Posts filed under 'Technology'
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
Ok - so I’m new to it, but at first glance, it provides nothing that doesn’t exist already in other languages. Perhaps it has some value in built in AJAX, but seriously, if you know what you’re doing with javascript, that part is somewhat trivial. Also, I don’t need yet ANOTHER language that does the same thing as ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python – I mean seriously, especially one with as crappy a syntax as Ruby. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m biased, but Ruby and Rails seems like a good idea in a world that doesn’t have J2EE application servers overflowing the dumpster bin. Just giving me another record abstraction for SELECT * FROM TABLE(x) doesn’t do anything to make my life easier, it only provides marginal improvement over what I’m doing now in a completely different language construct.
That was my first day looking at Ruby — maybe in the next while I’ll find some secret major value there or it will actually turn my programming life around and make every task trivial…
… but I highly doubt it.
June 9th, 2006
There is a fun party game out there called Eat Poop You Cat or Paper Telephone. This game is a drawing game in which people alternatively write captions and draw pictures while only being allowed to see the immediately preceding information. This leads to mutations in what was originally intended and often are gut-bustingly funny. A long time ago, I tried my hand at some PHP on my website to see if I could implement a tool to make game coordination in these modern times. I recently went back to that to try to complete it and over the weekend got it up and working. So, I’m trying it out with a few friends (don’t be surprised if you see one) to try to iron out any issues left remaining.
If you want to start a new EPYC, email me and I’ll send you the link.
June 5th, 2006
I’m sitting on a plane and wondering to myself if I can write an entry from my blackberry. If this shows up, then I guess the answer is definitively yes. Whether that speaks to the excellent wordpress software or the savvy blackberry web browser, it’s just cool that it does work - we need more things in life this easy.
May 31st, 2006
Ok, so this is my first blog and my first blog entry. Aren’t you special for being here to read it. I’m sure I’ll get more used to it as a I read more about what I can do and more creative topics come to my head.
May 30th, 2006
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