After reading The Name Game I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Well actually, I laughed out loud the entire way through the article. The sheer frivolity of the industry described boggles the imagination. I actually checked the date to see if it was published on April Fool’s Day. Maybe I’m missing something very big here; if so, please enlighten me.
Rain Happiness
Happiness is thinking you forgot your umbrella, then spotting it in your backpack and walking through the pouring rain dry.
Interior Decoration
I mentioned earlier that I was rearranging some things in my room, and now in the photolog you can see before, after, and what was added. The photos from tonight all look a little grainy because the ISO setting on my camera was set wrong. The noise can really be killer on my cam at 300 and above.
Matt Is Bored
Well, everyone’s doing it. Here we go, Matt is . . .
- . . . it worth it?
- . . . a critic, hear me roar, or snore!
- . . . taking the extra
- . . . currently married to the love of his life
- . . . new Colts coach
- . . . so cute
- . . . a sad but amusing old drunk
- . . . way better than chocolate
- . . . a lil gerbil ish
- . . . yummy
- . . . a clown
- . . . great!!!
- . . . me name
- . . . a babe
So there you go. If you’re really cool you can put your full name in there, but alas that did nothing for me. I might try “Matthew” later to see how Matts and Matthews compare.
Palm Tungsten-T Released
Well, just minutes ago Palm officially released their new Tungsten T product. They really need to start coming up with better names for these things. This is bad, and Zire? What’s up with that? Anyway this unit looks quite good, it has everything Palm has been lacking for so long:
- Sliding graffiti area, so it should be pretty small.
- Voice recording and playback, which has been missing for far too long on the PalmOS platform
- High resolution screen (320×320), Sony has had this for ages. Again, long overdue.
- Bluetooth, this is a big deal, and a first in the PalmOS market. Finally, innovation!
- Multimedia Card and Secure Digital expansion slots. Groovy.
- OS5: evolutionary, not revolutionary.
What’s going to decide how this unit does in the market is how Palm markets this, and how the well the form-factor and screen is received. Most people don’t admit it, but the feel of a handheld is really the one of the biggest factors in making their decision. That’s why people think the Treo looks funny but love it once they hold it in their hand. Palm hasn’t been very consistent as far as screen quality goes, so I’d really like to see how this one looks, and how it compares to the ones Sony is putting out. The only real flaw I see with this unit’s specs is that it has the headphone jack and hardware to play MP3s, but it says “separate
Hopefully this will be the unit that keeps Palm afloat and reasserts the PalmOS over PocketPCs. There is really no reason to buy a PocketPC anymore: not for speed (try actually doing something on that faster processor), not for multimedia, not for working with Office documents, and certainly not for the price. If you did somehow end up with a PocketPC through some twist of fate, do yourself a favor and put GNU/Linux on it.
Update: There in a nice review on Infosync by Larry Garfield, an old PalmStation buddy, where he covers pretty much everything I was worried about, including the screen. His review is very favorable. Palm Infocenter as a pretty detailed announcement with some good discussion. PDA Buzz has hands-on reviews from a number of people who have one already. Brighthand also has a new review up, but I’m hesitant to recommend them because their design looks a little too familiar.
Pun-A-Day #18
This guy goes into a restaurant for a Christmas breakfast while in his home town for the holidays. After looking over the menu he says, “I’ll just have the eggs benedict.” His order comes a while later and it’s served on a big shiny hubcap. He asks the waiter, “What’s with the hubcap?” The waiter sings, “There’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise!”
Note to Self: Chenille
Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Especially with other stuff
More on Monospaced Fonts
Well I’ve found a few more I plan to check out, and I’m going to give each at least a day’s worth of heavy coding, then narrow it down progressively until I finally decide on one. The non-free fonts that don’t look terribly promising I’m going to try and test drive online, but MyFonts anti-aliases things pretty heavily and indiscriminately, which makes it hard to tell how fonts work at smaller sizes. The new entrants in the contest are:
Several of these font suggestions come via Aaron Swartz’s favorite fonts list. Personally I’d like to see more lists like this, perhaps in a semantically meaningful way that could be indexed and presented in different ways. Any format come to mind? I know I’ve read a couple of similar lists before, so I’ll try and dig up some more links.
Gallery: 10-27-2002
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Font for Code Editing
I’ve been looking for a nice monospaced font to replace Courier New in my code editing programs. Several people suggested Andale Mono, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, I don’t have it on any of my machine, so I decided to hit up Google to see where it would be available. I went on a goose chase through MyFonts that led me to a dead end when I saw that Andale Mono was part of Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts for the web, which were available for free, but now aren’t offered for download from Microsoft. However, it looks like the original license the fonts were released under is broad enough to allow third parties to continue to offer the fonts for download, which led me to the Core Fonts Sourceforge project which on their download page had exactly what I needed. Ahhhhh.
However my search is far from over, in the larger sense. Andale Mono is working out great so far, but I’m not sure if I like the feel of it yet, and so I’m going to test out some commercial fonts to see if any of them suit me better. I’ll post the final decision once I make it.
