Chicago now has a giant eye gracing the corner of State and Van Buren (Pritzker Park,). This makes my daily commute to and from work much, much more interesting. The sculpture (“Eye”) is by local artist Tony Tasset. My understanding is that each year there will be a new temporary piece in that spot. Public art definitely adds character to a city.
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting some cool folks who were thinking about how best to design technology to support learning in the future. The group came from disparate backgrounds under the moniker of “Meeting of the Minds.” Like ripples on a pond, I find the ideas we discussed reverberating in my mind – expanding and colliding off other ideas.
To me, the future is five minutes away. To my mind, the educational process is broken – we are largely following a model developed more than a century go that was designed to impose conformity and train future generations to labor in factories and fight in wars. Talking about ways to fix things was extremely refreshing.
Anyroad, there is now a background buzz in my brain. I am looking forward to continuing the conversation.
Purchased some very handy USB cables (with the somewhat unfortunate name of BONE Accessory Link Series) from Cyberguys. These cables are super short, so I can travel extremely light. Happy with my purchase.
Test part 3 involves using the iBlogger app. This particular app has not yet been converted to a native iPad version yet, so the scaled interface is less fun to use than BlogPress. It gets worse. The app crashed every time I attempted to publish my post. Looks like the N900 wins on all counts
I obviously have too much time on my hands this evening. My second test on the iPad involves using the BlogPress app. The BlogPress program is easy to use – it looks like I can upload images (via Flickr) and video (via YouTube), add tags, but hyperlinking does not seem to be an option. Having said that, I failed spectacularly in uploading an image – but perhaps that was due to AT&T’s sporadic DSL service.
It looks like the problem I had with the BT-1 webcam image freezing in ScreenFlow is associated with OS X 10.6.2. I tested on three other machines (Intel and PowerPC) running OS X 10.5.8, and everything worked. Have posted on the Telestream Community Forum. Hoping for a solution.
Yeh! LightScribe now works again for me.
Updating to OS X Snow Leopard resulted in each disk that I burnt with LightScribe coming out blank (not the data, but the printed image on the disk). Just found an update to the LaCie LightScribe Labeler, and now everything works again.
Crisis over….
Last weekend I finished reading Terry Pratchett’s “Unseen Academicals” – his latest Diskworld novel. Pratchett sets a high bar for himself, each time he finishes a new book there is the slight risk that the new tome will not match the brilliance of his earlier work. Luckily, Unseen Academicals is well up to standard. I found myself waking up at four o’clock on Sunday morning just to finish the book.
Sadly, the U.S. covers of his book suck (no offence to the artist). The way Pratchett’s work is marketing in the U.S. is misguided. I wish the U.S. publisher would stick with the British design. I end up ordering my copies from Amazon.co.uk to avoid the mediocre U.S. design.
I was going to blog about the book earlier in the week – there was a passage that caught my eye, and I had to read it three times in quick succession. It was just that powerful. The strange thing was that I did not have my copy of the book with me, so I turned to Google and Amazon’s search-inside-this-book so see if I could grab the relevant text. Many others had quoted the exact segment, but they left out what I thought was integral to the quote. I have emphasized what was missing below:
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior’
The two wizards exchanged a glance. Vetinari was staring into the depths of his beer mug and they were glad that they did not know what he saw in there.
The quote appears on page 229 of the U.K. edition.
Last week, I attended an IBM event at their Chicago Innovation Center. There were some great presentations, but there was one particular point that I found telling:
One of the presenters made an off-hand comment that his daughter used a Mac.
Now, the presenter has a high-level position with IBM, the room I was in was filled with Lenovo PCs. Even though IBM no longer makes PCs and laptops, I am sure that IBM employees are given Lenovo PCs and that the presenter probably had several PC laptops that his daughter could use.
I asked if he was aware of the apparent disconnect. He responded that the Mac/OS X was a clear better device/platform. His daughter definitely believed that. I think we are on the cusp of a generational inflection point.
I think we will suddenly see swathes of teenagers grow up and buy Macs rather than PCs. These users are going to push for Macs at work. Things will change.
Nintendo is one of those companies, like Apple, that excels in design. Over the weekend a simple calendar from the nice folks at Nintendo dropped through my letterbox. The images may be cheesy, but the concept is very clever – the calendar is basically a frame, holding a stack of cards. Each card represents a month, and can be shuffled backward and forwards as the year progresses. I like it.