To love another is a powerful feeling. Sometimes that love is returned and sometimes not. There are no guarantees in life except the ones you offer unconditionally. When you love, love unconditionally. Stretch as far as you can with your love and you may discover that nothing is beyond reach. from Love Beyond Reach -- dwlarson

May 12, 2008

Today's song is It Was A Very Good Year by Frank Sinatra, released in 1965.

My Newbound, Inc., partnership is gaining new traction in the software development realm. My partner, Marc, is enabling our Newbound Software Library (NSL) to work on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which is called EC2 for short. With our software running there, we can scale solutions for our clients easily in a cost-effective manner. Our NSL product runs well as peer-to-peer and is distributive at its core. Using EC2 virtual machines is a great asset as our business model develops.

There is good documentation for getting started with EC2. I found a page for getting started with EC2 using Mac OS X.

One of the best reasons to use EC2 is that you only pay for the resources you use for the time you need them. For example, if you needed the power of 20 computers for one hour using EC2, it would cost about $2.00 using Linux virtual computers!

Perhaps one day, consumers will be easily able to inexpensively use virtual computing environments for tasks that some people can only dream of today. Weather modeling and other kinds of simulations might be a some of the capabilities. 3D games could be a big deal if the bandwidth costs are trivial.

A computer user doesn't need all the power to reside on their personal computer. Using virtual computing environments opens the door to a more equitable situation and evens the playing field for everyone using them.

I published four new Desktop Backgrounds, in addition to Birds in Flight, displayed near the top of this page:

24" iMac Thumbnail Image	Title
	Love At First Sight
	Eye Pain
	Turbulance
	Mixed Salad

Consumer Reports states that Apple tops others in technical support.

I found two great articles [1; 2] from a former Windows developer who documented his reasons for switching to development on the Mac.

Computer simulation of climate changes. Why not show what happens if the Earth actually gets cooler instead? That's the problem with all the claims of global warming without a comparable analysis of what if the Earth is getting cooler? We should be prepared for both actualities, but the current focus is only in one direction.

On Tuesday I went to see the new movie, Iron Man. I enjoyed the acting by Robert Downey, Jr.. I think his acting carries the movie more than any other element.

This seems like a really bad idea to me.

Found on the web links for May 11, 2008.

Don