I don't tend to talk on the phone much, but when I do I tend to talk a while. It's a type of calling pattern that makes getting a matching calling plan difficult. I have been using a pay as you go plan that works fairly well. It's 10 cents a minute, but I have unlimited minutes after 7pm.

I have recently discovered google voice. It trumps my calling plan by being free. Can't beat that... In addition to that, my iPod headphones and mic easily outclasses my nasty 20 dollar phone. Here's how you use it. First, you have to have a gmail account. Next, log into the gmail webpage. You'll see a notice on the sidebar on the left about activating google voice, click on it and fro then on your sidebar will look like this:

Once you click on the "call phone" link, you'll see a keypad show up:

 

Dial your number and away you go! The call quality still isn't up to land line standards, but it's a far sight better than cell phones, especially mine. For right now this is still a free domestic service and they offer really cheap calls even to places like Yemen, Azerbaijan, or Oman (Olga and Rachel, I'm looking at you!).

 

 

 

Like many things google, there is a fair chance this will stay free for a while. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

 

Once again, the specter of government regulation of the internet rears its head under the banner of net neutrality. Once again, people seem to have their stories confused as to why this is an important topic. We are told that corporations are plotting to give priority to certain types of information speed-wise over others. The networking companies claim this is the only way they can efficiently use their networks, by separating VOIP, streaming video, and email from each other and then charging people for the bandwidth they actually use. Somehow, this is supposed to lead to them filtering information so that people only get what the corporations want them to get.

Tell me that doesn't sound paranoid, go ahead. It also doesn't make any sense. It actually does make sense from the networking end of things to give different types of traffic different priorities, but let's ignore that for a second. Are the companies greedy or not? Do they try to make as much money as possible, do they try to outdo their competition for subscribers?

My question is this, who would subscribe to a service that blocks content? Or to put a different spin on it, how long would it take for a company to advertise that they do not block content or restrict speeds regardless of content? Do you think that would give them a competitive advantage?

See, that's the thing, net neutrality laws are totally unnecessary assuming that there are at least a couple of companies actually competing for subscribers. As long as one company offers non-discriminatory speeds, all of them have to. As long as one of them does not restrict content, none of them can. I say go ahead Comcast, try to implement some content filtering and see what happens. Verizon/cox/everyone else will be licking their chops waiting for your ex-customers.

On the other side of things, allowing congress to get a foothold in the workings of the internet is a very dangerous precedent. Would you want Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, or Jesse Helms mucking around with the internet? No? Then you can't allow Pelosi, Franken, and Frank mess with it either. Leave the internet alone. We will be taken care of, not because the companies want to, but because they have to in order to survive and beat the competition.

So I figured out the caching feature in Slacker radio. Essentially, I pick the station I want to listen to on my iPod and then tap a button to tell it to cache that station. I've read that it saves about 100 songs per station. I've set up 12 to do that, classics (as in Beatles and Stones), New York Dolls, Potishead, Modern Punk, UK Indie, Silversun Pickups, Pixies and stuff, Buddy Holly Radio, '80s alternative, Indie hits, Classic Jazz, and Indie.

I have decided to go with an all "picked for me playlist" approach for a while. So I've got the Slacker stuff on there, and I've also put some genius playlists on there as well, Punk Mix, New Wave mix, mainstream rock mix, jazz mix, Indie rock mix, Brit-pop and rock mix, alternative pop/rock mix, and Alt. singer/songwriter mix.

What I like about this approach is that I still get the music I like, but it is a surprise for me, and I spend zero effort getting it on my iPod. You laugh, but when you have 34,000+ songs in your library, it's a pain to go through and actually make playlists. Even if I did, I would then face the monotony of knowing exactly what was in them. This approach keeps things fresh. As strange as it may sound, even with 34,000+ songs, you can get into ruts. That's where Slacker comes in. I can once again have the thrill of finding the song on the radio, but I get to skip the songs I don't like.

 

Ahhh, life is good! Who needs cellular service to enjoy internet radio?

I've been enjoying Slacker radio on my squeezebox ever since I got it. I love the genre stations I've picked out (Indie, indie hits, 80's alternative, and classic jazz) and the custom stations I've created have also been great. I have never been able to get Pandora to do what I want, but slacker has done the job for me. At 4 bucks a month, it's well worth it to me.

 

I'm intrigued by their cache option. They say I can cache the station on my iPod touch and then play it offline. For you iPhone users, you do this over wi-fi so you don't chew through your bandwidth limits. That would come in real handy for the car. I'll update you on how that goes. I also have to figure out how to do the song request thing on my squeezebox. I love having the radio without dealing with FM!

I had mentioned Pandora radio before, I now feel that I have found an even better internet radio service. It's called Last FM and it is amazing. Here's the way it works, it looks at all the music you have played, in iTunes, internet radio, and on your iPod, and builds an artist library for you. From there, you can play "your" radio station (assembled from the artists you play), or listen to recommendations for you based on those artists.

