Everyone Has One

My 10 month old iMac died about 10 days ago and I called Apple Care. The support rep quickly determined that it was the hard drive and set up an appointment at the nearest Apple Store for the next day. In the store they flashed my name on a big board showing the next appointments and called me at a couple of minutes after the scheduled time.

The Genius Bar employee quickly hooked up a power cord, keyboard and mouse to the computer (I had been told on the phone to bring my own but that wasn’t necessary) plus an external hard drive and was able to boot from it. He looked online at their inventory and saw that they had the necessary hard drive in stock and told me that the repair would be done in 1-2 days. The next day was a Sunday but he said that there were some people working on Sundays (however fewer than normal) so not to assume that it could be until Tuesday before being done. He was right and on Monday I got a phone call saying that the computer was ready. It’s now been a week and things are working pretty normally.

So, although, I hate buying extended warranties, the $189 for 3 years of Apple Care probably just paid for itself. Now, the hard drive shouldn’t have failed after only 10 months but that’s the way it goes. I do consider the service I got from the Apple employees to be excellent and the speed better than expected. My only complaint is that the 2 Apples stores in San Diego (and many other places) are in shopping malls so it’s a far walk from the parking lot to the store and a 24″ iMac is heavy.

I hate printing web pages because of all the miscellaneous junk on them. I usually do a lot of cut and paste to pick out just what I want. Well, no more thanks to Print What You Like. This very innovative and useful website allows you to easily manipulate web pages to get just the content you want to print. It also has some basic text manipulation so that you can get the text portion (which is generally what you want to print) to be more readable.

Although it is directed at printing, the functionality of this site is useful for other purposes. For example, evernote makes it easy to clip webpages or portions of them but grabbing an edited page via PrintWhatYouLike will make it much more readable.

The functions on the page are easy to use and limited to what you need. Hopefully they will keep it feature clean. The handy bookmarklet also makes it easy to pull any page into the service. So besides providing useful functionality, it is well executed.

The Periodic Table of Videos is a great website with videos for each of the elements in the periodic table.

Besides being educational it is very entertaining.

As memory gets cheaper people will start to record everything they experience. I predict audio in about 5 years and video in 10.

Audio recording already exists with personal notetakers where you push a button and speak into the microphone of a tiny, handheld device. Just add memory to that and keep the recording going all your waking hours. The technology already exists to avoid recording when there is nothing going on.

Video recording has had some experimental tryouts since the early 80s (see Wikipedia for a history). Portable recorders are making progress but still lack memory and battery capacity to last a whole day. The other “problem” with video is that if it is fixed to your body you will not see yourself in the video. So social liferecording will become popular where you swap clips with your friends to that you get their recorded views of you.

All the recording technology is well on the way. Also, storage technology to keep the mountain of data will continue to advance. However, with the amount of audio and video that you will collect, search technology will be equally important so that you can find “experiences” in the data you collect. Strides are being made in this area. For example, podscope does a very good job of searching for words in audio and video podcasts.

Once this is all in place it will have many effects on society. For example, going back to an original conversation with have legal ramifications as well as settling many “he said, she said” arguments. Capturing other people nearby will also raise privacy issues and make the lives of celebrities even more “available” to their adoring fans.

Hopefully the search technology will help parents with the mountains of recordings they will have of their children as they grow up and, of course, that will mean that those children will never be able to get away from those endearing incidents they were involved in when they were young. A new industry for packaging childhood “memories” will emerge. Probably there will also be a similar one for stealing data and extracting extortable “memories”.

The Dark Knight does more than live up to the hype. All the aspects of the movie are superb: acting, plot, scenery (for the dark mood), special effects and explosions. All of it.

Heath Ledger is wonderfully creepy and is the best Bat-villain yet.

The plot moves right from the first scene and rarely slows down.

I saw the IMAX version and except for the overly loud base drowning out some of the dialogue it really made the special effects stand out.

It’s now number 2 in domestic box office revenue and I’d take it over Titanic any day (but I’m not the romantic demographic that it was directed at) and would rank it up there with Star Wars. However, Star Wars had a bigger effect on society given its novelty at the time versus a well known comic book adaptation. I would also say that this raises the Batman saga (with Batman Begins) above the Spiderman series.

Evernote is a note-taking application. It works both on the desktop (Mac and PC) and the web and syncs between the different versions so that you have access anywhere (including smart phones).

It has nice features both for creating and finding notes. Notes can be created through the application, via an email message (to the appropriate address on their website), by clipping a screenshot, or even by taking a picture with a webcam. Notes can be tagged which also helps in finding them. Of course, there is keyword search but their value added feature is recognizing words in pictures and making that part of the search. So, for example, if you take a picture of your receipt from “Joe’s Pizza” then that note will show up on a search for “pizza”.

Overall, it’s a very nicely done application.

Woopra is an application for tracking website access. It involves both a webserver and local client applications. The client interface is really spectacular.

First off, it is in beta release. I had to wait several weeks to get my website approved. I have since applied for two additional websites and am awaiting approval on them. So I don’t know how long you will have to wait to use this.

First you sign up on their website and when you are approved you get a unique identifier so that woopra can identify your site’s pages. Then you add some code to your web pages (4 lines of javascript) that includes the identifier and will make a call to woopra every time the page is visited so that it can gather statistics. There are also plugins for Wordpress blogs and vBulletin (with probably a lot more to come).

Then you download a client application for your OS (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and then the fun begins. I should mention that the installation on Windows was very easy but getting the right version of Java on the Mac was a bit of a pain in the rear (the application uses the very latest version of Java).

The client shows a myriad of statistics in a very graphical way (often with choices of the type of graph). It even includes a live view of who is on your site at the time you are observing. Here is just one screen from the client:



You can also set notifications for specific actions so that you can be alerted when they take place. It is very impressive.

Finally a movie that lives up to its hype. Iron Man deserves its number one ranking. The plot is good, Robert Downey Jr. is good as Tony Stark, the special effects are good, the tech level is high. They do set up a sequel (make sure you stick around after the credits; no spoiler but you will see a performance by an uncredited “big name” actor). However, the movie is very much standalone.

I have to admit that it took me half the movie to realize that Obadiah was Jeff Bridges. He doesn’t look like himself. It was the voice that clued me in because at one point I thought to myself, hey that guy sounds just like the Big Labowski.

I did find Gwyneth Paltrow and the subplot around her character to be somewhat weak. However, the acting in general didn’t descend to comic book-level. Which is good.

I read an interesting article in Wired magazine about a service call Twine. However, when I went to the site I discovered that I couldn’t try it out because it is in closed beta. I have no interest in giving them my name and other information and then wait some unknown length of time to get into a beta test. One would think that with the long lead times of magazines that by the time the service gets into print the website would be available. Well, I’m unlikely to go back unless I see another article in the future and I’ve forgotten about this failed attempt to get access.

That is not good marketing in my opinion. I think that if a site is ready to be written about in the press, it should be ready for users.

I have been using Google Reader as my RSS reader for a few months now. It has the main requirements that I have for reading blogs:

• is a web service not a separate application
• lets me easily place a blog article into a new tab to read
• lets me quickly scan articles from a blog so I can select the ones I want to read

Google reader uses Ajax and keyboard shortcuts to quickly move from one article to the next and I find it quite convenient to run down the list of articles from a blog.

Adding and manipulating blogs is also done via Ajax and is pretty straightforward.

I had been using Bloglines but like Google Reader slightly more.