iMurphy

How frustrating! I’m reading “10 Faces of Innovation” and it’s just disgutting me! Not the book, but what it reveals about some of the processes I have to interact with. In the military, there is a current buzzword “operational tempo”. It means how fast one reacts to a situation and changes one strategies. I just read how quickly TellMe can implement changes in their enormous infrastructure, and it just about made me want to cry or punch a wall! Why is no one else concerned with responding to change this quickly?! As someone who works in an ER, I really like being put under pressure and being forced to adapt quickly. It’s not just about making changes, it about making changes in how you make changes. When you’re in the water, you can stand still, but you also can’t thrash about. Being calm on the inside and yet exerting powerful force in the right direction is crucial. I hope I get to be part of team like that

After hearing a great presentation on Ubuntu Linux, I thought, “Why haven’t I switched to Linux?” I have been very tempted, but there are a few major applications that keep me on my Mac. Finale is a big, one. (Though I hear you can run Finale on UNIX with WINE pretty well.) Aquisition is not the only Limewire/Gnutella client, but it is far and away the best. Blurb’s Booksmart self-publishing software isn’t available for Linux yet. Journler is still Mac OS X only; so is Delicious Library. But the biggest reason has to be iLife. There are other iPod managers like iTunes (but, of course, no store) and there may well be programs for Linux like the iOthers, but together and overall, the suite is smokin’!

Full of youthful hubris, I once tried subscribing to the entire IT Conversations feed. This ended up being one or two podcasts a day, and I never caught up. The effort, however, yielded a few gigs of audio on my iPod. I hack away at them, slowly whittling down the unfiltered mess. For the most part, I listen to what Gigavox recommends for me, taking into account my previous ratings. For example, everything I’ve heard from Emerging Telephony Conference has been boring as dirt.
As I drove along home, I heard Phil Windley and Doug Kaye announce three lightning speeches from eTel and I was prepared to be underwhelmed. But before I could wind my way past the crap, I heard three amazing, five minute speeches.

Brian McConnel gave a long introduction to RadioHandi, a kind of party-line plus voice mail for the internet. With a growing list of local numbers around the world, users can call in and listen to or leave notes around anything. The first use that comes to my mind is for podcasts who want to broadcast listener comments as audio. ‘Sounds like a great way to create communities and broadcasts with phones, VOIP and/or RSS.
Second, Ajay Madhok beautiful describes AmSoft’s offering to communications: context-awareness. Depending on where we are and what we’re doing, we want different people to be able to reach us in different ways. Why can’t our phones, our email and our IM clients act like a personal assistant, screening calls to make them appropriate to our circumstances? What if we could just have one identity and not tell everyone our changing emails and numbers? Equals is the total package to do this, and I have no idea how it could possibly work!! How can they intercept your calls, email and IM, regardless of what network they’re on?!?! ‘Sounds too good to be true!!
The last presentation was on how to make your home phone better. No one who thinks about it wants their home phone to surf the web, but it would be nice if it was an alarm clock, could tie in to online chat and access your contacts. Enter Casabi, tying the web and voice together at home intelligently. I’m sure it must entail buying new hardware, but it would be nice to have home phones that are at least as useful as cellphones.

For the first post of the year, I’ll return to my inane gadget musing of the past. Now I don’t own a Zune. In fact, I’ve never touched one. But I can tell I don’t want one … yet. If they ever get Linux on it, then the chances are it’d be awesome. If the wi-fi was actually wi-fi (as in, check your email and surf the web) and the “squirting” was just straight file-sharing, it’d be cooler than an iPod: the screens bigger and the battery lasts longer. As it stands, every body thinks it sucks, from GeekBrief to Leo Laporte to CNN. I would never get one now because it doesn’t work on Mac. Even the Zune-a-philes have lists of needed improvements, like Zune Luv. To boot, Microsuck has made some freaky ads.

Surely you recall the Optimus Keyboard, a 103-key gadget of awesomeness where each key is a tiny LCD that ’s individually reprogrammable. Well some news is finally coming out again: the keyboard will be available for pre-order starting December 12th. Price and quantity available have not been announced but there are some rumors that it might cost something in the $200 range. While digging through the Optimus LiveJournal, we uncovered this picture of the Mac OS X interface used to reprogram the keys. Looks incredibly robust and easy to use. In fact, everything about this keyboard looks to be awesome and incredibly useful: now let ’s just hope it doesn ‘t turn into vaporware like some other keyboard-related items.

Optimus-103 keyboard pre-orders start December 12 [Engadget]

technorati tags:hardware

Blogged with Flock

Ontology is the branch of philisophy that seeks to answer “What is there?” or “What is real?” These may seem like straight-forward questions, but consider things like Mathematics or The Spirit of Christmas. Are they real? How do you determine what is really real? Most cultures, religions and philosophies can be assessed by how they answer these questions. Traditionally, the West has been labeled Dualistic, that is, considering that there are two fundamental kinds of things in the universe (matter and spirit), while the East has been called Monistic, considering there to be only one thing at heart (the Tao or Brahman). I think that they are both right, but for the wrong reasons.

In the West, we inherited the wonderful traditions of the Hebrews and then foisted upon them the Greek’s errand nonsense. Jewish tradition maintained that a person is his or her body, that the breath was given to man by God and that as long as so animated, he or she was as living soul. Words like soul, mind and heart also mean breath, kidney and wisdom in Hebrew. When someone died, they didn’t have an inner “Casper the Friendly Ghost” float off somewhere: they were simply dead. Sheol, Hebrew hell, was simply an extended metaphor for the nothingness of the grave. It’s grey, monotone description indicates that death was empty and void. The word in Genesis 2:7 where Man becomes a living “soul” is rendered “creature” twelve verses later.

Greek philosophers, who presupposed no God, saw abstract concepts as having some reality beyond the physical. If everyone knows that right triangle obey the Pythagorean theorem, yet only perfectly in the mind, then the mind must be a kind of different thing from crummy, hand measured triangles. The New Testament was written in Greek because it was the lingua franca of the day, but now we’ve taken the pagan etymologies of the word to be what first century Jews were thinking. We are merely perpetuating Greek Dualism.

In the East, the ideas that everything is an expression of the Tao or Brahman, helped people remember that they are their body, not that they have a body. Never mind that God will resurrect everyone, then judge them: we have to have our bodies to exist. God is uncreated, however, and though the word doesn’t fit, He is the only thing of a different substance than everything else. Therein lies the correct definition of Dualism.

Flock seems like a cool idea that is almost all there. The goal is to have a web-browser that combines all the savy, open-source coolness of Firefox, and a heap of Web 2.0 smarts (it automatically links up with your Flickr library and Delicious account). There are just a few kinks left in the system, but it’s at a stable beta release and will soon be enterprise ready. I wish they’d use Flock or Firefox at my work. It’s bad enough being trapped behind a lousy firewall, but it’s worse to have to use an outdated, incorrigible web-browser as I’m trying to re-layout my website. Ugh.

technorati tags:flock, web-browser, firefox, internet, web-2.0, open-source

Blogged with Flock