I am in heaven. I have found a radio station that will play Joan Jett, Wilco, Devo, Glenn Gould, The Bouncing Souls, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Spoon, the Detroit Cobras, and all of my other favorite groups. There isn't another station that has that kind of spread. It's my station, made of my music. Oh life is good, life is good my friends.

That station is for the sure bet, when I'm in the mood for something reliable. I haven't done a lot of listening to the recommended station yet, but I'm excited about that too. I'm getting new music ideas from the Slacker "Indy Rock hits" station, Radioio's jazz standards station, a crazy east coast Doo-Wop station on live 365, and I'm looking into classical.com.

This is the radio I've been waiting my whole life for. I had no idea that this was even possible. Last FM may be all the reason I need to actually get an iPhone, it will allow me to take this on the road. We'll see if I ever shut up about this, in the meantime, please bear with this music lover's gushing....

So, my Squeezebox Touch got here today. In a lucky break, so did my switch and ethernet bridge. To recap, the SB Touch is a network/internet music player you can hook up to your stereo. I can stream the music from my computer via the network to it, or I can use it independently to listen to internet radio stations.

Here's how I set it up. Since I'm on FIOS, I was able to use a MOCA ethernet bridge to get the internet from the coax cable in my room. I took that ethernet cable and attached it to a 5 port switch. That gave me 4 more ethernet ports. I then simply hooked the computer and the SB Touch into the switch and I was done. I now have the music from my computer going over our network in the house.

I have been enjoying listening to my music without having it bog down my computer. I've also been enjoying the radio. I listened to my college's radio station WICB for hours, they are still one of the best college stations I have heard. I can also get all the worthwhile local stations like WTOP for news, and the Public stations too. I need to figure out when a Prairie Home Companion comes on so I can start listening to it again... All of these sound much better than regular FM, and as far as I can tell I can get damn near any station in the US.

Of course the other great thing that internet radio allows is the ability to use services like Pandora or Slacker. Slacker is a really good internet service. They sound great and have a lot of diverse stations. Pandora is a service that allows you to make your own stations based on an artist or song. It will pick others like the one you picked and then you can tell it what you like and don't like to narrow the view down. So far, I have made Buddy Holly radio, Silversun Pickups radio, Tito Puente radio, Beck radio, and Where is My Mind radio (from the Pixies song).

I overspent on all of this, but I am already really enjoying the experience and plan on taking the radio around the house since it ties into the wireless network as well. My iPod touch controls it through the wireless as well. This is the first audio toy I've bought in years, and it's a winner. I'll let you know if I find any hidden gems out there while "twisting the dial...."

I continue to love FIOS. It is stable, and fast. Not all is well internet-wise though. Here's the layout of the system currently; the main router/wireless interface is downstairs. There are two computers connected to it directly via ethernet. There are three of us sharing the 802.11G wireless. I'm upstairs using the wireless. Normally, things are fine, but more and more I think I'm running out of wireless bandwidth. Last night I tried to download a largish file and had some pretty bad speeds. As it turns out, two of the other guys were streaming over wi-fi too.

I have been thinking about getting a squeezebox (I blogged about that in my post radio reborn) and had assumed that I would use it wirelessly. After doing some reading, I don't think that's going to be a good idea. Music would have to go from my computer to the wireless router, and then from that to the squeezebox. With big music files (like FLAC or Apple lossless) and other things from my housemates via wi-fi, I don't think it would work very well.

But what to do? I had thought that I could just move the router upstairs and connect directly, but they already have two computers hooked up. It doesn't seem right to make them scramble to do something else. I'm in a rental, so it isn't like I can run my own cabling in the walls.

There are in fact a couple of newish alternatives! One uses the electrical wiring in the house for networking. You buy two of the devices, one is attached via ethernet to your router and then plugged into an electrical outlet. The other device is plugged into any other outlet in the house. You then run a cable from that to your computer/device you need networked. This method is easy, and really flexible since there are usually plenty of outlets to choose from. There can be some troubles if the outlets aren't on the same circuit, and interference on the lines could also be a problem.

I've decided to go with a MOCA (multimedia over Coax alliance) solution to my problem. This uses existing coax cable to network through the house. The set up is similar to the powerline stuff, but you need to attach it to a coax connection somewhere in the house. Here's where it gets good for me. It turns out that FIOS is already using MOCA to send info throughout the house. What this means is that I already have the initial device on the line, I just need to add another.

So, from the coax port in my room, I will attach a splitter. One side will go to my set top box for TV, the other side will go to an actiontec router. That will give me 4 ethernet jacks. Not only will I avoid the potential signal dropouts from the squeezebox, but I should get more reliable (and possibly faster) internet as well.

If you've been wondering how to network more stuff in your house, this could be your answer. If you're already on FIOS, half the equipment is already there! I'll let you know how it goes, I plan on attempting this in 2 or three months.

