Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, April 2, 2007

Why IT doesn't attract? -- Comment()
Why people complain about the stress caused by information technology? Few of us would change our jobs to something where IT wasn't being used. (See my column in Finnish on this topic, Miksi tietotekniikka ei houkuttele?)

The open world of pictures -- Comment()
What to do when you urgently need a picture to illustrate a point in a presentation? There is a great solution on the net, as described in The excellence that is Flickr and Creative Commons: "So I’m doing a presentation called “What’s Driving Open Access?” next month. And because I will happily take a metaphor, run it into the ground, resurrect it, run it back into the ground, then hop up and down on its exanimate corpse just to make the point, I went to Flickr’s Creative Commons search looking for pictures of buses. [...] I found some awesome stuff. I found more metaphors than even I can shake the proverbial stick at. I found the “rubber meets road” picture. I did. I swear I did." [Caveat Lector]

Are your files saved? -- Comment()
How to preserve your valuable data, such as music, photos and videos - that is the question. I have been using AAC format for music to save space and preserve quality (compared to mp3 files). But there certainly is much room for improvement in this area, as discussed in Tiny files set for a big future:" BBC Click's Ian Hardy looks at the latest developments in digital file compression such as songs and movies." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

Being stupid while getting a brilliant idea -- Comment()
Sometimes you have a great idea and write a lot of text about it (a plan for a new project, for example, or an article for a magazine), and then you realize that there is a great gaping (and abvious!) hole in the middle of the idea. This is nicely illustrated by Andy Ihnatko in Working, Drooping, and Twitting: " thought I'd take a break to check in with y'all." [Andy Ihnatko's YELLOWTEXT]

E-mail that refuses to let go -- Comment()
The suprising thing about e-mail is that sometime it just refuses to disappear (although I agree that usually you have the opposite problem). A good example of e-mail that refuses to let go shows Rove’s Role in Fate of Prosecutors: "Congressional Democrats said they are focusing on Karl Rove in the dismissals of several U.S. attorneys in part because the administration appears to have tried to hide his fingerprints." [NYT > Home Page]

Working with Apple TV -- Comment()
Some people have work which suits them great, like in the example of AppleTV On The Horizontal: 'The most awesome thing about AppleTV is that if you (a) are a technology pundit and (b) have a terabyte or more of music, movies, and TV shows on your home network, you can spend all day lying on the sofa with a remote in your hand and still call it "Work."' [58 words in article.] [Andy Ihnatko's YELLOWTEXT]