- Location:buried by cats
In other news, still bleah on the sofa with the lemsip mainlining ER...
Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was "literally laughed out of court" and that "wholly (holy) without merit" is a good characterization of Fox News itself. | + | Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales. |
When Hershey started shipping chocolate bars around 1900, you didn't have refrigerated trucks; nor did many people know what chocolate tasted like as it was a luxury. So the flavour of what arrived after travelling in a warm truck became so popular that when Hershey started shipping in refrigerated trucks, the customers said 'this doesn't taste the way I remember!'. At this point Hershey opted for backwardly comptible flavours and began pre-oxidising the ingredients.
When it's metal, oxidising rusts it. When it's fat, it's a polite term for rancid. It's that far more than the cocoa beans used in the US that gives a Hershey bar its, well, 'distinctive' flavour ;-)
The HTC Excalibur - also known as the T-Mobile Dash - is a smart, capable, lightweight smartphone with multimedia features good enough to let you keep it in your pocket out of business hours. By the time the Motorola Q finally makes it to the UK, the S620 may have stolen its market.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/118512/h
The first BlackBerry to combine a full keyboard and camera, the 8300 Curve doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl - or the slab-like bulk of the 8800 - but it does have QWERTY and trackball, spell checking and competent multimedia in a small and neat package.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/119405/b
I like them both and I've stuck with the Excalibur for personal use to replace the Treo 750v - the battery life, the better call quality and the standard connector plus the slimmer size made up for losing the extra software features. If you're a BlackBerry fan - and you have BES - the 8300 is an excellent phone. Incidentally, I wrote the review of it on the flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis...
Now I'm sure it's just a glitch; it's well after the stage should have finished and I'm guessing the rider in ths picture has taken his monitor off and left it in the car. Either that or he's very unwell, and in an ambulance!
Viewsonic has 19" and 22" LCD monitors with a built-in iPod dock, speakers, subwoofer, USB ports and memory card slots. Not only can you charge, sync and show off your iPod front and centre; you can play music, games, videos and photos on a real screen. One of these could sit in the living room to be an iPod media centre. This might be the best iPod accessory yet...
Kim Cameron is Microsoft’s identity architect. He’s embarrassed to be called a ‘Microsoft official’. He won an award for knowing that technology has to work in the real world. And he can’t cope with a single extra password so he’s come up with a password-free system for proving your identity that will start showing up in Windows soon. Read on...
The second article also explains:
where your memory is going and why you don't need to worry that it's not showing up as 'free'
why you don't have BOOT.INI any more
how to see startup process connection in Process Explorer so you know whose program is whose
This isn't tweaking information unless you're a developer, but you can see the extra levers and knobs Vista gives developers to twiddle. Plus, understanding some of these changes might give you the confidence to sit back and let Vista manage memory and schedule cpu priorities without trying any of those idiotic tweaking utilities that mess around in the registry ;-)
Covering the history of portable music players for Tom's Hardware has been fascinating; ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sbisson did a lot of the research and we turned up some fascinating details, from the inventor who took his stereoradiogram to the beach (reminded me of Tony Levin putting an expresso machine in a flight case) to the MP3 player company who went out of business after handing out free players at the Academy Awards. I got to see the first car radio at Motorola's headquarters last year; I wish I knew what happened to the portable wind-up gramophone I once had; I still remember the Hango PJB-100 (the first hard drive MP3 player) with fondness.
So how far have we come? I've just looked at two midget music players. I don't like the new iPod Shuffle at all (on consideration I think I was too polite about it in the review, but I do try to bear in mind that some people want just that kind of cheap, convenient reduction ochoice - sorry, simplicity) and I actually like the Samsung YP-U2 quite a lot; find out why...
A more important question is:
When Comic Sans?
Not very often at all, please
If you are setting up a phone interview for me with a US spokesperson, please take a look at the calendar and check what UK time corresponds to the US time you've booked and bear in mind that the US switched to daylight saving time last Sunday (I know because I was there and because I haven't had my head in a bucket for the last month: your IT team/calendar software/OS updater might have told you too, especially if you work in tech PR/have a client in the US/read the news). That way I won't get the call an hour before I'm expecting it, or phone in an hour late when the spokesexpert is packing up to leave.
Ditto if you're telling me about the conference call that's the only chance I'll have to speak to the high level representatives of the company about your new aquisition. You may think you're giving me nearly an hour's notice but actually you're telling me five minutes after the call starts (and no, listening to the recording isn't quite as useful).