I went into Best Buy today looking for a particular item. They weren't really helpful, and I couldn't find what I was looking for, but I did get a chance to wander around a bit. I hadn't been in one for quite a while. The TVs were, as always, quite impressive. If I actually watched much, I would have bought one straight away.

The LPs surprised me. They didn't have many, but there they were. I had heard that vinyl had made a comeback, but I had assumed that it was mostly for DJing. They had a Springsteen, GnR, and something else that didn't really lend itself to mixing. Later o, I also saw about 5 or 6 record players, most with USB outputs.

The oddest things I saw were both from Sony. Did you know that they still make a cassette walkman? It's 40 bucks! I don't think I saw any cassette tapes around, but there were the players. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to use a cassette deck these days, mp3 players are around the same price and are oh so much better. Even the LPs included mp3 downloads of the albums. Why cassette?

The other oddity was a 300 Cd changer, it was around $300 if I remember correctly. If this was 1995, it would be the most amazing thing ever, but now? It would be far better, in all respects, to simply rip those 300 cds to your computer and then hook that up to your stereo. Even if you ripped them in a lossless format to preserve the sound quality the cost, the reliability, and the functionality would be far higher with the computer.

The sad thing is that the record players seemed more sensible than the cd players these days, how's that for irony?

I've never been so frustrated in a company. Usually, bad companies have bad products and bad support. FIOS seems to be the odd combo of a great product and lousy service. I've had them for 4 or 5 months now and I'm about done with talking to them. Here's a letter I sent them, I'm sure it'll go nowhere...

 

"This is a general complaint letter. I have to say that in my years of dealing with different service providers, Verizon is by far the most incompetent one I have ever dealt with. The service itself has been great, I can't complain about FIOS, but there have been a slew of problems around it. The hell of it is, none of them should have ever come up. What has happened? Here's a list:

 

1) The initial service installation was somehow made as a business one despite the fact that option was never offered and never mentioned when I signed up for consumer services online.

 

2) It took almost a  month to get an additional box mailed out to the house. It took 6(!) calls over that time to make anything happen. I was told that the problem stemmed from your inability to cancel a service call.

 

3) When I complained about how long it took to get the box delivered, the guy offered to give me 3 months of free HBO, Cinemax, etc. I flatly told him no since I don't watch that stuff. Well, lo and behold, he added it anyway and I was then charged for it when that 3 months ran out.

 

4) The latest issue involved my billing. I signed up for auto pay, got both the printed confirmation, and the online one. I logged into my account today to find that it did not use my card and I still owed for last month despite the fact that right below that the website said that I was enrolled in autopay. I called in and was informed that "the customer" had requested the credit card be taken off the account. Needless to say, "this customer" did no such thing.

 

I want to be clear, the FIOS service has been very good, and every person I have talked to has been very nice. Useless, but nice. I thank my lucky stars that nothing has gone wrong, I don't know if I could deal with the prospect of having to get an actual problem solved when the incidental things, the things that are supposed to be easy have been so maddeningly frustrating. I will continue to use FIOS as long as it stays reliable, but Verizon has most defiantly lost a potential wireless customer. I hope that you can improve your behind the scenes operations, they really are awful."

 

Isaac Crawford

App Gallery - Welcome to mysqueezebox.com!: ""

I had heard about the Squeezebox from Logitec for years, but I never paid any attention. My loss... Listening to the radio was always fun in the past. Part of it was the thrill of the hunt, cycling through different stations in order to find something that fit my mood was a common pastime. The problem is that FM is a total wasteland now. Even the satellite stations don't do much for me.

Here's where the squeezebox comes into play. It is a device that allows you to stream your music collection to a sound system. No big deal, right? An airport express will do the same thing. Ah, but the squeezebox allows you to stream internet radio, even if your computer is off. In addition, it is easy to move it around or add more devices in your house. These can be linked together or operated separately. Logitec makes devices that you would hook to an existing system or stand alone devices much like a table radio.

There are over 20,000 stations by my quick count that you can get on there. In addition, there are services like the BBC, classical music organization, and the live performance archive that you can play on there. Then there are the customizable stations like Pandora, Last, and Slacker. You pick a song or group and they will play songs similar to them.

I love the music on my computer and listen to it all the time but it is nice to be able to get exposed to new music too. I think the squeezebox touch (as well as an app for my iPod touch) will be my next audio purchase. I'll hook it up to a table radio I own right now and in the future I'll hook it up to a pair of active speakers via its digital output. Stay tuned, don't touch that dial! I'll be back soon with more exciting audio news from Isaac!:-)

OK, well maybe need is a bit of a strong term, but my trusty macbook is showing its age. One of the new features in iTunes is that it will automatically take higher bitrate songs and convert them to 128k bitrates when you transfer them to an ipod. Basically, the higher the bitrate the song is encoded, the higher the quality of the audio, but the more space it takes up. Being a inveterate audio snob, most of my collection has been ripped at 256k and sometimes higher, but I'll ever hear the difference between that and 128k in the car or on the go with my iPod. So this new feature is great, I can save a ton of space on my ipod (which equals more songs on my ipod) and still maintain the higher quality at home.

