my voice is my passport
{ Monthly Archives }
Tim Berners-Lee has been knighted for his invention of the World Wide Web. This puts him in the company of Sir Isaac Newton, among others, and I’d say he deserves it.
As far as I know, Sir Berners-Lee still drives an old Volkswagen to work every day, though. :)
I’m mostly settled back in after my Christmas trip to Omaha. I still have laundry to do and thank-yous to write, though.
Not one but two of my friends got me ultra-cool music - one bought Aphex Twin, the other Boards of Canada. My profuse thanks to both. Now if only my family was that good at listening to my dropped hints… Not that I did badly there, either - I got enough clothes to last for two more winters, and enough cash to pay for a big chunk of my new couch.
Seeing my family and friends all gathered together reminds me of what I’m missing out on the rest of the year. Sure, there’s e-mail and the phone, but that’s not the same. I hope I can meet friends of that caliber down here in Arizona, but I haven’t yet.
I got to try one! Scottsdale Fashion Square has one of like 4 Segway Stores in the whole country, so I headed down for a test drive.
The paper said there were huge lines last week, but I got there just before 6:00, so the store was barren. It also helped that they’d started up a $5 fee per test drive, since so few of their visitors were seriously considering a purchase. They made me don a silly biker’s helmet, gave a 10-second explanation, and I was off and rolling.
I’d been expecting something a little more supernatural - like rocket skates that magically knew where I wanted to go, and an obstacle course to take them through. What I got was a 10-foot-square roped off area and a scooter that kinda lurched forward rather than gliding. It was still interesting, though. Leaning back and forth to move was totally natural; I actually had more trouble with the steering knob. Doing 360s in place was a no-brainer.
When they get down to $1000, and there’s a way to mod them so they can do fifty miles an hour and do ollies, I’ll be buying one. Until then, I think it will just remain an expensive curiosity.
Gamespot.com reports:
When called to investigate a shooting last Friday night, police in Anne Arundel County, Maryland found an unlikely culprit–an Xbox.
The Baltimore Sun reports that 34-year old Robert Preston Kersey had grown enraged by his roommates constantly playing their Xbox at high volume. According to the police report, Kersey emerged from his bedroom at 2 a.m. brandishing an automatic pistol. Rather than shoot his roommates, Kersey took aim at the offending Xbox and fired a single shot at the console. While the bullet’s impact disabled the Xbox, its thick plastic casing deflected the 9mm round, which ricocheted away harmlessly.
I’m at home for lunch, and I just had a guy deliver me a package… for an address on 58th street. I explained to him that I was on 56th, and the best he could muster in reply was “Oh. Okay.” As he took the package and turned around, I had to stifle a laugh at the “Dependable Delivery” logo on his shirt back.
I think I’m losing my intellectual edge as I get older… The latest symptom is my spelling. I used to be able to write dozens of pages without a single goof, but the past couple weeks, I’ve caught myself swapping “they’re” for “their”, backspaced over mistyped words and then mistyped them again the exact same way, and worse. (And that’s just what I’ve caught.)
Spelling isn’t *that* big a deal, I guess. Just please, please don’t let my programming ability be next.
Every time I receive affirmation that someone actually read an article I wrote, or used an image I made as wallpaper, it’s really gratifying. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve had a barrage of such affirmations (a friend wearing a t-shirt I designed, another listening to some music I recommended, and so on), but a month ago I wondered if anyone even cared about the stuff I wrote or produced.
We need more feedback from the world around us. Every Web page should have a counter built in so the author can tell whether people are reading what he wrote, and whether he should write more of the same. Peer to peer programs like BitTorrent should have a facility for reporting total number of downloads back to the original author of a file (not just to the person seeding). Those of us who aren’t paid to produce content do it for the positive comments we get, but we shouldn’t have to post e-mail links begging for feedback. People don’t have time to write a comment on every artistic work they like; why can’t our machines provide at least some of the feedback for us?