I know March is a weird time to put the clocks forward. I know we're not actually in the US. I do always try to double-check times myself because I find timezones very confusing (that's why I nagged the Office team until Outlook 2007 now does timezones properly, why I've bookmarked http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ and http://www.worldtimeserver.com/ and why I appreciate being able to have two extra timezones on my clock in Vista). But this is one more thing in the rich tapestry of PR life that you need to get right, because it's part of the 99% perspiration that makes for good PR...
To get your IMs to count, click the link above or the button below to go to the site, tell them where you live and install WLM. Then choose Tools > Options and after putting your name in for My Display Name add one of these text codes to choose which organisation you want to get a share of the money from the ads you see.
| *red+u | American Red Cross |
| *bgca | Boys & Girls Club |
| *naf | National AIDS Fund |
| *mssoc | National Multiple Sclerosis Society |
| *9mil | ninemillion.org |
| *sierra | Sierra Club |
| *help | StopGlobalWarming.org |
| *komen | Susan G. Komen for the Cure |
| *unicef | The US fund for UNICEF |
<a href="http://im.live.com/?source=WLM80x
But I found myself worrying; with all the pressure on academe to work well with business and have more immediate goals, will we have enough blue sky research going on to give us well-thought out algorithms to implement in the next generation of even higher performance computing? Any excuse to slow down and think more has to be good!
There's another 19 thought-provoking points in the HBR List of breakthrough ideas for 2007
EDIT: many apologies if you clicked the first version of that link without the b. It's a somewhat gratuitous German mdoern art site with a lot of lips and teeth in the background and I hope it doesn't haunt your dreams...
I rather like this; you can set it to recent, recent interesting or random interesting, vertical or horizontal, individual or group - and it works (at least in the LiveJournal preview)!
sbisson round the bend ranting about CSS (I want to be able to use an externally defined style inside a section that's using inline style links so I can use my preferred formatting for an element inside a badge supplied by a site without writing another definition and I can't find what I consider to be a clean way of doing this that doesn't multply at least one entity in a way I consider unnecessary). I'm so annoyed with CSS I'm even starting to prefer JavaScript, which is saying something. I want point and click, documented mashup tools that don't require someone who wants neat things on their website to become a programmer; that's what I'd call Web 2.0. Admidst all the ranting I have found some useful tools, especially Feed2JS which interactively writes JavaScript for embedding an RSS feed on a Web page, letting you pick and choose the obvious settings, and then helps you interactively style it. Don't like the style? It not only documents the CSS classes it creates, it also shows you what the CSS classes look like laid out on the page so you can see where to change borders, margins, padding etc. You can choose spoon feeding or a recipe or the tools for writing your own recipe; that's what I call interactive.
I don't want my whole LiveJournal on my website; I want to use tags to generate multiple feeds and pull in a feed of posts about my writing, a feed of posts about my travels and so on. Rummaging in
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
lj_nifty produced this service for producing an RSS feed for one of your LJ tags which does almost exactly what I want. (It would be very nice if the service went into the LJ code proper, because kind as it is of avatraxiom to host it, LJ will have better availability long term.) The LJ RSS only delivers recent posts and if there aren't any posts with your tag in the most recent batch you won't get any posts for that tag. RSS isn't all about what's new and shiny, LJ!It goes for little things; I didn't know I wanted a running word count in the status bar until it showed up in Word 2007. I thought I wanted word count on demand, but actually ambient word count is more useful. Of course there are things we users know we want; I've been telling people at Microsoft in detail what I wanted for timezones in Outlook and lo, Outlook 2007 has a Timezons button for appointments. It goes for big things; I might say I want a macro to export an Excel table to ICS format so I can import it into Outlook's calendar, but what I'm really asking for is an integrated accounting and time management system.
But I'm going to take Passionate to task for saying "The world never needed the iPod until Apple created it". One; I needed it. Two; Apple may have created the iPod but it was neither the first MP3 player (Eiger Labs branding of Saehan) nor the first hard-drive based MP3 player. That was the 5GB Hango Personal Jukebox (PJB-100), designed by Compaq, abandoned to a Korean company without the distribution or marketing to get it out there. Back in 1998 you might have seen me testing the anti-skip on the hard drive by hurling it across the table at
lproven in The Lamb, or being dragged back onto the pavement just before I got run over by a taxi I didn't hear because I had headphones on. I was copying MP3s from my PC, making playlists, browsing my library with an easy to use menu system and generally making like I had an iPod. (The PJB site has become a shop but CNET remembers and so do I http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-562What Apple did was take an existing product, design it beautifully, make it with the cheapest possible components engineered to an inch past their predicted life and market it superbly. That's what Apple does. Their innovation is all in the implementation; it's all in the delivery. That's OK - that's often what the user needs to realise that this is something they really do need. A geek will have hunted out the first version (and probably written a macro to get around the problems that Apple will smooth over in the design). Just don't tell them they didn't know they needed it till someone prettied it up.
