Eubie's notes

Michael Hyatt: Leading people and conducting meetings go hand-in-hand. Yes, you can use email, blogs, Twitter, Basecamp, or any number of additional tools. But at the end of the day, you will still need to schedule and lead meetings.

Before you plan another meeting (and suffer the rest of us to sit through them), make a commitment to do the following:

1. Define the outcome.
2. Create a written agenda.
3. Focus your attention.
4. Start and stop on time.

I’d suggest a few weeks at meetings of Toastmaster’s. I’m still taking advantage of things I learned from my meetings.

SFGate: The seed of date palm that has been extinct is sprouting. Scientists hope to learn about medicinal properties and other DNA information about the Judean date tree. “It is the oldest seed ever known to produce a viable young tree.”

A Honda hybrid that costs $3,000 less than a Toyota Prius? Yes I’m interested.

Greenbizjournal:Honda gives hybrid sneak peak
Earth2Tech: Honda’s Hybrid: The Insight’s Coming in 2009

I have a surname that is English, so I was surprised that the highest concentration of my surname is on the coast of Sweden, followed by the U.S. Try your surname at the World Name Profiler site. Hamrick Software has a similar surname tracker, which tracks your surnames through the U.S. at points of time. Not much distribution on the surname before 1920 and in just a few states.

In the US, the Eubanks surname ranks 1,673 in most common and there were 19,616 in the 2000 Census, according to David L. Word, Charles D. Coleman, Robert Nunziata and Robert Kominski (2008) and featured on Mongabay. “Demographic Aspects of Surnames from Census 2000”. U.S. Census Bureau. Family lore says the name was Eubank originally, which ranks 5,986 in most common with 5,298 occurrences in the 2000 U.S. Census.

Couldn’t wait to try Google Chrome. One feature I like is the pages I frequently visiting being shown on a new page. I think a feature like could end up chaning web behavior. It’s not longer one homepage that opens. Chrome is still rough, but it might push broswer development.

WSJ’s Walt Mossberg says Chrome could challenge Internet Explorer, but that would first require Chrome to be approved by corporate IT desks. Some of the folks can be conservative. After all these years some corporate IT departments still require IE6.

I wonder if Firefox isn’t more threatened by Chrome than IE.

NY Times: Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradiction: In reviewing recent studies of coffee’s impact:

• Not as much a diuretics in smaller quantities. Soft drinks might have more impact
• Not as big an impact on hypertension as thought
• Not as big a contributor to heart disease as thought
• Studies suggest coffee drinkers may have less risk to Type 2 diabetes than non-drinkers
• Caffein coffee drinkers show lower instances of Parkinson’s disease.

The opening ceremony caught me. I didn’t plan to watch it, but the fireworks, drums and pagentry hooked me. At the same time realizing that more than 1.3 billion people live in that nation. MSNBC has nice slideshow on opening ceremony.

Screenshot of Walmart's growth

From FlowingData — Watch Walmart’s spread across the country in this time-lapse map.

Old teacups as light fixtures. From {domestic construction}.

It’s five minutes well spent.