Posts filed under 'Technology'
Had lunch with Storm and Cassidy today at CiaH where I finally got to hear what made them focus on something other than CIGI. I haven’t been great at keeping up with all the flurry of activities from their side and totally should since there’s a lot to be said for networking with smart people. So, not sure if I can talk about their idea (so I won’t), but it seems like a pretty good concept and well defined market they are going after (and unlike many people, they are not trying to dilute their proposition by being all things to all people). As it stands, we’ll see where it runs to over the next 6 months, but I think given the skills those two have (from an SME, customer and technical perspective) combined with the experience they have in an ASP business (both successes and failures), that they should come out ahead of the game.
April 5th, 2007
I discovered a new thing that seems to be what everyone is talking about “facebook“. Seems to be a social networking thing with a better chance to be more than the current “orkut“.
March 16th, 2007
I went out and picked up a slingbox today. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a device that hooks into your audio/video system and allows you to stream the video feed remotely over the network. It was more difficult to setup than I thought (had to look up instructions on the internet for getting my airport express working), especially since you need to connect to the slingbox via local LAN before you can configure it to be accessed remotely. Once I did all that (about 2h of fiddling), it worked perfectly and I can now stream video (from our TV and PVR) from anywhere in the world provided the bandwidth is fast enough. I definitely recommend getting one of these, especially if you travel a lot.
December 4th, 2006
Finally I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. All the Web 2.0 apps out there have tagging (Gmail, Flickr and even Wordpress) that is very easy to do and lets you tag up any content (photos or email) with categories of information. I got a plug-in called Taglocity that lets me do the same thing for Outlook email which means I can very quickly and easily tag up emails. It also allows auto-tagging based on Bayesian filters as well as tagging email that gets sent (so when people reply it comes back pretagged by you). Finally you can do the tag-cloud kind of filtering which shows you how many emails have been classified with which tags. Overall, I think it will be fantastic and should improve my email management by leaps and bounds.
November 22nd, 2006
Chad found something really neat — this little line rider application which has a tobogganer sledding down hills that you create. Very neat. Apparently lots of people have spent a significant amount of time creating intricate toboggan paths and posted them up on YouTube.
November 19th, 2006
This is amazing… I want one of these projection whiteboards at work. I don’t need the actual simulation part, I would just settle for the drawing recognition… if it could also auto-build visio diagrams that would be cool too. Those MIT guys really do some very innovative, bleeding-edge work.
October 20th, 2006
While we were waiting in the airport lounge for our flight, some guy was super keen and told me about Slingbox. The slingbox device lets you watch your home TV system (including PVRs) remotely over the web. He himself was watching TV shows that he had recorded earlier and was just killing time waiting for his plane. I think it’s a very cool idea that it’s just an appliance that you hook into your TV system and it all just magically works. Much better than trying to build a home-grown web friendly system using MCE or MythTV. Currently they have a mobile Windows client and I think they are researching a Blackberry client which would be way better than BBTV.
October 6th, 2006
I think I really want a tablet computer. I actually write 50% of my notes on paper; that includes my daily work notes, fight choreography and screenplay ideas. I find it easier to be more creative and consise when capturing information in a paper form, but obviously love the ease of use factor of the electronic, so to me that means tablet. Looking around at a few and Dell sells what looks to be a nice one the LE1600 and LS800 from Motion Computing.
September 1st, 2006
Finally chose to break free of Bell Canada. Signed up for Rogers home phone and they came and installed it today. It should end up being about half the cost of what Bell was and all the same features plus a year free long distance. Now, my only statement is that the Rogers in-store guys really should know their product. I asked what kind of technology it was and they said cable phone (which doesn’t exist)… just to clear it up, it’s a private network voip system. Same goes for ADT who were all concerned that I was not using Bell’s service, but I assured them that the alarm system wasn’t smart enough to tell the difference. Should be good — it’s got battery backup and 911, so it is likely to be as reliable as the traditional 5×9s copper systems.
September 1st, 2006
I’ve worked on improving the IOSP website since it hasn’t been updated in two years. I did some tweaking in mediawiki and got a reasonable site up and running really quickly, including a neat integration with Google maps. Hopefully it works well enough as Brad wants some crazy things that doesn’t work well conceptually as a website…. but I guess we’ll see what can be done.
August 29th, 2006
A short while ago, I started playing Travian, an online game in the vein of Age of Empires without the real-time piece and having no client to install. It seems not too bad, albeit very slow (in constrast with how those games usually work) and any thoughts of it “running in the background” without much management actually is a false assumption. You do have to monitor it and do various actions to make it worthwhile as everything seems to take an hour to complete. I’m not sure I enjoy this middle ground of game where it has none of the interest or excitement of a real-time online game and all of the delay of resource management of a turn based game (seems the worst of both worlds).
July 15th, 2006
So, Thursday I bought a new car stereo that enables our iPods to be used with it. It’s pretty good — you can control the iPod through the stereo controls and it sounds much better than the FM iTrip connector playing through the radio. Our next car, we’ll elect for the option right out of the gate rather than having to put in an aftermarket deck.
July 7th, 2006
Looking at the old photo site, it’s not that great. It’s clunky and huge (back when I uploaded all 200+ photos of a vacation) and needs to be reworked. So, like many people, I figured I’d give Flickr a try to see how that works. I just uploaded some photos there and will be looking to migrate the previous photo gallery to the new one as time permits. The tools are much nicer, and should allow me to bulk upload photos from iPhoto, which in turn means more photos will get uploaded. The new online photo album can be found here.
July 3rd, 2006
A “meme” is a unit of cultural evolution that propagates itself through various means, the most common of which nowadays is the internet. Some good examples in the past have been things like the Star Wars kid, Mahir the Turkish stud, Badger Badger Badger, Lazy Sunday and such (see more here). I think there are two new ones that will become the same, just neat ideas that people have done a good job with.
Where the hell is Matt? — a guy does a global dance
Ask a Ninja — similar to the vein of Strongbad, but a real life guy
June 30th, 2006
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