Category Archives: Technology

Point Break

PowerPointA good chunk of my day today was spent designing an investor presentation for a client using the supremely inaccurate Microsoft PowerPoint — first on Mac OS X and then on Windows XP — a process which is best likened to assembling a model airplane with oven mitts on. There’s a lot left to be desired in all of the Microsoft Office applications, mostly owing to fact that counter-intuitiveness seems to be the suite’s guiding design principle, but I have a special complaint for PowerPoint. Not only does it do a poor job of crystallizing a thorough thought process, but it’s remarkably unfaithful to user intentions.

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Share and Share Alike

At the office, we were debating the issue of file sharing and its impact on artists, specifically whether or not a digital distribution system for music sales would allow artists to see a larger share of the proceeds from every sale. The argument was made that the low overhead of digital distribution doesn’t necessarily ensure that artists will see more money and in fact it may mean that they get a reduced share of the profits.

That’s when I realized that, after all the fuss over Napster (whose impending relaunch actually kicked off this conversation), Gnutella and lawsuits filed against individual users by the RIAA, I’ve developed a pretty callous attitude towards artists’ rights. This may anger some of my friends who are musicians and who aspire to become very well-paid musicians for a living, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter to me much whether artists get their fair share of money from recordings or not.

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Lacking in Confidence

Web ConfidentialAll of my passwords and user data have been stored in a home-brewed FileMaker Pro database for years, but recently worries about poor security finally started getting to me. So I downloaded and registered Alco Bloom’s Web Confidential, which bills itself as “the most powerful password manager on the Macintosh.” Normally when I write a post like this, it’s with the intent of praising the entrepreneurial spirit of the lone shareware author, and I had assumed that I would become a Web Confidential fan more or less immediately. The software has been highly praised in Mac circles for years as an indispensable, highly secure tool for managing the bewildering array of security permissions with which Web surfers must contend.

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Tickets to Nowhere

Here’s a quick complaint about online ticket purchasing for highly popular events: it has a long way to go. Unable (and, by principle, unwilling) to camp out all night for post-season Yankees tickets, I decided to try and make an online purchase yesterday when tickets to the division and league championship series went on sale right at 12:30p sharp. I set an alarm on my computer to remind me to log in at the appointed time, and I was pleased to be able to secure a spot in the virtual queue right away — especially knowing that probably tens of thousands of other fans were trying to do the same thing either online, at Ticketmaster outlets, or at the stadium.

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The Paperless Home Office

PDF IconThere’s a case to be made for the inherent clumsiness of the the Portable Document Format — better known as PDF, and most often associated with Adobe’s Acrobat software — but I really like it. At least in the interim, while the principal delivery medium for most documents is still paper, PDFs make a great replacement for stacks of letter-sized, stapled or paper-clipped documentation. Last night, while trying to figure out how to get my VCR to tape a show saved on my DVR, I suddenly realized that I could replace most all of the paper user manuals that ship with the consumer electronics devices I own with simple PDFs.

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A Case for Analog

Sony DSC-F505There’s a rule of thumb that I’ve picked up in my ten years or so of buying digital toys of all sorts, from PCs to peripherals to PDAs: every device has its own quirky, unintended operational shortcoming that, if it’s not readily apparent at the time of purchase, will make itself known soon enough, and will drive me completely bats.

The latest evidence of this is my Sony Cybershot DSC-F505, a digital still camera that’s pretty long in the tooth now anyway, but has been repeatedly beset by a few infuriating defects over the three years or so I’ve had it. First, the battery it shipped with started failing to hold any meaningful charge, and I’d get only a minute or two of power from it.

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Different Thinking

Finding favorable writing about the Mac on the Web is easier than finding the names of your senators and representatives in Congress. Though the platform has a relatively minor share of the computing marketplace, there’s no shortage of highly enthusiastic voices — old and young, articulate and visceral — generating an endless litany of pro-Macintosh rhetoric.

Yet the nature of this writing, while invigorating, often fails on the point of making truly persuasive arguments for buying a new Macintosh instead of a new Windows machine, and certainly on the point of providing objective or sound reasoning. Which is to say, most of what you’ll read on the so-called Mac Web amounts to a kind of benign dogma. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve noticed a small number of articles of notably impressive quality, all of which are worth reading for Mac diehards, interested computing agnostics and maybe even for inveterate Windows users.

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Look Ma, No Wires

Belkin F5D7010After bringing home a DVR on Saturday, I made a second significant technological upgrade to our household on Sunday in the form of wireless 802.11b networking — finally. Our cable modem connection, which sits in the bedroom, now broadcasts a clean 802.11b signal throughout the apartment, thanks to a new Netgear MR814v2 wireless router which I managed to buy for a remarkable US$40, after rebates.

It astounds me that the price point for wireless networking has dropped so quickly, but it makes sense now that the slower 802.11b standard is rapidly being superseded by the faster 802.11g standard. At forty bucks, an 802.11b router is an incredible bargain, as most home networking needs will almost never exceed its 11Mbps limit. Even if, through some dramatic and unforseen alteration in my computing habits, my home network traffic demands 802.11g within a few months, then I’ll be able to comfortably discard this Netgear router knowing that it provided me a very economical entryway into the wireless world.

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Time Is on My Side

Explorer 8000 DVRMy dog has a habit of demanding to go outside during the eighth inning of just about every afternoon ballgame I watch on TV, but during today’s Yankees-Red Sox match I had a solution that suited both man and beast: digital video recording. I pressed ‘Pause’ on the remote control, walked Mister President out to the dog park and let him run around for about fifteen minutes. When we got back to the house I pressed &#8216Play’ and watched Jorge Posada hit a crucial home run to win it for the Yankees with a final score of 10-7.

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