NOR, NAND and XIP
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/arch
That's for a PDA. I'm now going to go look for a registry key that lets me set that LED! I'm thinking about battery technology for a feature I'm writing; we're getting further with evolutionary sensible optimisation than we are with revolutionary new chemistry.
So if you're planning to travel and you think it's good to talk, http://www.roaming.gsmeurope.org/ shows prices by individual operator for a two-minute peak-time call to a fixed line in your home country, prices for receiving a two minute peak-time call from home (a handy reminder to turn the phone off if you don't fancy the extra charge) and the cost of sending and receiving text messages when travelling within Europe. No data charges yet, but that should be the next argument.
The Marc Smith interview I did for the FT on email overload and social metadata is going to be reprinted in a Swiss business newspaper called CASH. Presumably translated into Swiss German, though I'm not sure yet.
There was a fascinating talk at a press event for 2007 Office collaboration tools yesterday by Carsten Sorensen of the LSE covering how changes in manufacturing technology had defined early working conditions both physical and social, so that it's OK to interrupt people at work but not in a private space because by definition employees are available. Made me think of the stress induced by the Victorian stock tickers by telegraph whcih extended the working day to the club or the home. IT is having that effect: your fluid working day with information requested by email or IM is my interruption. Interconnect everyone for synergy and you make everyone deal with the impact of that on their work and we haven't got the working practices to deal with it, or often the right management attitude. I did like his story of 'email man' - a guy at Deutsche Bank who responds to 1,000 emails a day and who he descrived as an 'interaction machine'.
June Entman, a law professor at the University of Memphis, has banned
laptops from her classes for first-year law students, telling them they
must take notes with pen and paper. "The computers interfere with
making eye contact," said Entman. "You've got this picket fence
between you and the students." She said she wants her students to spend
less time taking down everything she says and spend time "thinking and
analyzing" instead.
USA Today, 21 March 2006
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2
Mary
Social networking sites are so last year, events sites are very this year - and intown2 is trying to cover both bases. If you're in London, or Seattle, or San Francisco or wherever for a day or so, and a friend of yours happens to be there too, why not meet up? Well, usually because you don't know they're there at the time. Put your address book and your calendar into intown2 and as long as they do the same, you'll be able to catch up with people.
This has the same barriers to entry as any other social networking site: you have to put in all your friends (by hand or by importing a CSV file) and so do they, plus you have to enter your travels one at a time. Obviously there are privacy issues with importing your address book and calendar into a public site wholesale, but there has to be a better solution.
- Offer the service as an add-on for existing social networking sites like Linked In, where you can cross-check against your address book, you've already done most of the work and where there is a big enough pool of other people who have too.
- It would be a natural add-on for Plaxo, where you're already trusting them to keep addresses up to date.
- Offer to scrape your address book in the same polite way Linked In does rather than making you export a file by hand, and offer to scrape the calendar for multi-day events as a starting point (always with the option to leave an event out).
- Or go the distributed route like FOAF; when more people have calendar info published on line, a site could aggregate it and help you find passing friends that way.
It's quite late to start a social networking site from scratch, even with a clever idea like matching locations. If a lot of people have to do a lot of work for an non-deterministic reward (you might not find any travelling friends going your way), even a free site has a high cost.
And the free account only allows you to add 10 friends; I think I can keep in touch with that many people by email, actually. The public events categories are an odd mix of sport, theatre and gay pride marches. The site asks for the cities you visit most but doesn't offer those as quick options when you create a trip. There's no widget to put on your web site encouraging people to click through to intown2 to check if they're going your way. It's a nice idea, but there are a lot of rough edges.
Make the deadline, fill the brief. While there are some things I like writing about and specialise in - mobile data and smartphones, Tablet PCs, Microsoft Office, Windows XP and Vista, nifty tools and services on the Web - I write on a very wide range of subjects. If it engages my attention, I like writing about it. That means when editors ask me what I s