So why do I need a new computer? I set my ipod up to sync before I went to bed, I knew this was going to take a while to do, I figured that overnight would be plenty of time. Wrong. Here it is 10 hours later and it's still churning away. It still has 1000 songs to go! This is the first big, processor intensive task I've had to do, and my poor computer just is a bit long in the tooth for it. I've had my macbook for about 4 years now, so I guess it's time, but it's going to take me several months before I can pop for a new one. SIGH... It's the curse of working with new, shiny computers all day, the desire never has time to go away...

Wow.


No really, just Wow.

OK, I'll expand on that, but just a bit:-) Honestly, when I drove to work this morning, I was worried that the iPad might turn out to be "OK." Usually, Ok is fine, but this is Apple and the standards are set quite a bit higher. If it turned out to be competent it would have been a total let down. As it turns out, it's another amazing device from Apple.

Why is it amazing? I've been reading the haters online for a while, they all seem to say that any given number of netbooks could "do" what the iPad does, why would you waste your money? With Apple, it is never just about what the product can do, how you do it is just as important. I can assure you that no netbooks works the way the iPad does.

The touch interface is unbelievable. I don't just mean that it is responsive, quick, etc. I mean that it is an incredible experience to use. Surfing the web on it is a revelation. You interact with the web as though it were a book or magazine, you touch it, you move it around.

I know all this sounds a little over the top, but maybe this little anecdote will help explain what I'm talking about. My manager Michael told us that the original Mac had brought the desktop and mouse into being as a popular way to use a computer. As we move our arm, a pointer on a screen moves in tandem. It does work pretty well, but the iPad is the first computer to do touch screen really well. Before too long, using a mouse will seem as odd to us as using the command line does to most people these days.

He was more right than he knew. I used the iPad off and on over 8 hours today and now using my Macbook feels downright clunky. It's odd having the screen as just something to look at, it's weird to adjust things remotely. It feels just plain disconnected. I will have an iPad at some point, I'm going to do well to resist the 3G version for a little while when it comes out. In the meantime, I encourage you to go to an Apple store or even a Best Buy and try just surfing the web with it, the more you do, the harder it will be to put down....

I haven't been keeping up with how facebook looks because I don't usually log into facebook anymore. I'm still getting all of my updates though. How? I use a program that fetches my friend's statuses and picture updates. I can also comment on them and post my own comments and status as well.

The program is called socialite, you can download it here. It also fetches all of my google reader feeds. You can also use it for twitter, flickr, and general rss reading as well. This one is Mac only, but there's probably other programs out there like this for you windows folks. I've found it a great way to get the important stuff from facebook and avoid all of the ads, stupid games, and the inevitable format changes. It's nice having a program that will do my updates for me and allow my web browsing to be just that, browsing.

The new iPad really has me excited. If you're sort of "meh" about the specs, I encourage you to take a look at the video Apple has produced. There you can see people handling it and using it and that makes a big difference. I think I "get" what Apple had in mind for this product, and I am beyond psyched about it.

One thing that did concern me was the fact that Flash will not be supported on it. Flash is an Adobe product and it's used all over the web, but it occurred to me that I didn't know how much Flash I used in my usual browsing. I downloaded a plug-in that blocks Flash content but allows you to download it if you feel like it.

What a revelation! As it turns out, most of the Flash that I run across consists of ads. Pages load much faster without them, and there is a lot less distractions and annoying things when Flash is blocked. In short, I barely notice the absence of Flash really isn't a big deal for me in my usual browsing routine. Granted, I never use Hulu, I can definitely understand people's consternation over not being able to see their TV shows.

So is this a fatal flaw? I don't think so. There are other, better ways to display video content on the web. H264 encoding and HTML5 have the potential to unseat Flash. Google is supporting both of these formats on Youtube and Vimeo is using HTML5 in limited quantities as well. Right now, limitations in playback seem to browser based. Between those two open standards and Apple's refusal to use Flash (supposedly for battery reasons although there are plenty of conspiracy theories around), I wonder how long Adobe will be able to maintain people's enthusiasm for Flash. With all of the iPods, iPhones, and now iPads not using it, that's a lot of the mobile market. Time will tell. In the meantime, I heartily suggest using a Flash blocker for speedier internet access. I'm using a Safari plug-in called "clicktoflash." You can get it here.

One thing that using wave made me think about is Google's new Operating system called Chrome. It is still in the development phase, but we already know the basic idea behind it. The way that Google sees it, most people tend to do most stuff on the internet, so why have stuff on the computer at all? Why not just have all of your data and applications on the web?

