Category Archives: Technology

Blackout

My cable modem service cut out inexplicably this afternoon. A call to tech support yielded no answers, only the broad solution of scheduling a service call for next Thursday — nearly forty-eight hours later. Thankfully, the connection came up half an hour ago, again inexplicably. Having it gone for even just a few hours drives home the fact that I’ve become totally reliant on this service.

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Radio Is the New Sensation

Radio UserlandDave Winer is gunning for the role of patron saint of Web loggers. Not only is he the author of one of the longest-running Web logs out there, but he’s also the guiding light behind UserLand Software. A scrappy publisher of content management tools like Manila, UserLand seems dedicated to the idea of bringing the power of database-driven Web publishing to the masses. Their latest release takes them a signficant step closer to this goal; Radio Userland looks like a remarkably capable personal publishing tool priced at the ridiculously reasonable rate of US$40 per copy. Bravo. I hope to find some time to download and try the 30-day free demo soon, and perhaps if all goes well, Subtraction.com will move over to Radio.

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Crossing over to X

AppleleMore Mac stuff. Over the holidays I took a day out to reformat and partition my PowerBook G4 and installed Mac OS X 10.1. I had a good time playing around with the Aqua interface, and steeping myself in the Mac OS X user community’s hubs and blogs, but that’s about as far as it’s come. 10.1 may be an improvement over 10.0, but it’s still not quite ready for prime time. There are too many missing applications, utilities and feature gaps. When I tried to play a DVD on my television via an S-video cable, for example, Mac OS X refused.Right now what it has to offer just isn’t compelling enough for me to boot it up very often, though I’m trying to remain optimistic about it. The foundation is quite impressive, and with some polishing it could be a first rate OS experience. But what’s most disappointing is that after all this time, Mac fans still have to wait even longer for a servicable, fully functional, modern operating system.

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New for Oh-Two

Happy new year, belatedly. I spent the holidays doing holiday-ish stuff, and also dealing with a series of system troubles that have been nagging at me, like a non-functioning CD-ROM drive on my VAIO and a continually mis-aligned screen on my Palm Vx. A week or so ago, I took advantage of the relative quiet to reformat my PowerBook G4 and install Mac OS X 10.1, which I’ve been playing with since. It’s fun, though there are some that would argue otherwise. In any event, I’m looking forward to 2002 being a heck of a lot better than 2001.

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Radio Radio

Philips FWi1000A lot of ridiculous convergence products will be rejected by consumers before manufacturers stop converging them. Still, some of them are going to stick, and I think one idea that will is Net radio-enabled stereo systems — like the Philips FW-i1000. It’s a mini-system like you’d find in any dorm room, but with a network port that allows it to access hundreds of Internet-based radio stations. Heck, if the combination of television and the Internet seems inevitable, then radio and the Internet is practically a done deal.

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Lewis’s “Next” and First

Liar’s PokerJust back from California. On the flight out, I devoured Michael Lewis’s “Next: The Future Just Happened,” the follow-up to his wildly popular “The New New Thing.” Though not as epic as its predecessor, “Next” was terrific, a keen survey of social change in the post-Net age. Lewis convinced me that he is a truly gifted chronicler of eras, and while in San Francisco, I eagerly hunted down a copy of his first book, “Liar’s Poker,” a less polished yet thoroughly engaging recreation of the bond trading business during the heady Eighties.

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Nice Little Chat

Palm Chat AssistantThe pen alignment on my Palm Vx has been giving me major problems. In trying to repair it, I’ve been using Palm Computing’s Chat Assistant, a Java-based chat applet that lets me talk to a member of Palm’s tech support staff, very much like the services available from LivePerson.We need more of this kind of tech support, if only for the fact that it’s infinitely preferable to hanging on a phone line. The queue for help was much more bearable than waiting on hold because I was actually able to continue working on other tasks. What’s more, chatting online with a technician entails far less pressure than talking on the phone — there’s no sense of being rushed for time, no battle of personalities expressed through passive-aggressive conversational nuances. By the way, I’d still rather have a PocketPC.

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Harnessing the Power of Atomz

AtomzSubtraction now has search capability, thanks to the terrific technology available from Atomz. Built on the same wonderfully generous consumer ASP model as Blogger, Atomz allows smaller sites to set up fairly powerful search capabilities in no time, and for free! Within a few hours, I had Atomz running and searching content in the Post section. Like Blogger, Atomz allows site developers to completely customize the look and feel of its results, which is a must for me.

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