Pun-A-Day #17
An oldie but a goodie
These three strings are walking along, dying of thirst in the middle of Death Valley. After a long, long trek. They come to a bar. “Boy, this is just in time…I can’t go any farther.” So he walks into the bar and orders a drink. “Can’t you read the sign there? We don’t serve no strings here” bellows the bartender. “But I’m going to die of thirst!” protests the string. With that the bartender picks him up, and throws him out into the street. One of his buddies says “I’ll disguise myself as a rope and go in to get us a drink.” So, in he goes. “Hey, I thought I told your friend that we don’t serve your kind here. Now get out that door before I stomp on you!” So he quickly retreats out the door. Finally the last string says “Hey, I’ve got an idea…I’ll tie myself up like a pretzel, and frizzle out my ends, so he won’t recognize me.” So in he goes into the bar. He gets up to the bar and orders a drink. The bartender eyes him a little susspiciously. “Hey, aren’t you one of those strings I told to get out of here?” To which the string answered “No, I’m a frayed knot.”
Into The Fray
Today I plan to do some major reorganizing in my room. There is art to go up, there are books to be put on shelves, there are way too many clothes. After that (assuming there is an after that) I have some major client work to catch up with. So I’m probably not going to be around here much today, but during the commercial break you should go check out the beautiful redesign at Zeldman. Absolutely gorgeous.
Too Cool: TRS-180
While I always see interesting things while I’m at Kaveh Kanes, today Barrett and Justin hacked together something where the public FreeBSD box can only be administered through the serial port, in their case using a old Radio Shack TRS-180, which Justin informed me was the “first laptop.” This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen, check out the pictures. I believe that Justin is going to put a HOW-TO online and I’ll link to it when it’s up.
New Alarm
Those of you who have lived with me before know that sometimes I have trouble waking up. Anyway it what may be the biggest waste of sophisticated hardware ever, my fancy desktop machine has graduated from playing music to also being an alarm. This works on a number of levels, because I can wake up to the music I want to rather than whatever is on the radio. Also while my normal stereo can do an alarm, I was having to change it every night because my schedule is different on Tuesdays and Thursdays than the rest of the week, and I would often forget to set it to the earlier time. The stereo being by my bed was also a problem because sometimes I would just hit the power button without even opening an eye. I found a nice plugin for Winamp 2 that does just what I need, although it looks like it is going to bug me to pay for it in a bit. It has all the features I need, and doesn’t look to bad either.
Let It Be
This site looks different in different browsers; that should be a given. All I can do is offer the HTML up to the world and let people take it from there. Now I do some testing in different browsers mostly because I use a number of browsers normally, however on this site I write the code for the code itself, not with the presentation quirks of any particular browser in mind. That said, I think the overall design looks better in Mozilla than it does in Internet Explorer, which is funny because IE is what I used the entire time I was putting this site together, even though I coded some things into the CSS I knew IE didn’t support (yet). Speaking of which, is anyone else perturbed that with IE6’s service pack they didn’t fix any of the CSS bugs? I guess they’re doing all they can to keep up with security venerabilities. Back to the topic, if you haven’t tried this site out with Moz or one of its derivatives yet, give it a run, if just to see what things are intended to look like, and will look like whenever IE gets the act together. The reason this all comes up is I’m bopping so much to this Daoist groove that it is really painful to go back to commercial projects where I spend thrice as much time tweaking things in 5 different browsers on half as many platforms then I do on the actual design, which is not right. Now it’s a skill like any other, and I consider myself pretty good at it, but I hate it. It’s not what the web is about.
Gallery: 10-25-2002
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Pun-A-Day #16
An ancient Babylonian general was once involved in a plot to overthrow the king. His plot included a number of followers in the upper ranks of the army. However, his plot was uncovered, and the king threw him in jail. The king sentenced him to death without a trial. However, from the jail he was able to secretly contact his followers to arrange to escape, meet his followers, and attack the king’s palace at night. So the night before his scheduled execution, the general managed to escape from prison. He fled to a ziggurat several kilometers away, where his followers would meet him. However, the ziggurat was one of several in the area, and he wasn’t sure if his cohorts would find the right ziggurat. By this time it was twilight, so he lit a small fire and sent smoke signals to indicate in which structure he was hiding. However, the king’s loyal soldiers saw the smoke coming from the ziggurat, and came to arrest him before he could meet his followers. He was executed later that day. The moral of the story? Warning: The searching general has determined that smoking ziggurats can be extremely hazardous to your stealth.
Hey Ma
Hey Ma by Cam’ron featuring Juelz Santana is the song of the day:
Now I was downtown clubbin’, ladies night
Seen shorty she was crazy right
And I approached baby like
“Ma, what’s your age and type?”
She looked at me and said “You’s a baby right”
I told her,
I’m 18 and live a crazy life
Plus I’ll tell you what the ’80s like
And i know what the ladies like
Need a man that’s polite,
listens, and takes advice
I can be all three . . .
Buy the CD, PressPlay it, listen to the radio for five minutes (they’re playing it all the time), or whatever.
Extreme Performance
It looks like AMD is going on the road again. I missed them the last time they came through Houston but I’d like to check them out this time. Some of the events sound like fun too.
Gallery: 10-24-2002
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