On the Tarmac for 6 hours for SXSWi
Yesterday we had one of those nightmarish plane trips you hear about on the news every so often. Our American Airlines flight to Austin, Texas had a (supposed to be) short stop in Dallas/Fort Worth airport. The first leg from Indianapolis to Dallas went smoothly, and we got on the plane 1717 for the 36ish minute flight from Dallas to...
Technology
[46 entries.]
usability in watches and clocks
I've been subscribed to the Watchismo Times blog for quite some time now after noticing links to it from Boing Boing, one of my staple blog reads. Watchismo describes their content as being "a reliquary of obscure timepieces from bygone eras as well as the cutting edge designs of today." I'd say that's definitely the case; there are some truly...
Everything is Miscellaneous
I mentioned the book Everything is Miscellaneous a few posts back on my list of recent reads, but I wanted to pull it out and write more about it, because it was very thought provoking, and a book I intend to buy (I borrowed it from the library) because I want to read it again. In the book, author David...
Why I'm Still Disappointed with Movable Type, 4.0 Beta version
ridiculous rant. You can see the original rant below the fold. I am, apparently, really stupid. And quite wrong. And Jerame is quite right. Never mind. I'll just be over here, making new category templates. Don't mind me. UPDATE: Okay, I'm not quite that wrong. I can make a specialized template work for a single category, but when I start...
Why Twitter? To Make Bitter People Write Bad Humor Articles
My friend Dan was googling his twitter ID (funny!) and discovered he'd been quoted in a "humor" article about Twitter on Funny Times, which he of course shared with his twitter pals, because - even more funny. Too bad that the article was yet another frivolous critique of Twitter. Allow me to add my two cents interspersed with this guy's...
Joost
I downloaded and played with Joost, the TV on the internet viewing software that Warner and Viacom have signed up to put TV shows on. Interesting, I guess. I'm not thrilled about having to use a different interface than my browser to watch videos. And I had trouble finding anything interesting to watch. There's boxing (yawn) and Indy Car racing...
Who Is Sick?
Who is Sick? is a Google map-based application where you can enter data detailing the symptoms of your illness, add it to a map of your location, and see who in your particular area is also sick. Kinda interesting, especially in my neighborhood....
Upcoming.org is part of Yahoo?
When the heck did that happen? It's cool, but I must have missed the announcement. Wow, there's a ton more events from Indianapolis listed there now....
More Twitter Stuff
Now that I've reached a critical mass of friends who used twitter, some of the designers that I had added to my friends list back in SXSW are getting annoying. I kept a bunch of them because it was interesting to hear what they were working on during the day and how they approached design challenges. But I'm noticing an...
24,000 some songs gone
I took my 200 GB external drive with all of my music on it to CompUSA this weekend to have it put in a new enclosure, because the old one was going bad. I had this happen before to a Maxtor drive - the enclosure doesn't spin the drive fast enough, apparently, so the disk kept crapping out while transferring...
Civility on the Web - New York Times has me ROTFLMAO
From the NY Times "A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs": Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality...
More Twitter Fun
Adding the Twitter RSS feeds of my friends and family members to my feed reader, so I can catch up with them later if I miss something. I'm really excited that my sister Stacy is now on Twitter - just hearing little updates from England at about a 7 hour time shift is really entertaining, and especially just hearing the...
Twitter Related Fun
Twitterific is a great little Macintosh program that lets you get (and make) your twitter updates without having to have the browser window open. There does seem to be a couple of similar Window/PC programs that lets you do the same thing - Twitterlicious is one, and Twitbox is another. I've never used either, so I don't know if they're...
Forbes on Twitter
David M Ewalt from Forbes on the subject of Twitter: "I'm not interested in what you had for breakfast." Yeah, I'm not interested in what you had for breakfast either. That's why I don't follow you on twitter, ass. I do care what my friends had for breakfast; therefore I follow them. I'm sorry you're using twitter wrong, but that's...
Hate my site?
