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Friday, October 11, 2002 |
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Bot Mots. Lori found some interesting chat mates:
Unfortunately, the kids were already asleep when I got home tonight or I would have gotten their reactions, too. [The Shifted Librarian]8:43:18 PM 
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On the Internet, everyone can hear you joke. A Kiwi student took home a promotional CD from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and popped it into his wife's computer. The media player checked with one of the Internet CD databases, and, not finding a track listing, prompted him to enter track names. So he did. Funnny track names. Like "Wee on My Face," and "Maybe I Fart on Your Face." Of course, the software promptly sent this metadata to the server, so when all the elderly patrons of the symphony tried to listed to their copies of the disc, that's what they got. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] This is too funny! It's never occured to me to do this, but now that I've heard of it I can't believe I didn't think of it first. Of course, one could be more subtle about it, like give the right artist and cd name, but mix up the track names a bit. That could be be amusingly annoying. 8:33:23 PM
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Decade of IBM Mobile Tech Smarts. IBM's breakthrough notebook computer, the ThinkPad, turns 10 this week. A look at how the signature black laptop forever changed mobile computing. By Andy Patrizio. [Wired News] I can't believe it's been that long. Time flies. I remember when the 700 came out, how much I wanted one. More interesting is how far things have come in 10 years, not just for the Thinkpad, but for notebooks in general. "The first ThinkPad sold for $4350, weighed 6.5 lbs and had a 120 MB hard disk drive." It also had a low resolution screen (640x480?). The computer I'm writing this on cost less than US$2000, weighs less than 4 lbs with an extended battery, has a 30GM drive, and a high-res (1280x786) wide-screen display. And it's tiny! One thing they both have in common, which hasn't changed much over the last ten years: The eraser-head pointer, which was invented at IBM, and sat on a shelf in their research department for years before finally seeing light of day on the Thinkpad. 8:13:18 AM
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Wired News: A Site for Your Eyes. Wired News has a different appearance, but the new design isn't just about look and feel. The site now complies with standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium for greater access to all users. By Jon Rochmis. [Wired News] Over recent months, Wired has started to regain some significance. Their early print stuff had a high Signal-to-noise ratio, though the layout often looked like a Pagemaker on crack. Their early on-line experiments were original for their time. More recently, things had been going down-hill. I stopped buying the print magazine altogether when I realized I was having to page through 30+ pages of advertisements before I even got to the table of contents. (A note to all magazine editors out there: This is bad!) As if this wasn't bad enough, their choice of colors and page layout sometimes made the TOC hard to distinguish from the ads themselves, at least on a quick scan. Even worse, the magazine was three times as thick as it had been, but was so loaded with full-page ads, (sometimes on every other page) that it seems to have half as much content. For a magazine that had taken the baton from Mondo 2000, this was all very disappointing. But recently, Wired has become more interesting again. They've trimmed the ads, reducing the magazine to a more reasonable girth, and the articles are actually readable now, with no more orange-on-yellow pages burning holes in the backs of my retinas. And now, they've updated their website to be slightly less flashy, and support accessibility standards. Perhaps the web standards folks are finally starting to make headway in their cause. 7:59:31 AM
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Last update: 11/2/2002; 3:18:13 PM .
