Chasing My Own Tale
“These results are supportive of research by Jensen (2001), which states that participants listening to classical music are more likely to disclose personal information than those listening to no music.” – Usability News, 6.1 2004
It would be interesting to have music playing in the background of a job interview, or some other highly structured interaction and contrast classical with other music forms.
Um. Colin Mockery, a singing airplane, Mr Bean and Harry Potter… together again for the first time.
Great interview on Wired with one Dr. Michael Bull. He talks about how the iPod and other portable music devices are used to control one’s environment. Below is an excerpt, read the full interview with Dr. Bull at Wired.
For example, a lot of people use it to go to work, for commuting. I found that they use the same music on a regular basis. They will often play the same half-dozen tunes for three months, and each part of the journey has its own tune…
It gives them control of the journey, the timing of the journey and the space they are moving through. It’s a generalization, but the main use (of the iPod) is control. People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction … and they’re having a good time. That can’t be understated — it gives them a lot of pleasure.
So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.
Actually the protest is interesting, but I was more drawn to the idea of how quickly I could revise and add a new layout to OrderSomewhereChaos.com.
The Grey layout will be the default for today, but will remain in the Layout list after today as well.
Obviously Fark has done this for every state… it was simply Oregon’s Turn for the 25 minutes of fame…
Cool.
I was running around BlogDex last night and it turns out that my Python spoof got linked from commonhouse.net which is the blog of Quinn who’s involved with Danny and friends with lots of San Francisco digital media types.
Maybe actually interesting posts would generate some more traffic here.
After working out a particularly strange solution for a client’s web publishing system mess, I decided that before the client’s developers poured too much time into it, I really ought to figure out if the solution would actually work.
Essentially, what needs to happen is for JavaScript to control Server-Side Includes.
“But Ross!”, you say. “SSI’s are executed on the server, well before any JavaScript gets executed. Anything you do will require passing back a Post via a form, or at the least, a query string… right?”
Not quite. It turns out that SSIs can be used to parse the HTTP_COOKIE environment variable. Set this up with the right statements and the site should be able to make JavaScripts control the SSIs.
My demo? My own site of course: rossolson.com also known as ordersomewherechaos.com.
As of late last night, instead of the layout always changing every hour, you can now control the layout with a little pulldown menu in the navigation bar. The pulldown has a JavaScript call that sets a cookie and then reloads the page that it’s on.
The code that I used to have simply rotating the layouts now looks to see if the cookie is set first. If it is, the layout is chosen appropriately. If it’s not then it’s a free for all and your get the layout you’re given.
Earlier this week I wrote up a request for someone to build a TAP: the Traveler’s Access Point. It’s a idea for a very flexible and portable access point that I could basically take any where and work with. I got back a few interesting responses:
Jock at Pocket Monkey.com pointed out:
ASUS WL-330 and it looks like this is about $60. (Froogle)
Tony at demarctech.com wrote:
Hmm we are getting close
Reliawave RWV 802.11a/b/g Outdoor AP/Router/Hotspot Controller
Also we are getting away from PCMCIA as this is a very costly part of a unit plus as is not PCI/DMA is takes more processing power for the CPU. What we are working on next is a main board with 2 mini-pci and 2 Ethernet and a sub board with 4 more mini-pci.
Brian at beattie home.net simply stated:
Sure $500 quantity 10
Money being what it is, I won’t be diving into this right now, but it’s still something rolling around in the back of my head…
This was from a set of photos that I received called the best Photos of 2003. If you look careful you can see that the animal’s tail is vertical… That means it’s not a mammilian aquatic… it’s a fish.
Surfing (Opens in new window)
A big fish.
First you need to set your preferred shell to be bash. bash is wonderful as shells go. Here’s how to have it full time in Mac OS X.
You can make bash your default shell with NetInfo Manager in the Utilities folder. Open NetInfo Manager, select users, select the user whose default shell you want to change, click the lock to make changes, and then find the shell property and change the value from /bin/tcsh to /bin/bash. Save your changes and exit from NetInfo Manager.
Now that you’ve got bash, you can use these handy hot keys from ugu.com:
Yay for bash!
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