A wild idea right? Well, not really. Many people already use webmail instead of a mail program on the computer. Google has already shown how useful productivity apps like word processors and spreadsheets can be online through Google office. How many of you use an online photo site like Flicker or Facebook to store your pictures? Banking, streaming music, shopping, watching videos and TV shows, even data storage via cloud servers are now all done online. The Chrome OS is essentially a browser that allows you to have very fast access to everything on the net. The OS itself will actually be at Google, not on the computer really, so viruses and worms won't be able to affect the computer. Security is all taken care of online, there won't be any reason to try to gain access to the computer because there essentially won't be anything on it.

In theory, your computer should be as fast as your internet connection. It's an exciting concept, and I think it will appeal to a lot of people that consume content (as oppose to making things like music, video, and other media) and don't want to have to deal with the messiness of backing up data and security issues.

Using Google Wave gave me just an inkling of the potential of doing stuff without an OS on the computer. It will allow you to work in ways that we are just now starting to dream of. Something like wave has the potential to merge word processing, email, wiki creation, and IM on one tab of your browser. Applications will no longer be programs you run on your machine but simply links along the side of your screen. Now that I have FIOS, I can see the potential of online apps. Honestly, I am having trouble imagining anything that I do on a computer that couldn't be done totally online. Well, eventually, right now I can't do what I want online because there aren't equivalents for everything I do online yet. There's no reason they couldn't be though...

Chrome won't be for everyone, not until everyone can get unlimited access to fast internet, but it is an exciting new choice that should be coming in the near future. I can see my next laptop being one running Chrome. I'll have a big rig for doing my audio, photo, and video stuff on, but for around the house and normal stuff, Chrome will probably be all I need. These are exciting times...

I got a google wave invite several days ago in my inbox. I let it sit there until my brother called up last night and wanted to mess with it. It's a very interesting program.

At first, I thought it was just another instant messaging program (IM). You can use it like that, but I think it's a bit cumbersome as compared to other IM clients. One twist Google has put on things is that you can edit the other person's text, and you can both see that happen in real time. Hmmmm.... maybe it is more than an IM client.

Wave also has a word processing capability. It's limited, but perfectly capable for normal stuff. So imagine this, you can type up a document and share it with someone else, or a whole group. They can then add to it, edit it, append it, etc. It's an ideal tool for any collaborative project, for brainstroming if nothing else.

Unlike an IM client, you can leave what you've done up and then come back to it later to see what the others have added. So Wave is kind of like a cross between an IM client and email, but everyone you have added to the wave can see the edits in real time so it's also like a really responsive Wiki application too.

There are all sorts of different content you can put in as well. Here's a wave I've made up with a youtube video embedded in it.



It's just as easy to put in Google maps. There are other gadgets out there for Wave, but I haven't had a chance to mess with them just yet. One of the ones the Google team used that is interesting allows you to put the wave in your blog. That allows all of the same functionality of the wave, the interaction, the editing, etc. in a blog post! As developers work on this, the functionality will continue to expand.

So Google wave is a word processor, IM client, wiki maker, collaborative tool, and email all rolled into one thing. It takes some getting used to in order to take full advantage of it. I can't say I'm there just yet. I'm still stuck in the either it's an email OR an IM session mode. I do think that with more use, I'll get into the rhythm of using it. It's still early in the game for Wave, but I see big things ahead for it. We just need more gadgets for it, a little smoother operation, and most importantly, a critical mass of people using it. Watch out for Google, they have some big things coming down the pike!

Everything is still going well. I had been getting annoyed over the jagginess I was getting while watching hockey on my 2006 macbook. I figured that the integrated graphics just weren't up to decoding the HD stream on the fly.

I fiddled around a bit tonight and found a solution. It turns out that the jagginess only occurred at certain window sizes in the viewer. Well, at most sizes really. I'm assuming that at certain image sizes there is less interpolation going on and therefore less processing by my wimpy graphics chipset. Once I found the sweet spot, the image quality was quite a bit better and the game was much more enjoyable There is still a fair amount of smearing on the action, but I'll forgive my computer that issue. I'm assuming that once I go to a new computer, with a real graphics card, there will be no more problems with the TV stream.

I got my FIOS installed last night. OMG! Not only do I now have internet in my house, it is freaking amazing. My downloads are silly fast and webpages open up almost instantly. Youtube is a revelation...

I also got a TV package. There's a digital cable box in my room but I don't have a TV. I am watching TV on my laptop computer. ON. MY. COMPUTER!!! This may be old hat for some of you guys, but I think it's awesome. All I needed was a firewire cable connecting my box and my computer and a few free programs. Now I have HDTV on my computer. Seems to me that I should be able to record this, but I haven't figured out how yet.

I may never leave my room again... :-)

That's a question I got a lot when I sold photo gear and I'm still getting it now. Last night, a lady was comparing the regular glossy screen to the anti-glare one on the laptops. They do look different but she was distressed because she didn't know which one was "right."

