06.25.01
Posted in General
at 12 pm
I bought a cheap ($50) MP3 player about a month ago. I did this mostly to find out what I like and don’t like about MP3 players. Here’s what I want my next MP3 player to have, above the one I’ve got:
Need longer battery life: This one only has about 5 hours. 10 is a minimum, 40 ought to be standard. Amy’s got a portable CD player that will go for weeks on a single pair of AA’s.
The ability to delete tracks: I’d love to be able to remove tracks from the device without having to hook the thing into a PC.
Volume control needs a higher top end: This machine barely gets up to audible by 80, and tops off at comfortable in a chatty room at 100. Wanna be out on the street or riding a bus? Nyhuh-uh.
Built-in headphones that wind up or a built-in speaker: It makes sense that a portable device like this would be listened to with headphones 90% of the time. I bought a pair of headphones that have the wire wind up into the headphone itself. I really think that the device could do that as well. Or at least have a speaker that could be activated.
No hiss when not playing a file: It’s the strangest thing. There’s a hiss whenever the machine is on, event when a track isn’t playing. It seems like the audio circuits should be dead if the player isn’t playing. Maybe this is related to the battery drain? At the very least, if the MP3 player is playing a silent part of a track, I don’t want to hear hiss. (And no, it’s not the headphones.)
Remember what track and mode is set: Between sessions would it be all that hard to remember that you’re in ‘Random mode’? or on Track 6? No.
Bass boost: It seems that a bass boost feature would be nice.
Ability to read track name is nice: The tiny display that I’ve got could use a scrolling line of text, but it’s not a real issue at this point.
Built-in minimum memory: The 16 MB of built-in memory is a really good thing.
Wireless download or cradle download: It sure would be nice to have a non-wired way of downloading music. Wireless would be cool mostly for show off things.
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Posted in General
at 12 pm
I’ve talked about this before, but just tonight I finaly watched Scout’s Honor a documentary on the work of Scouting For All. (Poor, slow site)
The Scouts cannot be legally forced to change their ways, just like I can’t be forced to put conservative materials of a political nature on this site. However, just like any other organization, steps can be taken to inform and to present the honorable solution.
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06.23.01
Posted in General
at 10 am
A long time ago in this journal I mentioned wanting to find songs about rain. Today I found a pretty big list of rain songs.
Today’s weather is not rain oriented, and I’m not so much looking for rain as when I was first looking. And now adays, the issues I was dealing with and the difficulties that I was working on in my professional life seem… small. Very very small when compared to the work I’m doing these days.
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06.22.01
Posted in General
at 11 pm
I’m not sure how many browsers this will run on. I suspect it’s Mac only, but I’ll try and get a Windows version set up too.
Wiki Me
Take that link and make a bookmark out of it. The best way is to do this is to drag it to your “personal toolbar” or whatever your browser calls it. There’s a diagram here.
Once it’s there, go to a page that talks about something you’re interested in. Find a short phrase that you want to discuss with others and highlight it like you would something that you wanted to copy and paste from the page. Then click on the bookmark you just made. If it all works, your should see a page from FPOWiki in your browser which you can work with to make your statement.
This idea was adapted from Google’s GoogleButtons and Bookmarklets.
Amy has suggested to me that I might want to explain what the hell this Wiki thing is. I will, later this weekend. For now, I’m just too wrapped up in making it work and extending it in such a way that it makes *me* happy, and satisfies this… relentless drive inside me to work with this stuff.
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06.20.01
Posted in General
at 11 pm
Tonight I went to the local Computer-Human Interface Forum meeting, to hear Ward Cunningham speak on, of all things, Wiki and Wikis and WikiWebs and the like. After all this development regarding Wikis that I’ve been doing and tying both this journal and my regular site to the Wiki for discussions, it has been very enlightening to get the chance to ask Ward (who created Wiki) some questions regarding implementation and talk about some esoteric stuff like HTML Validation and what it means to have an open writing environment. We also discussed a bit about the limitations of web browsers as editing tools.
I ended up winning the drawing for Ward’s book “The Wiki Way” which was published in March… the same month that I lost my job that led me to the new job where I started using a Wiki for site prototyping… and where today, someone suggested naming a computer after the robot from Buck Rogers: Twiki!
