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Tuesday, February 29, 2000Cool Tech@ 01 pm | PermaLinkFeb 29 Tue (01 PM) The latest cool thing I've seen: <http://www.romeMP3.com/> <http://www.active-components.com/new_product.htm> <http://www.mp-3.co.kr/english/product/> It's an MP3 player that has the form factor of a cassette player. That means you can have your MP3s and play them on anything that has a cassette player, which is still quite a lot of stuff at this point. Of course, there's some fidelity issues and such but the concept is still pretty cool. Plus it has a headphone jack so that it can be used as a standalone player. There's supposed to be a newer version coming out which has an LCD display and more memory. It's too bad that it doesn't have a USB connector. It seems to only support a strange PC only cable, so I won't be getting it, but I can always hope that the next generation will have USB. The underlying conecept here is that for magnetic media, you can simulate the megnetic encoding on the fly. There have been other examples of this like the FlashPath disc which adapts a SmartMedia card to a Floppy disk drive. Amy and I played with one of these during our flirtation with an Olympus digital camera. I hear that the company also has a floppy adapter for Sony's MemoryStick format. I wouldn't be surprised to see a CompactFlash oriented adapter as well. But floppys are really slow and I don't even have on on my G3. I'd like to see them work up something that can adapt to Zip disks. Then we'd have higher transfer rates, plus the Zip discs have a larger form factor that would be easier to work the electronics into. It's too bad that we won't be able to do the same thing with CD or DVD players. They are optically based media rather than magnetically based. This means that some sort of dynamic reconfiguration of a visible surface would have to occur. This might be possible, but even then the _very_ thin size of the compact disc would make it very difficult to cram in all the necessary electronics. The same goes double for DVDs. But it seems like, overall, USB connections would be the best bet. There are already a number of cheap USB readers for all of the previously mentioned solid state memory products. And USB has been really gathering steam as a connection technology. With any luck, USB will be the last wired method of connecting pieces of electronics. After that we can look towards Bluetooth and Wireless Ethernet. Then your electonics just have to be in the same room (house?) to recognize each other and work together. I can imagine that wires will still dominate the higher end connection methods (UltraSCSI, FireWire, etc.), but it will be cool once we can eliminate the need for the lower speed devices to need wires. No more wires for keyboards, mice, graphics tablets, solid-state memory readers, mp3 players, lcd monitors, speakers, scanners, computer-to-computer connections, pda's, vcr's, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances, automobile diagnostics, home power regulation and generation systems, night lights, light fixtures, aquarium temperatures, security systems, doorbells, postal boxes, lawn watering systems... Sorry, brain dump. :) (Last thought: Then we'll just need a wireless battery recharging method.)
Tuesday, February 22, 2000Black Day@ 10 am | PermaLinkFeb 22 Tue (10 AM) Black Day I want to take you in my arms, forgetting all I couldn't do today. Yesterday was a pretty bad day. I've been struggling a lot lately, feeling like I've been letting myself and others down quite a bit. It's been difficult with my Grandma death still looming over my family, some stumbling around at work, and my usual trailing off on my responsibilities for my class. In my life and my work, I've been trying stradle the line between design and development, the arts and the sciences if you will. I feel ing I'm losing ground on both accounts. That planned 'settling out and dropping some projects' situation has yet to happen. My stacks of paper and windows of e-mail are all sitting still, growing slowly as I sit and watch. Gotta get out of this slump.
Monday, February 21, 2000The Apple Style, iCab, and Harry Potter@ 12 pm | PermaLinkFeb 21 Mon (12 PM) Apple has a great style guide that has some great tips for Tech writers and others who deal with writing about technology. <http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/pdf/apple_styleguide98.pdf> Last night Amy and I were talking about web browsers. IE 4.5 is much more stable that NS 4.5 on her machine, not to mention faster. I've been sticking with Netscape, but now it seems like the majority of the browsers out there will either be made the Evil Empire or the Other Evil Empire. Now I know that Mozilla is and will always be an open source project, so Netscape>AOL>AOLTW won't actually control it, but I'm not exactly happy about the situation. However, the alternative that is available right now is <http://www.icab.de> which, after it's big splash about this time last year, continues to grow and become more reliable and robust. I keep trying it out, poking my head in for a quick look and then running back to Netscape 4.5/4.6. I finally purchased "All Tomorrow's Parties" last night as Amy and I were out. I haven't started it yet, as she and I are reading "Harry Potter and the Something of Secrets" to each other. She read the first book of the series out loud, in the car as we had been driving 250 miles each way to Grants Pass to be with my family over the last couple of weekends. Now we've got the the second book, and have read 82 pages into it. More will be read tonight with any luck.
Previously, that same day...A favorite work@ 12 am | PermaLinkFrom the bookmarks: <http://www.math.cornell.edu/~chruska/recursive/moser.html> This has always been one of my favorite wirttings, ever since I read it in Whole Earth Review about a decade ago. Hmm, maybe skin ought to give me a login on his weblog <http://www.gaff.cc/> in order to provide him with great stuff like this. :) Skin?
Wednesday, February 16, 2000Mail and Neva J@ 09 pm | PermaLinkFeb 16 Wed (09 AM) Eudora 4.3 is out now, but I'm holding off at least 2 weeks before I download any updates. 4.3 was released yesterday and it turns out there's a bug in it. E-mail is such an important part of my daily activities (reading it, not necessarily responding to it.) that I won't do anything that might disrupt it. Yesterday I received the Student Evaluations from the Fall term class I taught on Web Graphics. It seems like the students really liked it, and gave me pretty high marks. That must have been the reason why <http://www.pdx.edu> kept me around for another term. I only hope that this term's class goes half as well as the previous term. On Sunday Amy and I attended my Grandma's funeral. I'm not sure I want to talk about it just yet, but I wanted to note it in my journal. It's been more difficult on the inside than is evident on the outside.
Tuesday, February 15, 2000The Web Hydra@ 11 am | PermaLinkFeb 15 Tue (11 AM) Is it just me or does it seem like Donald Norman and Jacob Neilsen are slowly merging into one body? I was turned onto Norman in 1995 after reading 'The Design of Everyday Things', and Neilsen's work in 1996/97 when I started reading his <http://www.useit.com> web site. They've since started a consulting house together <http://www.nngroup.com> and are working on some sort of online university. These guys are obviously candidates for some sort of brain/body merging technique...
Wednesday, February 09, 2000Interesting Book@ 10 am | PermaLinkNext time I'm at Powell's I want to pick up this new book that I say at Barnes&Noble's, called UnderStAnding, aka Understanding USA. I flipped through it at first, but didn't spend much time on it, though it stuck in my head. Then I found this article <http://www.fastcompany.com/online/32/benchmark.html> and I'm more intrigued with it now.
Thursday, February 03, 2000Down for the count@ 01 pm | PermaLinkThe Zip drive on my new G3 died, so I've had to take it in to get replaced. It's obviously still under warranty and it looks like the Zip drive is the only problem, so with any luck I might have it back by Saturday. Till then, I'm Mac-less, though I still have access to most of my e-mail and lots of the stuff I've been working on. Hopefully, Amy will let me use her Mac, with my old Zip drive to upload some files for my class tonight. <http://www.amazon.com> is in the process of redesigning their front page. They've dropped the whole tabs interface. It will be interesting to see if the 'tab craze' that has gripped web design for the past few months will start to die off. We might be installing Apache at work, migrating from Netscape Enterprise Server. This would be great news for one of my other projects. Hello XSSIs... :)
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February 2000
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