January 23, 2007

About Me

Resume San Francisco native Software exec in lovely Silicon Valley and Mendocino New media junkie, embedded device creator, social networking dabbler Gadget Geek

January 22, 2007

The Apple iPhone. OK, I give

OK, I was just gonna stay out of it, but everyone’s asking if I’ve pre-ordered mine, so figured I’d chime in. First, I should say my favorite version of the keynote was on Mad TV this last weekend. “iPhone, disappear me!” What I think is groundbreaking: The interface. After seeing a “direct desktop manipulation” demonstration a few years ago (it’s since found it’s way to YouTube, a big whiteboard/Star Wars like translucent screen you manipulate with your hands) I knew some form of that would find it’s way to real application.

December 12, 2006

Categorization and all that

Following up on my "Popularity" ramble, found that tool I needed. DEVONthink for the Mac (since I’m a Mac guy). Actually DEVONthink Pro Office had all the features I wanted (OK, so maybe product naming isn’t their strong suit). While not perfect, it’s the best overall tool I’ve found. This version can suck in all my email, documents, and I can set up some tools to send interesting web pages to it.

November 30, 2006

Popularity

I’m a geek, and proud of it. Being a middle-aged geek meant I was a geek when it was terribly unpopular to be one in high school, and only the serious geeks need apply, and only the strong survived without lifelong scars (although finding high paying tech jobs did ease the pain a little :-). And, of course, now being a geek is just fun. But, back then, no dances, no parties.

September 13, 2006

It’s Showtime

As I’ve said, I’m a big Apple fan. But, sometimes, even I weary of the hype. No one has a reality distortion field like Steve, but man oh man, yesterday’s special event left me wanting. Existing iPods got updated. OK, yawn. More storage, better screens, better batteries. At this point you have to do that both to get new components, and just to stay in the game. Smaller shuffle. Shuffle is cute, but only as a 2nd or third portable player.

August 3, 2006

Amazing photo tool

A little different blog here, just reporting on something that blew me away this week… I saw an amazing panorama of the Sydney Skyline on wired.com. Check out the original article here: Permalink After being amazed at the photo, I checked out Autopano Pro . It was, amazingly, available as a beta for the Mac, I was sure it was going to be another Windows only tool (it’s available for Windows as well, and Linux too!

May 4, 2006

Social archeology

I don’t talk about my actual work here much since, well, this is a Blog, and it’s basically making a flyer and posting it on my permanent record, and as such, I want to make sure I’m good, and don’t say anything I’d regret. Of course, I don’t say much here at all, but then, that’s a different piece of the same pie. But, I have enough embarrassing legacy still lying around from my days on Usenet, when trolling for flames and arguing something that you knew was incorrect as if it was the only one truth, just to hone your debating skills, was considered art, instead of just rude.

April 7, 2006

I love Apple

Yeah, OK, so I’m an Apple geek. Never owned an Apple ][, used ’em, played games on ’em, ran Visicalc on one. One West Coast Computer Faire, the last one with really interesting Z8xx(x(x)) and 65xx machines that you could buy in kit form, or, rather, the last one where those were in the main room. One side room had Charlie Chaplin and the IBM PC, and another room had this amazingly cool machine from Apple, called the Lisa, which geeks surrounded, grunted about, then someone from Apple would say “Um, it’ll be about $10,000”, and we’d look at our hobbiest standard atire: cruddy t-shirts and jeans, giggle about how they didn’t really get the fair, then we’d shuffle back into the big room to check out the quad-density 8″ dual floppy drives again.

June 3, 2005

Sun buys a Tape storage company

Used to work for Sun, this one boggles me. Wrote this up for some Friday humor… Acknowledging a strategy outlined by John McArthur, an analyst at International Data Corp., who says he recommended the StorageTek deal privately to Sun six months ago. “It’s a good way for Sun to boost short-term sales as it waits for its longer-term research and development spending to pay off”, he says. “Tape drives are still a multibillion-dollar market, and that doesn’t go away overnight,” he said.

April 5, 2005

So what’s with this podcasting drama?

Was looking over at podcast alley, and I’m a bit amazed by the drama that’s happening after 7 whole months of this stuff being around. 4000 podcasts? Political/social/religous bashing left and right? People saying Dawn and Drew aren’t funny? Camps such as PodShow (Curry and friends), and then others Holy “this isn’t why I thought it was interesting” Batman! Heck, first I couldn’t get over the hump finding something interesting enough to ‘cast about for more than 5 minutes, then I tried a train-of-thought recording, and it nearly put ME to sleep, so I figured I wasn’t cut out to be an audio entertainer off-the-cuff.