Push-to-talk is just nuts, unless you are the network engineers, tech support, courier, or plumber it is a rude tool. There is little purpose for push-to-talk other than make grown men feel better because they never were allowed to have walkie talkies growing up. I love to pick them up and announce "clean-up on aisle 7".
We have added a Quick Link RSS Feed for this site. It is also available from the vanderwal.net XML page. Yes, the plethora of links there today are related to testing, well at least some of them.
SixApart's TypeKey looks to be a good resource to help authenticate those making comments on Web sites. I have been very happy with SixApart's TypePad, not that I am ready to move off my own system. Actually it sounds like TypeKey will have an open
Google has been letting me down lately. The past two months I have had too many irrelevant links or only a handful (when I narrow the terms) that do not have what I am looking for. Oddly I have Googled only my site and found the results where I mentioned what I was seeking.
I have been turning more and more to Vivisimo and DogPile for search instead. Why? Well they are both metaseach tools, Vivismo includes Google in what it searches, that search across multiple search engines and return them in one interface. These two services also have faceted filtering and/or categorical filters for the results. These facets greatly help filter out the junk. In short it solves the Paris Hilton site problem when you want a hotel room not a bimbo.
In the past I have tried Vivismo, but it did not seem to have enough depth, which has now been solved. Dogpile now offers a good breadth of search engines that seem to improve on the limited results I had been getting in the past. It is good to have options.
I have been loving my iPod for some months now. But, I am continually amazed that in the 4,000 songs I currently have stored I don't always have what I want to hear. Not only do I not have the one or two songs, but I do not have anything by that artist or composer and I own four or five CDs by that person. I just realized that I did not have any Eric Clapton, but that was only when I was grabbing the Holy Cole Trio to rip. Eric Clapton August lived in my Walkman for years at the end of the 80s. It was part of what framed living in Oxford and traveling into London on Thursdays or Fridays.
I had been thinking that the iPod would be much like having a Walkman again, but it is much more than that. A Walkman took pre-cognitive measures before heading out to ensure that the music you wanted was loaded or in another pocket. I always traveled with three or four tapes, usually mix tapes to get my space worth. Now I always have something I am not tired of or would like to hear (albeit not always exactly what I wanted, yet).
I am really enjoying the iPod on the train rides as it blocks out the chatter of non-regular riders who know the rules of the Metro are not to talk, but if necessary to have a conversation quietly. I really enjoy the music while waiting on the platform watching others. One night a man stepped to the edge of the platform and was practicing ballet positions in street shoes and slacks. His tapping, pointing, and placing the his feet was in perfect time to what I was listening to, which I believe was Lamb.
I do not wear the telltale white headphones as I am not a fan of the look, but also greatly prefer the sounds produced by my Sony Fontopia, which tend to block a lot of external noise.
The biggest downside of this arrangement is missing out on the sounds around me. I also am not finding the concentration reading or when knocking out ideas on my graphpad. These are things I did not notice when I was younger and had my Walkman, but I may not have felt free time so rare.
This Cris Rock's cell phone bit really helped boost my spirits on an unhealthy week in our house.
On this end we had Joy in the hospital, Will projectile vomiting (like a fire hydrant), and me getting a light version of the virus that put Joy in the hospital. We are all getting better, but still need some rest.
Outbound SMTP e-mail has been blocked at work, so I will most likely respond using my mobile account for personal e-mail that needs addressing during business hours. This restriction is understandable, but also limits the ability to shoot a quick e-mail to say I will be meeting for dinner this evening at place X. I loathe the telephone and find e-mail more usable as it captures the information for reuse and later referral, where as the phone does not permit this ease of reuse, or ease of accurate reuse as may be more appropriate.
I have posted my thoughts on Tools to Manage Information On Your Personal Hard Drive for Mac OS X in particular. I have posted this on my Personal Info Cloud site. This is the first piece of content that I am not posting in both places. This may become a trend as I am spending a fair amount of time thinking through ideas related to the Personal Info Cloud in one place. The Personal Info Cloud has an RSS feed and I will be posting notices that new info has been added there as it happens.
