do - with a field manual!

This is really well done!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

One of the blogs I stumbled upon recently was Concept Ships which is full of all kinds of sci-fi eye candy (of the hardware variety). The car above was posted recently and drawn by Dwayne Vance.

I definitely want one.