Twitter...

So I'm trying out Twitter. First impression, seems some-what cool. No idea of I'll actually stick with it but if anyone cares check it out or follow me at their own risk.

iTunes: Another Soul Lost...

So a couple of months ago, Tom got me into really using iTunes and it has kinda spiraled into this semi-encompassing obsession of cleaning mp3 tags, finding high quality album art, and systematically quantifying the value of a song between 1 and 5 stars. To date, I have about 30GB of music loaded into my iTunes library (conservatively about 40% of my actual mp3 collection), which translates into roughly about 5,000 songs and 340 albums. I dunno, there's something about a coverflow that seems to stretch on to infinity. I've also rated about 8 gigs or 1,300 songs out of the 5,000.

Well, like all good addictions, I had to spread the love. After a quick gym work out on Monday, Steve came over and I burned him about 4 gigs of music for his fledging iTunes library (he recently got an 8 gig nano). As he made his selections using iTunes' album view, I raved about the advantages of actually doing all the leg work that's required to make iTunes operate at its full potential. Long story short, I think I got him hooked on the idea of being able to quickly filter through gigs of music, make smart playlists on the fly, use Genius to build playlists for him and generally just have a very sleek and cool looking music library as opposed to viewing a bunch of directory folders through windows explorer.

Also we got to reminiscing about high school, and how we use to go to the store to buy CDs for bulky discman. Now all that fits in my pocket and I use it to make calls from as well as surf the internet. Sometimes I have to stop and remember how far we've come and how crazy the times we live in are. Seriously, what is going to come over the horizon? It's almost unfathomable.

Google My Location?

Is it me, or is the internet just getting creepier and creepier? Now Google has a service that allows you to Google your friends' locations (with their permission of course).

Brave New World...

I never really thought about it but the geotag apps in my iPhone 3G can be down right creepy.

The End of Print Media?

At least one newspaper of note, isn't going down without a fight.

... something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times’ website—video, audio, “drillable” graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, there’s a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio “back story” with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.

I Give You, The Future...

Well it's finally happened, LG introduces the watch phone.

Upgrades...

Normally I build a new PC every two years or so, just to keep up with technology and what not. But with times being what they are (economically) and no real need for upgrading the speed of my PC, I decided to just go with a few minor upgrades. So yesterday I received in the mail a new Samsung 750 MB hard drive and a i-Rocks 12-in-1 USB 2.0 card reader.

I got the new hard drive because a lot of the new content available now is in HD, which makes it four times as large as before. And I got the card reader because 1) I broke the front USB ports on my computer case a while back and reaching behind the case to plug in my jump drive and iPhone is a pain and 2) so I can finally get pictures off my camera. That means as soon as I fix my PHP scripts that automatically resize my photos for my image galleries, AGO should have new pictures again. Yay :)

The hard drive was OEM, which stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. It basically means barebones. All I got was the hard drive in a plastic case, no cables, no manual, not even a box. I pulled out my case, slid open the cover, pulled out my hard drive bay, and attached my new drive. I booted it up and nothing. BIOS recognized it but Windows didn't. Doh! I forgot I needed to partition and format the drive first. So I pop in my Windows CD, set my BIOS to boot off CD, and commenced to format the drive. After that it was smooth sailing. Luckily I knew what I was doing.

But during the course of the installation, I got to thinking, how is a lay person, that is someone who is totally computer illiterate suppose to know to do all that? In this age of Plug-and-play, I forget sometimes that certain tasks still require a moderate degree of computer knowledge. I tend to think of computers are fairly simple puzzles. Problems are easily fixed if you know what you're looking for. But what if you have no clue? They must seem like indecipherable black boxes. Things work or they don't, but they have no idea why. Of course, I face the same kind of challenge when staring at an automobile. We all have our blind spots I suppose.

Spotlight...

I was watching NextWorld on Discovery Channel the other day and saw, what I consider a very ingenious idea, for solving our unsustainable food production problems of the near future. A company called VeriticalFarm, one among many, proposes that we build hydroponic skyscrapers in cities to grow produce all year round locally.

When I hear of stuff like this, I think of the green revolution that our President-Elect talks about that will reenvigorate American industry, create millions of new jobs, and make us the world leader again in technology, or maybe that's wishful thinking. The cynic in me thinks that the nay-sayers will keep true change from taking place with their doom and gloom, and it will be another country that steps up and leads the charge. This would be one case I would be glad to be wrong.

I, Nanny...

Yesterday I wrote about Ergo Proxy, an anime I had recently finished watching. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans live in bio-domes, are cloned in artificial wombs, and depend on artificial intelligent machines (androids) for many basic, day-to-day functions. Well it turns out that at least one part of that story might not be so sci-fi after all. In a Wired article, I just discovered that robot nannies are now available.

Models now on the market range from the Hello Kitty robot — "perfect ... for whoever does not have a lot time to stay with child," proclaims a vendor — to NEC's PaPeRo, which tells jokes, gives quizzes and uses radio-frequency identification chips to track kids. In another generation, these sophisticated machines will likely seem quaint.

Personal service robots are more common than industrial robots — an estimated 5.8 million are now in use, five times more than in industry — and people are happy to use them for tasks once fulfilled by people. One survey of public attitude towards robots found that many people were willing to to use them as babysitters — more people, in fact, than would use robots as priests or massage therapists.

Of course, while the technology is definitely cool, it does raise a lot of interesting ethical questions we'll eventually have to tackle as robots get more advanced and more prevalent in our daily lives. Man, these are crazy times we live in.