This whole Wiki thing is swirling around me. I’m in some sort of WikiVortex. It’s a nice place to be for a while.
—-
In other news, Amy and I had the rug pulled out from underneath us this morning. We had been in the process of applying for a new apartment. Lots of cool building amenities, great view, good privacy, and not out of our price range.
12 hours after I took in the application, the property company calls back a says that the original owner decided to move back in. Serious downer. We were getting quite excited about moving and building up a lot of energy. I hope we can find a place that’s as nice as the one we lost.
—-
Last WikiComment for this entry: Where you see the [Read and write comments] link on these entries, you can follow that link to be dropped into the FPOWiki for that entry. Give it a shot.
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06.18.01
Posted in General
at 12 pm
It was bad enough when Intel started using Willamette for it’s code names:
FAQ: Willamette
But now they’re onto another river in the area, Tualatin. Which is also the name of one of the local suburbs. It’s freaky to see these names hitting web sites from the UK:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
It’s all very strange… to me.
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06.12.01
Posted in General
at 11 pm
I think that e-mail spam could be considered pollution of the internet. Perhaps thinking of Spam as pollution rather than rogue e-mail could help further discussions regarding how to deal with it. Organizations that create pollution in the natural environment are subject to taxes and sanctions based on the amount of pollution that they create. In similar ways we should be able to take ‘pollution samples’ from net e-mail and trace back the source of the pollution.
Hmmm…
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06.10.01
Posted in General
at 11 pm
I’ve been doing all this work with Wiki tech lately, and now it’s ready to go on my personal web site. Hit the home link to be taken to For Placement Only. On each page, at the bottom, you’ll find a link that will take you to a place where you can read and write comments about the pages. I’m thinking of making it frames oriented, but a simple link will do for now.
I’m really interested to see if I start getting posted comments regarding my WebDev articles. I’d love to see what public comments people would make if they had the opportunity.
Eventually, I’ll have these entries link into the Wiki as well. I’m not expecting a serious amount of overall linking, but it will be interesting to see what get’s sent through and what ends up in the Wiki.
Enjoy!
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06.08.01
Posted in General
at 10 pm
I knew it was going to be a rough project. The timelines were ‘aggressive’ and the plans were sketchy. But it sure seemed within reason.
But then, slowly, the previous version of the project (V2) was still be deployed and has become a black hole of sorts, dragging and sucking away any time that ventures near its gravity well.
And the event horizon is growing it seems. Every day there’s yet another thing that pushes off our ability to get free from the V2 issues. But everything should be wrapped up by June 30, at the least.
In the mean time, I’ve been working on two other projects, personally. One is the web site for the VW club I’m part of. http://www.absvw.org is the essence of low cost development. I’ve made everything I can either free or low cost. I think we’ve got a nice little site there.
There’s not much functionality, but it works pretty well, I think. It’s lots of text, and I’m trying to put some effort into putting more images into the site. Baby steps, baby steps.
—
On the other end of things, I’ve been playing with Wiki technology. What is Wiki? Wiki is a different kind of Web site. It’s kind of like an anarchist web site and technology. I’ve been playing with one doing some prototyping for my day job, but I’ve been really hacking away at a personal one that I can mess around with. If you like, feel free to check it out, and play with it. Feel free to post and make changes.
Eventually I want to link it up to my web site more closely to allow free form discussions to occur along side my Web site contents. I think it could be pretty cool.
—
I got a really nice note regarding my Design Method article in the web dev section:
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! A Design Method sums-up so perfectly so much of what we try to teach, I wept when I read it. With your permission, I would like to print it and give it to all my tutors and students to make it a guideline for their very design lives! Fantastic!”
I’m not sure about the weeping part, but it was nice to see. The guy’s .sig file says that he’s part of the National College of Design and Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. Maybe I can get a free trip to the Southern Hemisphere out of it. 🙂
(139 mails in the in-box)
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05.31.01
Posted in General
at 11 am
Well it’s about time he got online in a proper fashsion. Love him or hate him, he’s put a lot of thought into his books: http://www.edwardtufte.com/
I highly recommend “Envisioning Information”, which has direct application to Web page design.
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