...more recent posts
Today's picture (archived here) is my niece Mary. Despite the fact that I am related to her, she is very cute. We had a great dinner with her in Providence.
Well, this is turning out to be a little frustrating (I thought it might.) Almost 2 hours spent trying to give Apple a lot of money. Too bad their servers can't handle the load. How many people could really be hitting the Apple store right now? A million? I doubt it. They should be able to handle the load. Maybe they should look into Solaris. Anyway, I keep trying to place the order and I keep getting server errors (too much load, I'm pretty sure) and then after 5 or 6 times my session will time out and I have to start all over. Of course the whole time I'm on hold (voice) with them as well, just in case someone picks up. Anyway, the last time I had to go back to the beginning and start over it is showing that I have an order being processed (even though I never got any message over the web telling me that they acknowledged the order.) Unfortunately when I check the order status it just says my account is being revised. Grrrr. It might be possible that I ordered the same machine like 80 times. I wonder what the limit on that card is?
And you thought blogs were only full of crappy, uninteresting, self-centered ramblings... oh, wait....
[update: Well, something got ordered. Unfortunately, I've already received 6 email confirmations, and there seems to be another one in my mailbox every time I check. I sure hope they realize I don't want 80 versions of the exact same order.]
Finally it's here. Mac OSX public beta has been released. MacNN has good coverage of the whole Paris expo. New ibooks (w/firewire) were also released. No new Powerbooks (although I want one, I'm glad they didn't rush something out; I'd rather wait for bigger screen, and higher mhz G4e.) I'm ordering X today for my machine, but we're not planning on changing over the whole office until we're sure it's ready (fonts and printer drivers are making me especially worried.) Maybe by February or March. Long way to go, but I feel like it's the start of a new era (for me at least.)
Too bizarre. Here's some info if you're curious about the picture. I wonder if they'll make the smart(y) pants?
On the web design front: I've never seen this before. Check out the little animation that plays (once) when you load the page. It reminds you to make sure you are seeing all of the horizontal information in the graph. It's a little thing, but it's nice. If I was still on the chi-web (Computer Human Interface) mailing list, I would point that one out. (The chart is a list of costs for credit card transactions. Suddenly I'm hearing a lot about micropayments again.)
Just in case you're looking for yet another summary of the current intellectual property rights in the networked computer age debate, here is an unusually good one. Heavily biased toward the information sharing side of the argument, but well argued, and reasonably presented. And for the rest of your cyber-freedom legal shopping, take a look around the whole Berkman Openlaw site while you're at it.
If I were a different person, it might be soap operas. Or that Blind Date show (O.K., that is me sometimes.) But I'm me, and so the guilty pleasure is riothero. But today I am absolved. He actually had a useful link. Noesis: Philosophical Research On-line.
I love finding stories that remind me I live in the future. Here's one about how the Sydney Olympics are trying to beat conterfeit Olympic products. They have formulated a special ink which contains the DNA of one particular unnamed Australian athlete.
"The DNA-laced ink is being applied to most of the 3,500 official souvenirs -- some 50 million individual items. It's the largest deployment ever of DNA as a security device. McGill oversees a team of 60 'logocops' equipped with special scanners that can detect the DNA ink. The logocops will roam Sydney and other Australian cities, pouncing on street vendors and retail outlets to determine whether their merchandise is authentic."I love the fact that they are keeping secret the identity of the human from whom the DNA was taken. Like maybe some counterfeiting mastermind could kidnap him, take some DNA, and whip up their own version of the ink? Muwahahahahahah. (link from /.)
I don't have a DVD player, and even if I did I'm not sure I would buy this, but I'm glad to see someone is putting the technology to use. And I'm not too surprised it's the Beastie Boys who are doing it. "...This 2-DVD piece will lend sound credence to the rumors that Adam Yauch is a certifiable home theatre geek...."
It's even worse than I thought. Wired's WebMonkey has done some in depth testing to see if web designers really need to stick with the cannonical 216 "web safe colors" palette. Turns out that 216 is a little too many if you really want to ensure that the colors will display properly (especially important if you are trying to hide an image by making it - or it's background - the same color as the page background.) Here's the very sad "really safe colors" palette. As they said in the article, "hope you like green." For more info, here's the conclusions, and here's the start of the article.