For those of serving the Web from a Microsoft Server 2003 O'Reilly Net has Tips on IIS 6.
Late last night I got back from the IA Summit in Austin. The Summit was great as it sparked a few ideas, I learned new things, I got to see friends of like minds, and learned the world is still alright. The Summit Blog offers a good snapshot of the Summit. I could not have enjoyed the Summit without James' iCal of the Summit as I was able to drop it into my Personal InfoCloud and truly get what I wanted out of the Summit.
The sessions were very good this year, there was always something I wanted to attend (on a few occasions there was more than one session I really wanted to attend). I really enjoyed Jesse's James Garrett'sBrand-driven IA session which was entertaining and insightful. Victor Lombardi's Incorporating Research on Navigation into a Design Method really gave me a strong insight into some of the current research, particularly a summary of Andrew Dillion's Shape of Information, that helped flesh out some of my own ideas. The UT Austin student's presentation on Extreme IA, using Extreme Programming methodologies for IA research and tasks. Tony Byrne's Critical Review of Enterprise CMS was extremely valuable for myself as it made the current CMS marketplace more coherent for me (I went to an all day session on CSM on Friday that was largely an echo of much of my CMS experience and provided a few good insights that I did not have in my tool belt, which did not strike as large of a chord as the Critical Review).
I need a little time and sleep to digest the conference some more.
I knew the Summit would be jam packed into nearly all my waking hours so I was looking forward to the travel time to write and reflect. My trek to Austin was an educational experience as I had purchased US Air tickets off Travelocity for the round trip. My ticketing info said US Air flights with partners United and CanadaAir. On Thursday evening I stood in a non-moving line at the airport for 45 minutes only to jump the line to ask about my flight. The agent said, "We no longer run the flights to Chicago, you are now on a flight run completely by United". I went to United to find out I was very late (30 minutes before the flight and trying to point to the long line at US Air and trying to eek out the words 45 minutes). It was a fast trek behind the counter agent as she rushed me to the short security line with my carry-on and my check-in bag as I did not have time to check my bag and I was short on time to get to the last gate out on the airports tendril. That morning I moved my small pocket knives to my check-in luggage so I would have the ever resourceful and needed tools in Austin. I was stuck in Security as they dug out the offending .75 inch pen Swiss Army knife and the regular sized one then rescanned my bag.
By the time I got to the gate the doors to the flight had shut (10 minutes before the flight). I was on to the adventure of finding a flight or series of flights to Austin assisted by the helpful gate agent. He tried 9 different combinations as he muttered about the snow in Atlanta and the Carolinas. Finally he said he was going to make a last ditch effort with Continental. I followed him to the gate to Houston and was able to get a seat to Houston and a connection to Austin on the last flight to Austin. Then a snag. The flight was leaving in three minutes, but my ticket was a US Air ticket for a United flight and needed to be converted by US Air to United so they could in-turn transfer it to Continental. The helpful gate agent said he would go back out to the lobby and exchange the ticket and he took off jogging. Five minutes later he returned with my exchanged tickets and they reopened the gate doors and the very helpful Continental gate agent carted my luggage down the gateway, but with out the wheelie extending handle out so he looked like a hunchback galloping after me). I finally sat in my seat and was quite numb from the experience). I was able to relax a little and write a little on the flight and on my 2 hour plus layover in Houston, but only about a third of what I had hoped to get done.
For the return flights I decided to leave even earlier for the Airport. It was a good thing I did so as I went looking for US Air and CanadaAir (regional) for my flight back as that is what the ticketing said, with both flights co-branded with United. The Austin airport does not have a presence for US Air nor CanadaAir. I thought I was in for another great adventure. This time I tried United first (no other closely related options). I handed the ticketing agent my ID and she handed me my United tickets, but my flight was delayed with "wheels up" at 5:40 and boarding at 6:00pm. This was as confusing as the rest of the trip for me so I just went with it. It turns out I was on a small regional jet that did not have enough room to write on the laptop, but I did have a great seatmate that had also been to the conference and we had a very good chat. The flight from Chicago home was the usual tight forward accommodation that does not permit opening a laptop. But, I did get home after 1am this morning.