*PISH* Give me a color slide any day:-) Seriously, there is something satisfying about making a physical object that actually exists. Making a string of numbers whose appearance varies considerably depending on how it is rendered just doesn't feel the same. Or maybe I'm just old fashioned.

I do think that the analog still has a place in this world, even if it's only in the way people think about stuff. Are we hard wired to think in an analog fashion about certain things or is it just the way we were taught?

My first purchase as an Apple employee was an iPod touch. A 32GB one to be exact. I am beyond happy with it. Not only does it make sitting on the train much easier, it's really helping me out at work. No really! I constantly use the calculator, and I jot down various notes that help me out as I talk to customers.

It has also helped with my internet situation. Since my only regular internet connection is at work, I have been taking my laptop in every day to do my online stuff. No longer. Now I just take my iPod in. I can do my email and facebook stuff pretty easily with it. It has also allowed me to keep up with my podcasts. I don't keep my itunes library on my laptop's hard drive, it's just too big. That meant that when I wanted to get the latest editions of my podcasts, I would have to take my computer and my external hard drive into the library along with the necessary cables, power cords, etc. Now I can download the latest ones on my ipod and then sync them to my music library when I get home. I had no luck researching that little scenario before I got it, so now everyone else can know about this!

I'm just dipping my toes into the apps ocean. So far, my favorite apps are the facebook one, stanza, and bejeweled. Stanza in particular is an amazing program. With it, you get an excellent ebook reader and easy access to thousands and thousands of free books. I need to find a good blogging app, does anyone out there have any suggestions? My favorite blogging program (Marsedit) hasn't shown any interest in making an iPhone/iPod version.

I'm already plotting my next purchase. I've got my eye on the new 27" quad core iMac that will be coming out in November. Not sure when I'll be able to afford it, but I will have one eventually. To see the new Imacs is to covet them. No really, they are stunningly beautiful, Apple has really outdone itself this time. It will also serve as my TV. It'll be about the right size for my smallish room. All it takes is some time to save for it, I hope I won't go too crazy in the meantime...

How many times have you heard that they don't build cars like they used to? All I can say is thank God for that. This video is illuminating, check out the differences in the inside during the crash.

Man, last night was perhaps the most brutal night's sleep I've ever had. I tossed and turned and woke up feeling like I got beat up. I ached all over and had a splitting headache.

The good news is that I had a rather vivid, pleasant dream. I was visiting a childhood friend and his family in Hong Kong, not that they have ever been there as far as I know. I also saw one of my college roommates there. I now realize that my completely truthful conversation with him sounds as weird as anything else in the dream. He asked me what I had been doing and I told him that I had been in Yemen, but that my MS has kind of grounded me recently...

Anyway, it was time to leave. I was going to take the train to the airport, here's where it gets cool. I walked down the street and got into an elevator to take me up to the tracks. Strangely, the elevator got slightly smaller as it went up. Then it started moving sideways. Just as I started to freak out, a window revealed itself and my train tickets were printed up for me! I was on the track, on the way to the main train station. Pretty cool.

At the station, I was supposed to find the area to board my particular car. The cars were similar to the old fashioned cars on trains, or maybe a carriage. They were tall, with lots of glass, and there were two benches facing each other. Cars of a certain destination would cycle through a small eddy-like area and you were supposed to jump on as it came by. Well, mine came and went, it didn't slow down or stop for me. So I got on another, figuring that they were going to the same place anyway. But then mine came back! So I jumped off and tried to get onto the correct one.

I ended up missing both, but not to worry. There was a keypad recessed in the wall with some instructions. I punched in the general direction I wanted to go and a small compartment opened up. As I punched in my specific destination, a closet opened up so I could store my luggage and we got underway. Once again, I was in my own train car. It was pretty small, people that are claustrophobic would probably freak out, especially with the car's inclination to get smaller as you got underway. It was also good that I was by myself, no one else would have fit.

Anyway, I enjoyed that, I like trains, and having my own car was quite a treat. Who knows, maybe sometime in the future we'll get to experience all that for real.

Recently, I had gotten some inquires from a local museum wondering if I wanted to do a video project. When I asked what it was, I kept getting told that it was an oral history project. That sounds good, but it was a little vague. Still, the idea of shooting a documentary, however short, was appealing. I was finally directed to another museum's site to see what had made everyone so excited about getting this underway.

I quickly decided that this is yet another generational issue involving technology and information. The clips are just that, clips of people talking. Apparently, they are shown, "multi-media" style at the museum using a touch screen interface. This really impressed the people that saw this display. Here's what I saw... I saw some rather amateurish looking clips put into categories depending on what they were talking about. There was no narrative, there was no coherence, and I don't think there was much point.

When I got to sit down with one of the board members and tried to figure out what it was they wanted to do, I was amazed. They wanted to hire me (or this other guy) to run the camera and edit the footage. They also may have needed me to do the "multi-media" installation at the museum. Ummm, what decade are we living in?

