Thursday, January 16, 2003

I got my first Moleskine about eight months ago. Since then, I have become addicted to these amazing little notebooks. Imagine my suprise upon discovering today's Metafilter Thread about them. I now have about four or five of the small ones that I keep in my computer bag and use throughout the day. 8:18:14 PM

As depressing as the Supreme Court decision on the Eldred case is, for some reason all I can think about is how much we need campaign finance reform. We need to find a way to divorce big money interests from politicians. Otherwise, the good of the public will always be subverted by the need to get elected or re-elected. 4:02:57 PM

Infosync: AT & T Wireless subscribers will be able to vote on the next American Idol season using their SMS capable phones according to this article. I'm sure this is just a trial balloon for the network and ATT, but this could be the start of something a lot bigger here in the US where SMS hasn't really taken off like in Japan and the Scandinavian countries. I think my major concern about the possible success of something like this is that even most tech savvy people I know don't use SMS messaging from their phones at all. My more non-technical friends don't even know how to use the phone in this manner. My Danger, which supports sms messaging, has the major hole in it's operating system that does not let you generate SMS messages from listings in your address book. I think that the current lines of phones could be improved quite a bit in terms of the ease of text messaging. 8:35:21 AM

Cory has a new story, named Liberation Spectrum, (fiction) up on Salon that is about, in part, Wi-Fi. 8:24:39 AM

David Pogue has an interesting article discussing upcoming TiVO features in today's Circuits section of the New York Times. The good news is that, as of April, the phone jack requirement to access program data will go away, and you will be able to connect to their service online. The not so good news is that it looks like those of us with first series machines will not get all of the new features. I guess I'm not that concerned about that particular aspect, I'm going to hold onto this first generation machine, with its lifetime subscription to the service, as long as I can. 7:21:35 AM