A photographer and journalist traveled around the world to see what families eat during a weeks time. They covered 30 families spanning 24 countries. The most expensive weekly total for food belonged to a family from Germany at $500. The least expensive family from Mali was able to feed a family of twelve for under $27 a week.

Their book is called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats and is available from Amazon. Below are a handful of the family photos published by Time Magazine.

Notice how the poorer countries eat far less processed or boxed food. They eat a lot more fruits and vegetables it appears from these pictures. And I sure didn’t know that Canadians eat polar bear!

Click picture to begin slideshow.

Guatemala: The Mendozas of Todos Santos
Food expenditure for one week: 573 Quetzales or $75.70
Family Recipe: Turkey Stew and Susana Perez Matias’s Sheep Soup

The Lookout arrived this week on DVD. If you haven’t seen it add it to your Netflix queue. Better yet, go buy the DVD like I did today. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in the past couple of years. I saw it in the theater and liked it just as much tonight watching it for the second time.

Here are a few links on the film:

The Lookout Trailer at Netflix

Review at Rolling Stone

IGN Reviews the DVD release

Richard Roper review from the Chicago Sun Times – Roper named this movie his favorite so far this year.

Paris and Nicole have had a number of  public spats. Clemens tossed a broken bat at Piazza and a feud began. Even Gates and McNealy took jabs at each other for many years.

And now Gnomedex has a feud to call their own: Winer vs. Calacanis. I expected the two friends to patch things up over a beer last night, but that was expecting too much. Instead Calacanis fired at Winer this morning. Winer fired back and this fight continued to get nasty into the afternoon.

I find the whole spat kind of funny yet pathetic. It’s a good thing that Chris Pirillo pulled off a touching hour with Derek Miller this afternoon or the Winer/Calacanis fight would have overwhelmed Gnomedex which is not how it’s supposed to work out.

I knew nothing of Derek until today. Because he recently underwent major cancer surgery the interview was done via video conferencing. It’s hard to explain why it worked but it did. Chris and others were graceful while asking questions. Derek seems like an amazing human being. He was funny, smart and self-effacing. He seems like a genuinely nice person. He mentioned how someone came to visit him in the hospital after the surgery and asked, “Aside from this (cancer) how are things going?” Derek replied, “There is no aside from this right now“.

At the end of the interview, every attendee gave Derek a standing ovation while Chris positioned the camera so he could see everyone. It was clear he was touched by the gesture and so were most attendees. Guy Kawasaki was the star on day one. Derek Miller was the star on day two. Huge props to Chris and Ponzi for making this happen. You created an experience those in attendance will not forget.

Something tells me that Derek would be embarrassed to hear this, but he stole the show today.

Here is a picture of Derek as it looked on the big screen today.

I just returned from my first day at Gnomedex. This is the first time I’ve attended this event and it was a lot of fun. My favorite speaker of the day at Guy Kawasaki (picture below) who spoke about evangelism. He was so good that he should have been the keynote speaker. He was by far the most polished speaker yet also had the most interesting content. I loved his story of how he turned down the chance to interview for the Yahoo CEO position because it would have meant a 2 hours commute. He put his family first which was cool even though it may have cost him an estimated $2 billion had he landed the job.

The theme I will remember most about his talk is that when growing your business it’s best to talk to your most loyal customers and ask them what you can do better instead of spending time asking those who don’t buy your product or service.  “It’s very hard to convert an atheist”

The most confusing talk of the day was given by Jason Calacanis. It’s not so much that his talk wasn’t interesting because it was. It’s that I was looking forward to his talk more than any others, and he showed up with what amounted to a 45 minute infomercial for his new company called Mahalo. I reviewed Mahalo a few weeks ago and believe he could be on to something. But it’s old news and I wish Jason would have talked about another topic because he’s such an interesting character and is so smart. Maybe my expectations were too high? 

When Jason asked the audience a question about spam Dave Winer yelled out, “What do you think about conference spam?”. No doubt many others in attendance were thinking the same thing. Jason seemed a bit dejected after this happened and didn’t have as much energy. Jason brought up many valid points about spam and the need for better search results. But I was disappointed that each point he made felt like a tailor-made opportunity to mention Mahalo. I think Winer was right to call him out.

I came to Gnomedex expecting to to experience a much different conference than what I’m accustomed to. Most conferences I’ve attended have been as a Microsoft employee or vendor and most had thousands of attendees. They are big and impersonal. But I found out today that Gnomedex has many of the same problems you’ll find at larger conferences such as technical issues, starting on time and keeping people on topic. And there’s got to be a better way of drawing for prizes.

But overall, Chris and Ponzi did a great job of selecting speakers who are thought-provoking and interesting. And sometimes controversial.

Random things I noticed:

• Lots of action at the back of the room
• Men outnumbered women 40 to 1
• Lots of Apple laptops and iPhones
• The attendees are older than I expected
• Google was hardly mentioned. Microsoft even less.
• Chris facilitates rather than leads the discussion

Overall, the first day was well worth the price of admission. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

–Link to Gnomedex pictures on Flickr

Guy Kawasaki picture taken by KK
Chris Pirillo picture taken by Mr Noded

I have a number of AVI, MPG and MOV files that I’ve encoded or downloaded that I’d like to burn to a playable DVD to watch on my TV. In the past the above scenario was possible but not very easy to do. Nero was one option, but it wasn’t always easy to sync the audio track or the picture quality was poor.

Well, DVD Flick makes it easy to take AVI, MGP, MOV, WMV, ASF, FLV and MP4 content and turn it into a playable DVD. Basically, it’s a simplified DVD authoring tool that makes the whole process quick and easy. You don’t need to be a encoding expert to make it work.

For example, I downloaded the BBC TV show called the IT Crowd in AVI format but wanted to play them on my DVD player. I just dragged them into the new project window and told DVD Flick to burn it to DVD. It works and it’s that simple. 

–Link to IT Crowd episodes