I had to break it to them that it doesn't take much of a genius to record people talking, or even to string clips together. Just as digital photography has made acceptable looking images easy to get, digital video cameras have made it really easy to get acceptable looking video without knowing much.

Of course, if I shot the stuff for them, it would look much better. That's still the difference between a hack and someone that cares. Lighting and composition will always separate the men from the boys. Of course she didn't really understand what it was you need to pay for when it comes to video production like this. Like I said, shooting it is a piece of cake, editing is always work, but it wouldn't be too bad for a project like this. What you end up paying for is the ability to organize images and sound in order to tell a story, or in this case, history.

This had never crossed anyone's mind as far as I can tell. They were ready to pay me money to simply record stuff. They were then going to take those clips and put them on a screen via a touch screen interface. Like I said before, I think there is a generational gap at work here. What role do documents and information in general play in learning history? And where does that information belong?

To many people, especially older ones, the act of getting information transferred into bytes is an amazing and unknowable process. The fact that it happens at all is seen as a miracle. In their world, you need to have lots of arcane technical knowledge to do that, that's why you have to pay people for that. To people that are comfortable with these things (like everyone under the age of 25 and some of us older folks), it is as normal as putting on our shoes. For us, getting the footage or image is understood. What we want to know is what are you going to do with that info?

If teaching history is the main reason for recording this stuff at all, why are you going to stick it in a museum? A museum in Mathews county of all places... Once again, for people in the younger generations, information does not belong in a building where it is subject to opening and closing hours. It is not meant to have limited access. If you want information to be useful, put it on the web so that anyone can have access to it. At one time, museums were very good for that. Nowadays, they are much better suited for showing objects and hosting educational activities.

So I am going to speak to the board in December. I'm hoping to be able to explain the difference between recording data and using data to create something useful. I'm also hoping to convince them that any of them can run a video camera. No, it won't look as good, but it will be a hell of a lot cheaper. Sometimes quantity is more important than quality... If they do want that data to be made into something useful, the last thing they want to do is limit access to it. I will try to introduce them to the internet...

That's not really fair, they do know what the internet is, but they seem to have a very limited view of what it is. Older people tend to see the internet as something akin to TV. You tune it in and see what's on. It doesn't occur to them that they should contribute. I do wish that people would stop being afraid of technology. I'll try to do my part in a couple of weeks and hopefully if they ever want to do an actual documentary, they'll call me...

I had noticed my daily hit rate on my site had been going down recently. The other day, a Google bot crawled my website and suddenly I'm getting all sorts of hits. Not only are some of my old popular pages (demand curves, profit is important, in defense of black sabbath, etc.) getting hit again, but Im getting hits on pages that never got them before. I have no idea why my numbers dropped off so much, but I'm amazed that the Google bot has done as much as it has. Glad it stopped by!

One other thing that is interesting, about 30% of visits to my site last longer than 5 minutes. That may not sound like a big deal, but it means that people are reading stuff. Here's an amazing statistic, as of tonight, 10% of the last 200 visits to my site have lasted longer than an hour! That makes a guy feel good!

I just finished reading "Neuromancer" by William Gibson. It's one of those books that I've been meaning to read for a long time. Along with several others, it was the book that launched the whole "cyberpunk" genre in science fiction. What's that? It's hard to pin it down exactly, but there's a lot of being on the net in a virtual way, total technology domination of the world, amoral and vicious characters, and a general world weariness... The original "Max Headroom" gave you a taste of it. You can also look to the "Ghost in the Shell" movies and series to get a more modern take on on the genre.

Neuromancer war written in 1984, and it shows. To me, it reeks of the 80's. I remember what the future was supposed to hold, a never-ending cold war with the soviets, japanese corporations running the world, and a general disintegration of all moral orders. As a story, it's OK. Truth be told, sci-fi books have always left me flat, but at least I was entertained.

The most interesting thing for me was how his vision of the future looked and how closely it resembled today's reality. Gibson's view of cyberspace is still in the future. In his world, cyberspace is an all-encompassing virtual world. When you "jack in" you leave this world and enter a totally different one. You float in space, appearances are dynamic and can shift at an instance. We're still a ways from that although I wouldn't argue about how far away. Technology moves so fast that it's difficult to have any good idea about what's going to happen even in the near future.

That's where Gibson had some trouble. The birth of the internet as we know it today happened 5 or 6 years after he wrote this book. He understood the extent of information that would be involved, but not the amount. At one point, we were supposed to try and even conceive of thousands of megabytes being transmitted across cyberspace. Can you imagine? Thousands of megabytes! LOL, I have 100,000 (or so) megabytes of storage on my computer, I can't really imagine what something like google of you-tube goes through, and neither could Gibson at the time.

What we might consider the more pedestrian things that he missed are actually much more influential that his big ideas. Things like cell phones are totally absent from his world. Along with that is the ubiquitousness of the internet. In his world, only certain people with the right equipment had access. In our world, anyone with a decent cell phone has access.

