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Thursday, August 23, 2001
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 Thursday, August 23, 2001
started 8/23/2001; 1:26:47 AM - last post 8/23/2001; 2:53:09 PM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, August 23, 2001 
8/23/2001; 5:26:47 AM (reads: 3868, responses: 4)
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Yes, Virginia, there really is a Linux hardware business 
| | When I got an email with the subject "Check Out Freedom PC Inc.!", I almost trashed it as spam. But it's an apparently real letter signed "Greg Ketchum, President/CEO/Ski Bum." He's a bit breathless about his pitch (reminds me of those DAK come-ons from years ago), but hey. Lemme know what you think. The site is here. |
Jabber on
| | Most of the presentations made at Jabbercon, including my own, are on this page (datum: mine is about 3 megs). |
Way to Wi-Fly
| | I just got off the plane here in San Jose sat down in a seat near Gate 7, opened the laptop, saw a strong signal (it pegged at five little green dots), opened the control strip, saw the network was "Wayport_Access," clicked on it to see what was there, and found that any attempt to use the browser redirected me to a Wayport sign-up page. The price was $6.95/day. Since it's only 7:45 right now and I won't be leaving for another two hours — and I'll probably be here in time to use the service this afternoon before I fly home, I went ahead and signed up. The user interface is about as perfect as you're going to get in a browser. I especially like the pop-up windows for the expiration date, since there doesn't seem to be a data entry convention for date formats. Some are mmyy, some mmyyyy, some mm/yy, some mm/yyyy.... Do we really need yyyy when the Millennium turned eighteen months ago? |
| | So now I gotta work. I'd like to check out more about Wayport, but their .php3 pages come up blank when I hit the buttons in the left frame. Let's try Mozilla... |
| | Whoa. Doesn't go to the page at all. Not sure why, because it seems to go everywhere else. |
| | Anyway, it's too bad that Wayport doesn't make using their site as easy as it is to sign on for their service. If they want to attract members rather than just one-day customers, they need to make it easy for potential members to look at simple lists of locations, with sorts by airport, hotels, schools, restaurants, and geographical areas. |
Fat air
| | I'm off to San Jose for an all-day meeting. But I might check in if I can find some wi-fi at the San Jose Airport. I'm told it's there somewhere. |
Biting the MiniDV
| | I'm in an extreme rush, so I'm going for the Sony DCR-PC110. Upside: Zeiss optics, size, versatility. Reviews are positive. Downside: only one CCD, memory stick (which I don't much care about since I'll be shooting to tape and getting it on the computer by firewire), complexity, Sony's tentacular site. Good price too: $1155. Hope the dealer — All Star Camera — is okay. |
| | Interesting: I searched for "Sony DCR-PC110 $" (sans quotes) on Yahoo, so I'd get pages with U.S. prices. As I went through the pages, the prices kept going down... to a point. Interesting how many places wanted my email address but wouldn't give me a price. Very old school, like those ads in the back of photo magazines that always say "CALL" instead of publishing a price. Too bad: they lose. |
| | To my pals with all the good advice recommending Canon, Fuji, et. al., I wish I had time to talk first; but I have to make an impulse choice here. And if it sucks, well... there's always eBay. |
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THX - Re: Thursday, August 23, 2001
8/23/2001; 4:07:20 PM (reads: 845, responses: 2)
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I can't believe you just said "Do we really need yyyy when the Millennium turned eighteen months ago?"
This type of attitude on the part of programmers 20-40 years ago is why we had to go through the whole Y2K mess in the first place.
Yes we need yyyy for our date stamps in all places now, unless you want to go through the whole thing again in 2100.
We as a society can no longer afford to be so shortsighted as to not worry about what happens 100 years from now. The point of any society after all is to last a really long time.
You can't do that if you use up all your resources in 300 years and if all your workers have totally wrong headed attitudes that quality doesn't matter. The companies of the world like Bose that are all marketing and ZERO substance, need to be killed lest they bring down the whole of society with wasted cashflow and energy flow.
Quality is the most important thing there is. People and companies who don't understand this are doomed to failure.
Alex Scoble
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Glenn Fleishman - Re: Thursday, August 23, 2001
8/23/2001; 6:53:09 PM (reads: 788, responses: 0)
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"So now I gotta work. I'd l"ike to check out more about Wayport, but their .php3 pages come up blank when I hit the buttons in the left frame. Let's try Mozilla..."
Their site hasn't worked for Mac users ever. I've complained. They don't care, does they? What's weird is that the latest browsers (IE 5.x for Mac/Win, Netscape 6 for Mac/Win, Opera, etc.) are mostly identical these days. So you really have to work badly to break a specific platform and browser.
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Doc Searls - Re: Thursday, August 23, 2001
8/24/2001; 11:39:17 PM (reads: 1063, responses: 1)
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Makes complete sense to me.
My main point, being a relatively non-technical guy who likes to take the user's side in matters like this, was that the pop-out menu approach worked far better than yy and mm combinations that were (a) hard to read on some browsers and (b) incomprehensibel to some people. How the data gets remembered by the system is an important matter, but not the one I was talking about.
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THX - Re: Thursday, August 23, 2001
8/27/2001; 2:08:55 AM (reads: 3076, responses: 0)
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Hehe, well then call me obtuse.
Sorry for going off, but obviously what we had here was a failyah to communicate. I didn't understand exactly what you meant...That you were talking about the interface and not about the way the program stores the data.
I went after you when you said that, when I should have known there. Sometimes, we just see phantoms that aren't there, because they are what we want to see.
I like your blog and probably should have started with that and softened my message, but alas that is not what happened.
Well, I better stop there before this becomes a blognose of epic proportions.
Alex Scoble
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