Memorial Day
May 30, 2010
The old soldier came ramrod-straight to attention, one hand steadying the rifle he carried on his shoulder. He stared ahead through silver spectacles, mouth grim and every hair in place.
He wasn’t in dress blues, but his good suit was blue and he’d festooned its lapels with an intricate wealth of ribbon and brass from the War. His cap read “Post Commander, VFW,” and he and his white-haired mates proudly flanked the young Marine bearing colors in their midst.
Five of them, four soldiers carrying flags and rifles, and a leader calling cadence, strode down the hill. They marched past the small American flags dotting some of the hillside graves; VFW members and their wives had spent most of the morning identifying and marking the graves of dead ex-soldiers. They passed us, reached the low stone wall at the entrance and turned.
Never puzzle a juror
May 29, 2010
“Uneven. VERY uneven,” said the man sitting next to me, “I can’t decide if she’s brilliant or a D student.”
“Yes,” concurred the lady on the other side, “She’s still looking for her voice.”
We were paging through a computer slideshow, evaluating artists’ work for a competition. Applicants had been asked to submit a body of work, not just one or two pieces, and the dozen or so from this artist were looking a bit dicey.
Futurama
May 28, 2010
Every bigtech company has an R&D division hanging around somewhere and if they’re smart they talk about it, because gadget freaks like me need a regular injection of coolth. Google Labs, Adobe Labs, Microsoft, all of them offer some form of R&D portal, and they’re a great look into where things are headed.
Take this one, for example: Most input devices operate separately. What would happen if you combined inputs from touch and stylus so that you could use both hands, independently, on a touchscreen?
Might drive you nuts if you’re a mousehound, i.e., an experienced computer user…but what if you’re somebody’s grandma, never used a computer before, but you’re VERY used to, say, sliding a birthday card to the right position and holding it down while you write a note to the grandkids?
These really are NATURAL interfaces we’re talking about, in this case from Microsoft, and looks like a no-brainer for Milan, i.e., Microsoft Surface, still one of my favorite newish things.
I keep thinking though: Why stop at the surface? Stick a camera and some visual discrimination oomph behind that thing and why do you need to touch the surface at all? Gestural inputs use speed, pressure, etc., to differentiate–why couldn’t you do that Minority Report style? Have body language recognition?
(See? That’s why I like that labbish stuff)
Adobe Labs are a little more pragmatic than Microsoft’s–I visit there regularly for betas (and sometimes even alphas) of the software I’m already using. I downloaded my first copy of Lightroom from there, played around with AIR there, and actually prefer the research forum to the more typical user communities.
It’s a great place, though, to find useful little things that make you stop cussing at Adobe software. For example, electronic signatures are legal for some things and not others–frequently you have to follow up a signed, encrypted PDF with a paper copy or the governing authority won’t accept it. Adobe’s just come out with a new electronic signature tool that is supposed to solve the problem. Haven’t played with it yet…but it’s going to be fun to figure the implications.
And then Google–which floats idea beta tests like elephants eat peanuts–comes up with stuff all the time. I’ve already talked about their public data tool, which may be one of the most socially useful things around. And I’ve just started playing with their new transliteration tool, which lets you type in English and have it translated into another language on the fly, like this:
इ’म अ वर्ल्ड-क्लास गद्गेत अद्दिक्ट.
(Which is supposed to mean “I am a gadget addict” in Hindi. For all I know it could be saying “kick me” but hey)
Happy sigh.
My cheatin’ heart
May 27, 2010
I snuck into a Verizon store yesterday and toyed with an HTC Droid Incredible. It was enough fun that I can see myself shoving Gigi-the-iPhone into a drawer somewhere…and for some inexplicable reason guilt’s setting in and I’m starting to feel like an errant spouse.
Gigi’s aptly named; she’s gorgeous, eminently capable, capricious and demanding. And she’s not perfect. Is she due for replacement, though?
Well…I’m not ready to say that, but problems keep cropping up. This week I discovered that I can’t use her to connect my MacBook Pro to the Web, the way I can with just about every other Internet-capable phone. I’d tried this with a beta copy of the OS last year and it worked just fine, then I never did it again. Usually when I’m traveling about town, Gigi *is* my laptop, so I hadn’t needed to try.
This week, though, I’m helping to host a meeting about selling art online, the speakers must demonstrate with live websites, and our venue doesn’t offer wireless access. No problem, I said, I’ll just use Gigi to connect up my laptop, hook the laptop up to the projector, and we’re set. I made sure of the process (known as tethering) with the online iPhone manual on Apple.com, and went over to test it, just to make sure.
It didn’t work. I called Apple and they confirmed that the tethering feature had been removed. “I think you probably used tethering last year during the about 48 hours before AT&T turned it off,” sighed the rep, “They were afraid it would swamp their 3G network and we can’t get them to turn it back on. Believe me, we’ve been asking.”
Drat. I called AT&T, who naturally said it wasn’t their fault and blamed Apple. They might be releasing a tethering solution sometime in the future, “…but don’t hold your breath.”
And then it got weird. “This is what happens when you’ve got management that doesn’t understand technology and won’t pay for enough network capacity,” the AT&T rep whispered, “But tethering IS available on the iPhone…if you know where to look.”
