People sometimes ask me “How do you keep up with new technology?” and seem surprised when I reply “I read web sites.” How can they be surprised? I mean web sites are easy to publish and most of the ones that I choose to read update on an daily, if not hourly, basis… there’s no printing involved, no time to market – you change a file on a server and *bam* the page is instantly available. Maybe it’s what I read that’s key…
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Monthly Archives: November 2002
Fear and Responsibility
My last few Rants have been either of Geek nature or just small, little things, and I think I know why… see, there’s a been a stone in my shoe for some time now, and I think it’s taken me this long to formulate my thoughts enough to share them. It came into my mind a bit when the DC Sniper was roaming around the DelMar peninsula, but I’ve since realized that it’s more than that. I realized this while I was watching the news this morning and the reporter was talking about how some guy, who shot at an abortion clinic worker and accidentally killed him, wanted to vie for an insanity plea. Add to that the story about some other guy that shot a bunch of people at a Wendy’s, while trying to steal their stealing money, and now protesters are fighting for him and against the death penalty… and the Rant firmed up well in my mind… Responsibility.
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HOT Doughnuts NOW
Day 2, A.K. – On this, the second day After KKD opened, I find representatives of two of the few companies making me money in the stock market, while in the local coffee house. Cosmic? Not really – just good timing is all. The guy with KKD had come up to help open the new Milford store; even though it is a franchised place, they have “helpers” that do this for a living, just like most chain companies. While talking to the guy, I learned that the store, while packed yesterday, wasn’t as busy today… only a few people in line at a time.
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A Geek in Review
There’s been a couple of changes in my digital toy box, so I thought I’d do an “update” of sorts: Samsung S105, Pentium 4 2.53GHz, Toshiba e740, Y’z Dock, Sony DCR-TRV25.
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It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
Christmas season? When isn’t it Christmas season is the better question: the stores start putting their decorations up in September (true story! they started in the end of September this year!) and have their projections made long before Halloween. This means that The Season is now Halloween to New Year’s Day – people will bitch and moan about “how things were different when!” and fight it in their own homes, but it’s already a fact. Besides, who can withstand the marketing machines of American retailers? I know can’t. And I know for a fact that everyone of you out there has at least one Ronco “As Seen On TV” product somewhere in your house right now! I’m even willing to give you 100 to 1 odds that it has got something to do with exercise. We’re all victims of the Marketing Machines – besides, Ronco products make a shit load of sense on the TV shopping channels at 3:30am.
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Y’z Dock
Anyway, one of the neatest things about the new OS X interface is the dock. The dock is Apple’s answer to the omni-present task bar that is sitting on your desktop at the moment; it’s used to show the currently running applications as well as giving you a “Quick Launch” icon bar for launching applications. Like I said, it’s about the same as the Windows’ XP task bar, but with a great deal more flare and style – it’s basically become the new trademark of the Apple desktop. In fact it’s one of the neatest pieces of OS code that I’ve seen in a good long while, probably since the animated and fading menus of Windows 98 – I’m comfortable in saying “one of the neatest” because there’s been a new product released that is equally as cool, but for Windows XP users: Y’z Dock.
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MSN 8
’bout freakin’ time they got around to it – upgrading MSN Chat I mean. How do I figure that? Well, MSN, version 8, shipped last week. Wait, isn’t MSN Chat just a web site? Sure, but MSN is going through a period of changes, some subtle, some grand. Here’s my take on MSN, and where Microsoft is planning to take it in the future.
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