« December 2004 | Main | February 2005 »
January 27, 2005
World Events
Surprisingly, the start of an event that wasn't at all noted in the popular online news outlets today (CNN, MSNBC, ABCNews etc); the liberation of Auschwitz.
Posted by Dan at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)
Home, home on the Range
... where the deer and the antelope play!
Back from Scottsdale AZ with a whole slew of new information. Unfortunately the conference organizers haven't really figured out that providing your attendees with wireless internet access is a good thing. More importantly, having the hotel's wireless just barely providing a signal in the conference room, only leads to a lot of frustrated attendees and a lack of attention spans to the conference itself. Oh yeah, if you're also providing breakfast, include meat in it somehow (i.e. bacon, sausage, or even lox). Just bagels and coffee doesn't cut it, really!
Oddly enough, my second trip to Arizona has proven to be about as disastrous as the first. The first time was a flight on America West from Philadelphia to Seattle, with a stop at the hub in Phoenix. Thanks to some bad weather, I was delayed in Philly long enough to miss my connecting flight and any flight happening that day to Seattle. America West was willing to put me up in a hotel, but they weren't about to tell me how to get there or even which of the hotels it was (there were a few by the same name). Eventually a group of stranded travelers commandeered a van that knew where he was going, charged it back to the airline and got about 3 hours of sleep before all of us tried to catch the next flight to Seattle.
This time wasn't much different. I arrived at the airport expecting to have a ticket to Phoenix. Despite my insistence, their computer was absolutely positive I was not on the flight (or any flight for that matter). They had the tickets for my two coworkers, but none for me. Odd. I was forced to buy a ticket there in hopes of catching the later flight down at least, with standby on the flight I was supposed to be on being an option. Stand-by didn't happen, and it was then that I realized my luggage was on it's way to Phoenix without me. Finally arriving in Phoenix later in the day, I had to put up with jokes of "you have purchase a plane ticket to fly idiot" and things like that (I knew those ribs were coming). What I hadn't expected was to find my luggage so easily. It was behind a sliding glass holding case, awaiting my pickup with the tracking number. The luggage handler and I walked right on down, moved to open the case, and SNAP the key broke in the lock. The next 40 minutes were spent trying to open the door.
At least Arizona had bright blue skies, beautiful sunsets AND sunrises. Warm weather was there the entire time, and it just felt relaxing. Now if only the conference room had windows, or more sunlight in it.
Posted by Dan at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2005
nofollow
Currently taking guesses on how long until the comment spammers figure a way around the rel:nofollow addition to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN? In any case, I've got mine... wooohaa.
Posted by Dan at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)
Travels with Dan
I'll be in Scottsdale Arizona next week for the Video Processing and Quality Metric conference. Some of the papers being presented sound like they will be interesting. While some leave me wondering.
For example, "WHICH COLORS BEST CATCH YOUR EYES: A SUBJECTIVE STUDY OF COLOR SALIENCY" a presentation that will cover (I'm guessing here) rod and cone sensitivity and response. To me, this seems like a rather silly discussion to be held as a lot of the research for this occurred many many years ago. More importantly, didn't the US military pay many millions of dollars to discover that green received the most response from the human visual system? Wasn't that the reason low-light goggles project in a green tone? There are of course other presentations with similar questions, and I look forward to being proven wrong.
I'll see what I can transcribe from the conference. The website makes no mention of wireless access in the auditorium. If anyone in the Scottsdale area wants to meet, let me know.
Posted by Dan at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2005
Ivy League Redux
About two years ago, I had made a post about the perceived benefits of gaining an Ivy League education. Earlier today, Slashdot actually had a useful posting to an article on Slate.com about the very same topic.
While the article goes into a bit more detail with regards to citing other works to back it's arguments, it's main data comes from an article co-authored by an acquaintance of mine named Monika Hamori. Congrats Monika! The paper itself is well worth reading, discussing the trends in how education has been playing a role in big business recently.
Posted by Dan at 01:12 AM | Comments (0)
Ice Age
For future reference, NEVER believe those who tell you "Oh it never gets icy here, don't worry about it" when you know for a fact you live in an area with a lot of precipitation. I'm currently living my weekend in a prison cell many would call my apartment, thanks to the inability to scale the hill leading to the front door.
Posted by Dan at 01:09 AM | Comments (0)
January 12, 2005
Ruby Ruby Soho!
I've heard a lot of good things about the Ruby language from numerous people. Most of them are people whose opinions I valuely highly, yet I've never been tempted to it. Why? Well for one thing, I haven't had any real need for it. For a second, all I could ever find were praises about the language. Nothing bad had been said about it.
That's all changed now. It seems someone over at Creative Karma is not happy with Ruby. An interesting read.
Posted by Dan at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2005
From the "Shoot Our Foot A Second Time" Department
An article (link thanks to MacMinute) on the News-Leader.com discussing why the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) use of the $0.99 USD per song is going away. I found this article completely bogus for multiple reasons, only a few are worth mentioning as they lead to a more interesting discussion.
To begin with, the article itself is very one sided; statements being made primarily from competitors to the iTMS. That alone should send the FUD signal up in every reader, but history has repeatedly told us readers are often dumb. Also, the fact that the News-Leader.com, a relatively unheard of newspaper, is making these claims doesn't help bolster the case for accurate news.
It's pretty obvious that this is mostly a push from a marketing machine somewhere in Napster to help solidify a foothold in any kind of market. The idea of subscription based music services though, the general focus of the article, is the what confuses me. Why do these people blindly believe that this is the future of music?
The argument being made by Chris Gorog is that for a flat fee per month you have access to some really really large musical library at a cost significantly less than what it'd take to own all the music you'd need to fill your musical device. The key word here being that ONLY you has access to this. If you wish to, say, share your music with your friends, suddenly there are problems requiring you need to actually purchase the music. Oddly enough the purchase price for the music is another $0.99 USD on-top of your monthly fee. The average user won't be terribly interested in this hidden gotcha of the subscription service. The one piece of Americana that these executives have forgotten is the magic of the "mix" (be it a tape, cd, or m3u). Using my brother as an example, he's recently been introduced to digital music only to discover that he cannot copy his music from one device to another. This instantly turned him off from even continuing to use the stuff, and it now sits around collecting dust.
But don't just base your idea off of a single user, look towards the recent past at just before 2000. DVDs had just been released as the new killer format to wipe out VHS and make life easier for all. A splinter group of rather heavy weight players backed by Circuit City, a then massive player in the home electronics market (they still are today), introduced a format better known as DIVX. It failed (read here) for a variety of reasons, with the largest being consumers just didn't want it.
Lastly music is one of those things that people prefer to actually own. The joy of ripping those stupid dog bone stickers off your new CD notwithstanding, the fact that you can completely forget about an album and re-discover it at a later date is priceless. The fact that years later you can replay this music without having to discover that the provider no longer exists, as such you can't authorize your music player, is a bonus. Music is one of those areas where ownership is preferred.
So why have these execs decided to push their concept of better upon us?
Posted by Dan at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)
Ringing in the New Year
What a way to ring in the new year... wow.
Sorry for the grainy picture, but camera phones aren't very good normally, and adding in freezing temps doesn't help.
Posted by Dan at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)