“Uhm…do you mean jailbreak the phone?” (i.e., uncouple the phone from the AT&T network–which voids the warranty, can knock you out of things like iTunes and in the past has sometimes literally killed the phone)
“I can’t advise you to do that, ma’am…but you might visit Google and explore the, uhm, possibilities.”*
Hmmmm. I love the iPhone, it’s an incredible, paradigm-shifting device…but it’s definitely missing some key features: Voice dialing, voice-controlled GPS (unless you pay a fairly hefty fee and then it doesn’t work all that well), easy photo messaging, multitasking (which lets you switch between apps without having to restart every time), Adobe Flash, the ability to change batteries and a memory card slot that would augment storage and allow easy file exchange…
…and no tethering, either.
Verizon offers the best wireless performance in town–and I was a long-time Verizon customer before iPhone–so I headed to my local Verizon store, grabbed a couple of technoweenies there, and we played with a Droid Incredible for a couple of hours.
I gotta say, I’m impressed. The DI offers just about every one of the missing features I mentioned, and quite a bit more. It supports a classic iPhone interface, i.e., pages of apps that you can organize and move through, or you can opt for its standard star-like interface with different “homescreens” for different application groups. It’s faster, the low-light photography is better than on iPhone (and higher resolution, with the ability to adjust exposures), it offers faster websurfing and allows video playback directly in the browser.
Most everything else looks about on par with an Apple 3GS, or slightly better, but with Verizon’s better (and I think faster) network. The iPhone has almost an order of magnitude headstart on apps…but many of the services that require separately purchased apps on iPhone turn out to be native to the DI’s Sense Interface.
I sternly told my gadget jones to settle down but…just to be on the safe side, did a price comparison. Uh-oh. Verizon will sell you a DI for $199 with a two-year contract (there’s a $350 penalty for early cancellation, so beware). Monthly service at my usage level runs about $70 per month.
Right now I’m paying nearly $140 for my iPhone service. 50% less? Ulp. At that rate, the Droid pays for itself in three months.
Of course, Apple’s coming out with the iPhone 4G, which supposedly will blow away even the Droid Incredible, and may indeed include some of those missing features. It’ll still be on AT&T network, though, and I doubt the price will come down…
…so I need to think about this.
————————
*Instead of exploring THOSE possibilities, I called the venue owner, found out where the nearest Ethernet plug is in the building and will be installing the world’s longest Ethernet connection for tonight’s meeting. Say what you like about landlines, but sometimes they come in awful handy…
Antzio
May 25, 2010
This morning started out like any other: Awaken, stumble downstairs for coffee, get attacked by ants…
Ouch. Huh?
Yup. They’re baaaaaaack. A few hundred tapinoma sessile were investigating my kitchen counter, apparently in a very bad mood and perfectly illustrating why kitchen counters should never be made of black granite. I’d leaned against the counter to pull out the coffee grinder, and they took that as an invitation to swarm my fuzzy black bathrobe and chomp me on the clavicle.
Bluejay update, part I
May 24, 2010
Well, I’ll be a birdie’s uncle…maybe literally.
Hard at work coding a website this afternoon, but a strange banging kept breaking into my concentration. Finally, I looked out the window and saw the bluejays at it again, trying to build a nest on my back porch light.
Apparently the mister bluejay decided that gravity (or the big, gaping hole between light posts) has nothing to do with their continued inability to get twigs to stay on the light. The problem is they just aren’t building hard enough. [Read more]
Fusathon, good works, good fun
May 23, 2010
Saturday was a total hoot, made better by the fact that it was for a good cause. If you missed it, you missed a lot.
Yesterday the Oregon Glass Guild (OGG) held its annual Fusathon down at Uroboros‘ glass factory. We talked glass stuff, made glass stuff, watched other people make glass stuff, tried new ideas for stuff, bought stuff, ate stuff and sang stuff. (well, and I took pictures of stuff, too)
By the end of the day, we were pretty stuffed.
Keep them cards & letters a-comin’…
May 21, 2010
Sometimes I think I’m becoming a dear abby for glassists, and I gotta admit, I like it.
When I started this blog I kinda figured that 99% of people who wanted to comment would use the comments box at the end of each post. Turns out that I was less than half-right: For every comment that shows up on a post, I’ll get one or two private messages using the Contact me link.* I think I’m up to about 10-12 emails per week.
Scents and sensibility
May 20, 2010
My favorite neighborhood urchin is now old enough that a day’s hard playing leaves him as fragrant as used gerbil bedding. It’s really quite amazing how far the scent carries. Feet. Yards. Blocks, even.
While I’m wondering whether subtly suggesting a little soap, water and deodorant would crucify his fragile preteen psyche, his best friend screeches up beside us.
[Read more]
iPhone: Where seldom is heard…
May 19, 2010
Round 2 of "Does Dragon Dictation for iPhone make it easier to call Terry Belunes on the mobile? (Answer: No)
…a discouraging word, or any other word, for that matter. Much as I love Gigi-the-iPhone, when it comes to spoken commands she might as well be deaf.
Gigi is a 16G iPhone 3GS, and from the first day she adopted me I’ve been trying to talk her into doing stuff. Literally. For me, speech recognition is one of the more important functions on a mobile phone. Unlike the iPhone, every mobile phone I’ve owned for years had near-perfect speech recognition, something I’ve mentioned to Gigi on several occasions.
She’s having NONE of that, thank you. If I want to access her features, I can jolly well tap the screen like everyone else. Despite having so far downloaded every voice application I can find, Gigi still listens about as well as a rock.