Whose Faulty Vision

Christmas is in Town

Christmas is in town! We’re dressing up as a pirate and his wench tonight, and going to costumed Karaoke. I’ll post pictures, I promise.

Reflection Photo

Featuring another new photo from my website, coincidentally also a reflection picture: Sunset clouds in water, Ithaca

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is it reasonable?’”

-Richard Feynman

T-mobile non-bill

I canceled my T-Mobile account a little while back, when I got the Treo. I just got a bill in the mail from them for $0.00. Seriously. Suppose if I don’t pay it, they’ll add a 15% late fee?

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“Serenity is a very personal work with political resonance and a heartfelt message about the human condition and stuff blowing up. ‘Cause let’s face it, nobody cares about that ‘human condition’ stuff… in fact if you notice it, try to keep it to yourself.”

-Joss Whedon

Flock Browser

So I’m trying out this new Web browser, Flock. The idea is that it’s a Web browser that’s not just for reading the Web, but for interacting with it–it features the ability to connect to flickr, del.icio.us, and blogging programs. It doesn’t do anything that other browsers can’t do, mind you–it just makes it more convenient.

The blogging feature doesn’t appear to work yet. It can detect my blogs on Blogger, but I get an error message every time I try to post to them.

The bookmarking thing is kind of cool, though. It connects your bookmarks to del.icio.us, which I hadn’t used before. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about bookmarks. Instead of putting them in hierarchical folders, you just assign each one a few “tags” (aka keywords). So I might tag a link to, say, Slashdot with the words “news” and “geek”. Then Google News and the New York Times and so on would also be tagged “news”, and Apple’s Developer website would also be tagged “geek”. So if I wanted to see the latest news, I’d hit “news” and see Slashdot and the other news sources, and if I wanted to do some geeky work, I’d hit “geek” and see Slashdot and the other geek-oriented sites. Makes a lot more sense than a strict hierarchy, really.

As a side benefit, the connection to del.icio.us means that you can have the same bookmarks on every computer that has Flock installed. Very handy.

Okay, that was the last geeky post for a little while, I promise.

Operating Systems on TV

Well, considering that today seems to be my “post like a geek day”, here’s another severely geeky post:

I often poke fun at “MovieOS”, the computer operating system they use in movies and TV shows, which can do pretty much anything with a couple of mouse clicks or key presses, often using cool futuristic-looking visual effects. Well, in last week’s “Veronica Mars”, Veronica did something that must have seemed like a use of MovieOS: she waggled her mouse, and suddenly all of the windows of all of her open applications were visible on the screen at once, scaled to fit. Then she moved her mouse again and everything vanished, so that her screen seemed empty (just a desktop picture) when her father suddenly looked at her laptop. Neither was MovieOS: they’re both uses of Expose, a feature of Mac OS X. Expose kicks ass; I wish I had it on my Windows machine at work.

And while I’m thinking about “Veronica Mars”: if you’re one of the poor souls who can’t watch the show because you want to watch “Lost” (or “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart”), check your listings–in my area, new episodes are rerun on the weekends. It’s worth taping, I promise.