Splatter it with cream pies. Make dinosaurs tromp on it. Let dogs poop on it. Or just let a bunch of hippie flowers grow on it....
Stop Cyberbullying Day
Read more about it here..... In all of this, one of the things that is bothering me is people's defense of the "mean kids" who put up the two sites that were promoting maliciousness towards various tech people, including Kathy Sierra. Like one of the comments in my previous post, who actually went so far as to make the brazen...
Kathy Sierra, hate comments, and women bloggers
I've avoided blogging about this because it's very difficult to explain, really. I'll try to keep it really short: Kathy Sierra is a tech guru who got her start in Java, published some really popular books, and became well-known in the tech community for her ideas about technology and writing user-friendly web applications. She writes a popular blog called Creating...
Twittervision
Twittervision is a googlemap with all the latest twitter posts displayed on it - it's pretty mesmerizing to watch - check it out....
Twitter
Shorter review: Simple, and seemingly frivolous web communication tool. But I can see it really working as a fun, handy IM/mobile texting tool for my friends, if I can only herd all of them onto it. What Twitter is: It's a really simple, public blog. You post short (less than 140 characters) messages about what you're doing right now. The...
Evite vs. Upcoming.Org
Last year in February, I was bitching about how lame Friendster had become, and I mentioned somewhere in there that they (and other social networking sites) needed to suck in functionality like evite, where you can send out party invitations to friends and get RSVPs online, be able to see who is and isn't coming to an event. I tend...
Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer Moderator: Michael Lopp, Sr Engineering Mgr - Apple Nick Bradbury, Architect of Client Prods - NewsGator Technologies Inc John Gruber, Raconteur - Daring Fireball Shaun Inman, Designer/Dev - haveamint.com Michael Lopp, Sr Engineering Mgr - Apple...
Web Typography Sucks Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
Web Typography Sucks Mark Boulton, Owner - Mark Boulton Design Richard Rutter, Production Dir - Clearleft Ltd Slides located at: http://webtypography.net/sxsw2007/...
SXSW thoughts
One of the first things I plan to do is take a closer look at Microformats and see where I can mark up my site appropriately. While I was sitting in the panel, I downloaded the firefox operator extension, and I've been playing with it. I also want to get OpenID set up on this site so I can use...
Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid Moderator: Eric Steuer, Creative Dir - Creative Commons Eric Steuer, Creative Dir - Creative Commons Glenn Otis Brown, Products Counsel - YouTube John Buckman, Founder and CEO - Magnatune Laurie Racine, Eyespot and DotSub Max Schorr, Publisher & Founding Ed - GOOD magazine...
Bullet Tooth Web Design Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
Bullet Tooth Web Design: Plan Your Web Site like Pulling off a Robbery Andy Clarke - Stuff and Nonsense Ltd Jason Santa Maria, Creative Dir - Happy Cog Studios...
Design Patterns: Defining and Sharing Web Interface Design Languages Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
sxsw, sxswi, sxswi07
2:00pm - The Growth and Evolution of Microformats Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
sxsw, sxswi, sxswi07
1:30AM - The Future of the Online Magazine Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
1:30AM The Future of the Online Magazine (19AB) Moderator: Rufus Griscom CEO, Nerve Media Rufus Griscom CEO, Nerve Media Sean Mills The Onion Ricky Van Veen Editor, CollegeHumor.com Laurel Touby CEO & Founder, mediabistro.com Joan Walsh Editor in Chief, Salon.com...
10:00AM - Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0 Panel Notes (SXSWi 2007)
10:00AM Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0 Moderator: Liz Danzico Director, experience strategy, Daylife Liz Danzico Director, experience strategy, Daylife Kristian Bengtsson Creative Dir, FutureLab Chris Messina Co-founder, Citizen Agency Luke Wroblewski Principal Designer, Yahoo! Jeffrey Zeldman Founder, Happy Cog...
Panels I Plan to see today and tomorrow
Some of these overlap, so I'll have to pick one over the other. But a rough idea. Monday, 12 March 2007 10:00AM Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0 (18ABCD) 11:30AM The Future of the Online Magazine (19AB) 02:00PM The Growth and Evolution of Microformats (18ABCD) 03:30PM Bullet Tooth Web Design: Plan Your Web Site like Pulling off a Robbery...
