Coffee Zone regular Jeff showed up this morning with an Asus Eee, one of the subnotebook computers that are becoming so popular. 4G flash drive. Runs Linux. Around $400? Nice sharp screen but the keyboard is just a little too small for smays. But it’s easy to see why these are popular. If I needed to go that light, I think I might just pop for the iPhone. But Jeff might not need a phone or the expensive data plan that comes with it, so…
A must-read/file/review on presentation voodoo by the master. It’s all good but these ideas jumped on my face like the Alien monster:
Life is too short to waste a precious minute watching a lame-ass ppt presentation by the the clueless and lazy. If it looks like I’m not paying attention, I’m not.
“…words belong in memos. Powerpoint is for ideas.”
Increasingly, many of the most interesting things I discover online wind up on my “shared items” page in Google Reader (rather than here in the body of the blog). I started “sharing” items in May of 2007 and the list has grown to 1,150 new stories, blog posts and articles.
“When you walk into a superstore, you would drop a sample of blood or saliva on a BlackBerry-type device. When you’re done shopping for groceries, the store would present you with a printout of your ailments and a bag of personalized medication. That medication would also contain digestible computer chips, which would relay real-time reports on your body’s fluctuations.” washingtonpost.com
G. Steven Burrill addressing AdvaMed 2008, a medical technology industry conference in Washington last week, spoke about the upcoming era of personalized medicine.
“Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth. On Tuesday, RealScoop will cover the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, putting each one’s statements to its Believability test.” [Link]
One of my first posts on podcasting was in November, 2004, and featured a little SanDisk “Digital Audio Player” I had purchased. Apple’s iPod had already been around for a couple of years but I saw no reason to pay more when the little SanDisk would work just fine.
I found the player in a drawer this week and marveled at it’s… clunkiness? Will my sleek new nano look just as ugly four years from now? Hard to imagine.
In a few months George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will return to private life. They’ll be surrounded by Secret Service guys (does the VP get SS protection?) but they have to be somewhere.
I’d like to "crowd source" a volunteer army of citizen journalists to report the last known location of these guys. No trespassing or peaking through windows, just a short report:
"W entourage just left Crawford ranch, heading for airport."
"W group just checked into Paris Hilton."
Include phone pic if you have one. All of which goes to a map.
You can be damned sure the NSA knows where you are (if they want to), so why shouldn’t we know where these guys are? I know, the FBI will explain that to me in some detail.
Regular readers know smays.com is all about getting those photos and home movies out of the closet and up on flickr and YouTube. I’ve even posted a time or two about digital immortality.
Scott Maentz and his wife are actually doing something about it. From their website: “Our mission at RememberGranny.com is to help technology challenged Baby Boomers create a legacy for future generations using today’s rich digital media and the latest Internet applications.”
RG.com has packages starting at just $99 but my favorite is the Complete Virtual Immortality Package ($499). Need some f2f help? Then you’ll want to consider the Virtual Immortality Mini-Vacation.
PS: I just went looking for some of my earlier posts where I talk about putting your life on line; paying flickr to keep your pix up forever and a day… and I can’t find them. Poor tagging. If anyone remembers some of these posts and happened to bookmark or link, drop me a line.
I’m closing in on 4,000 posts and it’s getting damned hard to find stuff.
We were listening to some new tunes on Roger’s iPod as we drove back to Jeff City from Columbia. Like most new cars, his has an input jack for the iPod (or whatever). So it was easy for me to pull out my nano [insert joke here], plug in and play one of my tunes.
As we listened, it occurred to me this simple act couldn’t happen in a pre-iPod world, at least not easily. Yeah, I guess I could have had a pocket-full of cassettes or CD’s, but Roger and I had thousands of songs between us and we thought nothing of switching from his iPod to mine.
My old pal RP was an avid collector of 45 rpm records. He had big cardboard boxes jammed with “singles.” The best we could do back then was stack 20 or so on a fat little spindle that would drop the next 45 down to the turntable. Shuffle? Sure, like a deck of cards.
I seem to recall RP telling me he had copied all of his 45’s to CD. Don’t know if he’s made the final leap to an iPod.
It’s hard to imagine what’s next but even hard to imagine there won’t be a “next.”
My chubby nano worked fine (insert joke here) and I’ve been quite happy with it. But I always preferred the original nano design and was happy see Apple return to it. This one just fits the hand better.
I won’t rehash the features. If you care you’ve already read about and seen them. One of my favorites, however, is the improved “memo” recording. Just the simple addition of a little level indicator (see arrow) makes a big difference if you want to record something.
I made this recording with a little gizmo from Griffin called the iTalk. It’s a little hot because I wasn’t sure how close to hold the mic. I’ll do something a little longer and post that, along with something from the Marantz PMD620 so we can do an A-B comparison.