I'm not picking on Gibson, nobody could see how things were going to unfold. It's a good lesson to be taught from time to time, even the most visionary of artists can't imagine how little things like cell phones will totally transform the world. We need to keep that in mind whenever we engage in long term plans. Things in the future will not be the same as they are now. That seems obvious enough, but we tend to only think of the big things that will change, not the incredible number of little things that totally transform day to day life. It's also important to remember than things can indeed get better. Technology doesn't have to be dehumanizing the way it is in so may sci-fi books. The internet has made the world a smaller one, and I think that's real progress.

My father got a new laptop the other day. He has FINALLY gotten a Mac, now all I need to do is get mom switched over and I'll have my computer troubleshooting life taken care of... Anyway, I moaned and groaned a bit about the new macbooks because they dropped the firewire port off of them. I still don't like that, but my father had never heard of firewire, so the new one was fine for him.

I gotta say, the new macbooks are pretty sweet. I shouldn't really be surprised, Apple keeps doing this and it should be expected by now... It is noticeably zipper than mine despite having the same clock speed and amount of RAM. There have been enough improvements that the overall speed has noticeably improved. I didn't really care about the new manufacturing process, but the result really is nice. This is the first computer I've felt that I like to touch, the aluminum has a very nice tactile feel to it. The screen is nice and bright, and the keyboard is fine. I do like the trakpad, I already miss some of the multi-touch features. In short, I imagine that I will end up owning one of these sooner or later. I'll get around the firewire limitation somehow (damn you Steve Jobs). I didn't think my computer was all that bad until I used the new one...

He also got an internet thingy for his computer. Since he's out in the sticks, cable and DSL were out of the question. Satellite is just too expensive. This thing uses the phone company's network, a 3g one I suppose. It's not bad. It's not quite up to a cable modem type of speed, but it is a huge improvement over the dial up he was on before. So those of you out of reach of cable modems might want to look into this, it's an easy way to get into the 21st century...

And no, that's not a good GAHH! Don't get me wrong, the new additions sound really nice. The aluminum case and the new graphics chips are great upgrades. I'm not to keen on the no button trackpad, but who knows, maybe I'd get used to it. Also, I think the new two tone look is fugly, but that obviously doesn't affect the usefulness. My gripe, and it's a big one, is that there is no firewire port on the macbook! Yeah, I guess I could spring for the macbook pro, but that's 2 grand and a larger computer. It's just a port Apple, $700 (and less) windows machines have this port, it's ridiculous that the new macbook doesn't have one.

I had been thinking about my next computer being an audio one. Without a firewire port, that looks doubtful. USB is fine, if a little slow, for transferring files, but audio and video uses really need a firewire port. I can't believe this... I may actually buy a windows computer for my audio work. I'd never get it near the internet, there's just too many problems with all the viruses and malware out there. The necessary anti-virus stuff causes even more problems as far as I can tell. ARGGH! Why couldn't they put that port on a reasonably priced machine?

I was only out of this country for a couple of years. Before I left, I was pretty up on the technology that I like, not so much while I was away. I am amazed at the progress that has happened in those two years.

Digital cameras continue to get better and better. DSLRs have more resolution, larger sensors, and now have live view and HD video! I'm still waiting for a small camera with a larger sensor. There's some interesting prototypes being shown at this year's Photokina. Hopefully they will see the light of day at some point.

I happened to look at a Crutchfield catalog over at my dad's place. I used to sell car audio systems after I got out of college and the stuff today is almost unrecognizable. When I sold stuff, tape decks were still pretty popular, now, there are decks without a CD player! It's all about iPods, flash memory, etc. Add to that satellite radio and HD radio, and you have a real music entertainment system in the car... Any of thise things would be welcome in the vehicle I'm using now. I was driving around and flipping through the radio stations (FM hunting I call it) looking for something to listen to. The best thing I found was "18 and Life" by Skid Row. That was the BEST thing I found... Bring on the large music storage and satellite radio!

There are also things that I'm not as interested in but are just as amazing. Navigations systems, dvd systems, multi-zone music and video.. WOW! I'm wondering what all that will be like once I get another car. It's exciting to think about.

Since I've come back and started watching TV again, I've been stunned with the hype surrounding HDTV. I actually watch one, and it's nice. There's no denying the better picture but honestly, after the first couple of times I saw an HDTV program, I didn't notice it any more. This seems like a real technical advance, but I don't think it does much to improve the experience.

One thing that really does improve things is the surround sound that usually comes with the HDTV channels. That's something I learned way back when I was selling surround sound systems. Even with a so-so TV, the experience could be dramatic with a good sound system. I have fallen in love with concerts on channels like VH-1, with the right system, it is amazing...

So when the time comes for me to buy a TV (it'll happen eventually) I'll look for the best deal I can, but I won't obsess over the picture quality. I will get a nice sound system though...