Me, giving a testimonial on Firefox
Oh, and while surfing YouTube looking at other's SXSW videos, I found a video of me shot yesterday by the firefox browser people, giving testimonial on the browser from the trade show space. I got a discount on a Firefox T-shirt in exchange. Which just goes to show -- I can talk your damn ear off, but if you stick...
Shadow Garden
I took this video at the frog design party Saturday night of an interesting interactive design project they did....
links for 2007-03-12
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke one of our authors. (tags: books webdev webstandards css sxswi) Soylent Green Stickers Download them and stick them on food at the grocery store. (tags: funny subversive)...
Social Networking, Me and You - Link Me All Up
So, this whole social networking thing... fun, huh? This past weekend, I actually went out and located my stupid pages on of the social networking sites, updated my picture and profile (holy shit, on some of them I didn't even have my girlfriend listed. Oops. Not single for quite some time!) and crap, trolled around and found some friends that...
Fun with javascript
via the J-Walk Blog: Try this: 1. Highlight the text below 2. Press Ctrl+C 3. Paste into your address bar 4. Press Enter javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0); Refresh the page to get back to normal. It works with IE and Firefox,...
Chatting
I finally sorted out my chatting crap and downloaded a chat client that lets me sign on to AOL Instant Messenger, MSN, yahoo, google talk, jabber, ICQ, and a ton of other chat clients all in the same window, and I configured it for all my different accounts and pulled in all my buddies lists and grouped them together. So...
Netflix Throttling
Friday Fishwrap has an interesting commentary on Netflix policy of "throttling" DVD shipments to people who are heavy users in favor of first-time or light users of their service. Interesting; I agree that it sucks, but I can kind of see the light users point of view, too. If you wanted to get a DVD occassionally and can only get...
Old Navy doesn't support the Safari Browser
I'm astonished. I just tried to visit the Old Navy online store (where I've bought lots of clothes in the past!) and I got this message: We're sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using. Our site works best with the following browsers: PC users Internet Explorer 5.5 and above Netscape 7 and above...
Upper Ranks? Who defines these things anyway?
Two articles on the subject of blogging showed up in today's Arts and Letters Daily about how the "Upper ranks" of bloggers are dominated by white males. One article says that it's so and calls for greater diversity. The other article says it's so also, but claims that it's the case because women and minorities either don't hold forth with...
Uncyclopedia
I have found a new place to spend unearthly amounts of time reading and writing and amusing myself no end. Like I needed another place like that. I love technology. Technology is the best. I pity the Amish. And people from the olden days. They had no technology. They must have been very sad. And bored. Maybe this is is...
Wireless Hotspots in Indianapolis
Indianapolis Downtown, Inc. provides a list of 22 spots where you can get wireless internet access, some of it free and some for a fee. On the other hand, wi-fihotspotlist.com lists 36 wireless locations in Indianapolis. It's not clear from this list which services are free and which are paid. So an IndyScribe wireless outing/control panel training session is in...
Ah, Technology.
We have one of those high-tech bathrooms here at work where everything is automated. The toilet flushes by itself, you wave your hands under the soap dispenser for soap, and under the faucet for water, so you never have to touch anything unsanitary. Which is really cool, except when the technology breaks. For a while now there's been one toilet...
MythTv.org - Open Source Digital Video TV Recording
Basically, mythtv.org is an open source TIVO/ Replay TV program. You port your cable hookup through a PC equipped with a TV tuner card ($100) and a decent sized hard drive, set up the open source software on the PC, and connect the PC to a large monitor or TV & stereo. Then you use the software to record your...
campaign your friends for political office
Look at this, I'm blogging on my new PowerBook. This is so extremely cool. Here's a fun prank to play on your friends: campaign them for political office without their knowledge. Now that's funny....
Commonplacebook.com is the personal website of 
