Chasing My Own Tale
My friend Bo sent this to me. It’s a little slow, but someone put a lot of work into these graphics.
You can send a postcard from OMSI now: <http://www.omsi.edu/online/> is the page that shows most of OMSI’s online activities (at least the ones that are okay to show right now. I can’t wait until I can put Forest Puzzles up there.
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This was my travel plan from last week’s business trip. The only change was that I ended up on an earlier flight on the way home, the first leg of which was in United’s Economy Plus featuring 5″ of additional leg room. Nice for a free upgrade, not worth purchasing though.
--------------- Flight 574 United Airlines Inc Confirmation Numbers: ZCWTNI Depart: Portland Intl Arpt (PDX) 06:34 AM Arrive: O'Hare Intl Arpt (ORD) CHICAGO, Terminal 1 12:22 PM Seat 19C Flight 536 Depart: O'Hare Intl Arpt (ORD) CHICAGO, Terminal 1 02:00 PM Arrive: Logan Intl Arpt (BOS) BOSTON, Terminal C 05:25 PM Seat 23C ---------------- Avis Confirmation Number: 00710940US6 Pick Up: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 Logan Intl Arpt (Terminal) Phone: 617-561-3500 ---------------- The Westin Waltham-Boston Confirmation Number: C531347547 The Westin Waltham-Boston 70 Third Ave Waltham Ma 02451 Us Phone: 781-290-5600 Check In: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 3:00 PM Check Out: Friday, September 07, 2007 1:00 PM ---------------- Flight 881 United Airlines Inc Confirmation Numbers: ZCWTNI Depart: Logan Intl Arpt (BOS) BOSTON, Terminal C 09:00 AM Friday Arrive: O'Hare Intl Arpt (ORD) CHICAGO, Terminal 1 10:37 AM Friday Seat 17D Flight 929 United Airlines Inc Confirmation Numbers: ZCWTNI Depart: O'Hare Intl Arpt (ORD) CHICAGO, Terminal 1 12:20 PM Arrive: Portland Intl Arpt (PDX) 02:38 PM Seat 13D ----------------
So in the last couple of months Amy and I went on vacation, Planar purchased Clarity Visual Systems, the Home Theater business unit launched, I had my 32nd birthday. In place of the journal entries that should have been coming from these events, You’ll have to settle for the three articles I posted: http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/articles/.
More news coming this weekend.
Poynter Online – Writing Tool #13: Show and Tell
On the Ladder of Abstraction:
An old essay by John Updike begins, “We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.” That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion? The answer is in his second sentence: “Consider the beer can.” To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. “Pop-top” and “beer” are at the bottom of the ladder, “aesthetic experience” at the top.
Over at Design Observer: writings about design & culture: Dmitri Siegel: Bartelby™
In his essay “Free Time,†philosopher Theodor Adorno explains how our time away from work has gradually been filled with economically productive activities masquerading as leisure. He further explains how we become habituated to this functionalization, so that when we have free time we don’t feel relaxed, but instead feel an anxiety to function, commonly known as boredom.
The article prompted me to see if I should add Bartelby to my Amazon wishlist… which I could but then realized that Melville’s work is almost all available through Project Gutenburn’s Archive.
Both the essay by Dmitri Siegel and the short story by Melville made for some great reading. However I’d like to learn more about Adorno’s work as that “Free Time” essay sounds like a major problem in my life at times.
From USA Today: “Retailers lack hot item to ignite toy sales”
[...] They are pulling more than price cuts out of their bag of tricks, however, to draw traffic today–the traditional start of the holiday shopping season. That includes stocking up on some nostalgic items, such as the Slinky, which is turning 60 this year–along with the leading edge of the baby boom.
It also includes attempts to stand out from rivals with exclusives. At New York’s FAO Schwarz, a Hot Wheels Custom Car Factory kiosk will give kids, or gift givers, the opportunity to add special colors, designs and wheels using a touch-screen monitor by Planar Systems.
Creative marketing is critical for the holiday season that provides the toy industry about 50% of revenue. [...]
It’s a little out of context, but it’s great to see Planar mentioned in the USA Today. These kiosks from Planar have been a big new project, and it’s nice to see that we got some traction from the press release that went out about them.
In fact I’ve been finding a few interesting Planar references including this one on our 3-D displays.
This is a list of the ways that we came up with at Hot Pepper to dole out assignments:
The key here was to break up tasks into .5 hour minimum to 4 hr maximum elements, always include the Do date and the Due date, and the time budgeted to complete the task. Optionally each task was also given an ‘evil twin’ task of QA by another person.
For the first post of September, we’ll be covering August and the last few weeks with QuickNotes™…
1) I’ve got a new laptop: 15″ PowerBook. Woo Hoo! It’s teh hot! Seriously, switching from the plastic-cased iBook to the aluminium wraped 15″ PB has given me a new appreciation for thermodynamics. (But still the PB is FAST! So much faster than the iBook.)
2) Tiger is okay, but little to write home about. The UI inconsistencies in OS X from the system and iApps perspective is becoming more obvious. But I could be just railing against the fact that part of iChat crashes on a regular basis, just after I switched back to using it instead of Adium because iChat can now do multiple accounts including Jabber accounts.
3) General instability is the call of the day. Some things are craping out way too easily. I’m letting Steve use my iBook while he’s out in Astoria for school, and I’ll be putting Panther on it.
4) Went and saw part of the Woodburn NEDRA electric drag races. Took some video and put together some movies for John Wwayland over at plasmaboy racing.
5) The new iTunes interface is an unecessary change unless it’s carried out to the rest of the iApps. The name for it seems to be “Polished Metal” as opposed to the older (and reviled) “Brushed Metal”. The iPod Nano looks cool but it took me days to find out it was solid-state flash and not hard drive-based. The ROKR iPhone is for SUKRs. Totally crippled and nothing new hardware-wise. Apple can’t build the whole widget, so the widget is a total compromise.
6) Our living rooom television died. Would like to replace it with a flat LCD, but they’re still more money than I want to invest in Home Entertainment. If anyone’s got a recommendation for a $200 to $300 television with *LOTS* of input and output jacks, let me know.
7) I’ve got a freelance project launching in the next could of days. I’ll point to it once it’s got a bit of burn-in time.
I’ve been seeing a new testing probe-bot that’s crawling around Contact forms. It’s already hit LazerQuick where we’ve patched it and just last nite it hit my feedback form on OrderSomewhereChaos. Nasty little bugger made me dive back into Perl code that I’ve not touched in 6 or 7 years. The mail is being sent to the (probably compromised) AOL account of “jrubin3456@aol.com”. They’re looking to find tons of spamming reflectors. I’m sure they’ll find *LOTS* of them.
9) Amy and I are off to see the final regular-season game for the Timbers! Mighty Mighty Timbers!
“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.
Slow day today, though it should have been more busy. Got my machine at work set up to do some file sharing over the net, though it doesn’t work perfectly for plug-in file transfers, but I like the graphics that I worked up for it. http://orion.omsi.edu/
I also started a small page for a friend of a friend. It’s just starting out. Can you tell where I stole some ideas from? Why develop two sites when you can just make one? http://www.omsi.edu/~rosso/superboy/
I was also looking through some of the work I’ve done before… like the one I made for Amy. http:///sorry.it’s.private.com/:)
I renamed my hard drives to Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, after the stars that make up the shoulders of the constellation Orion.
I still haven’t put together the archiving solution for the page… It’s on the to-do list. Along with the Forest Puzzles to-do list and the Cave Inn to-do list and the Zoo to-do list and the PSU to-do list… Need I continue?
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