Category: Technology

Invasion of the iPod People

Neal, this is for you.

We’re all interested in music. In the last five years or so, technology has come to a point where it can really help us to listen to our music in new, fun ways. We all probably use our computers to listen to music at least sometimes, but I think many would say if your music is limited to being played on your computer, you haven’t really experienced it. You need to bring it with you to your stereo, in your car, on a jog, or in my case, across the country. It’s at that point that you really begin to experience your music. It’s with you constantly, and it becomes a true soundtrack for your life.

For that reason, the crux of my argument is actually not going to involve iTunes immediately, but instead initially center on the iPod, because the iPod is the real story. Let me explain.

Continue reading “Invasion of the iPod People” →

Zeldman, how do I love thee?

About three months ago, a friend of mine mentioned some guy named Jeffrey Zeldman to me. Said he had a book that I should really read because it was great. Apparently this Zeldman guy had insightful things to say about web design and the use of standards like XHTML and CSS. About a month ago I picked up the book.

Two weeks later, I almost changed careers.

I kid you not, this guy made me want to be a web designer more than anything else in my life. Steph was shocked how serious I was when she read an email I sent late one night to my parents. The reasons I didn’t go running for the digital hills were only that I love my current job and I realized that I’m simply not good enough at web design (yet) to make any money at it in the public sector. I think it’s something I will probably do avocationally (like this site) for quite some time until I become good enough at it that I could do it professionally, assuming that day comes.

Zeldman’s book took the tiny shreds of knowledge I had about HTML and CSS and expanded them mightily in such a way that after reading every chapter I was aching to go make a website and try the techniques he had shown me. The aching part might have come from the fact that I was exercising while reading the book, but that’s beside the point. If you author web pages, even if you use Dreamweaver or GoLive, you owe it to yourself and your viewers/users to read this book. Your sites will be slim and powerful. They will work well on every platform. You will feel sexy. Go pick it up.

I am incredibly excited about web design and where it may lead me and the rest of the world in the future. One of the things I love about web design stems logically from the fact that the Internet is awesome. As you’ve read in earlier entries of mine, I love the Internet. It amazes me what happens when minds collect in centralized locations. Some people call it "hive mind" (thanks Jeff!), and sometimes that’s appropriate. Here’s a blog entry about that topic.

But I’m not just talking about the novelty of having people vote on things to see how close we can come to a common "truth" using the power of all our combined minds. I’m saying that the Internet has become and will always be an extremely powerful method of communication from the masses to the masses, or more precisely, from the average man to almost anyone on the entire planet. That’s powerful.

Only in the last ten years of human history has the average person been able to speak his mind in such a way that it was instantly and freely accessible to everyone else without doing a lot of work. I pay $60 a year for this site. I learned a bit about HTML awhile back (it only takes a couple weeks to become fairly decent at it) and that’s about all it takes. Anybody can do this. It’s even easier with free tools like Movable Type, which is what I use to manage this blog. It’s brain-dead simple once you get the hang of it, and it’s becoming simpler every day.

This trend is absolutely unstoppable and it’s only going to get better from here. Think about how many times in history things would have been different and better if certain people had a voice. But they didn’t because they couldn’t. Those days are over everywhere the personal computer is available. And that is because of the medium of the Internet. I’m excited about web design because I can learn to wield that medium with power and skill. That’s amazing. It’s like learning to write all over again in some kind of magical book that can express more than I would be able to on regular paper. That continually amazes and excites me.

It’s a great time to be alive, and it’s an even greater time to be a geek.

Kool-Aid

I can’t help myself. I’m an Apple keynote addict. I would do most anything to be up-to-date on exactly what’s happening when a Steve-led keynote is taking place. And right now, as I write this, one is happening. I am literally switching between the window where I’m entering this text and the window that is keeping me up to date on what the His Steveness is saying.

The funny thing is that there is no video or audio feed for this keynote. Usually Apple broadcasts the keynote live so people can watch it remotely. No such luck here. It’s taking place in Paris, France at 10am, so it began at 1am Pacific Time.

But that can’t stop me.

I found a chatroom where people were discussing the keynote, some pretending to actually be there until the truth was discovered. Someone pointed out a fairly obscure little page that updated itself automatically every three minutes and contained up-to-date information about what was going on. I’ve been watching text on a webpage update slowly for the last hour and 20 minutes. Yes, I’m that helpless. I’m up past 2am watching text on a website update itself every three minutes.

Do me a favor and head over to Apple.com, just to see what we introduced. Maybe that’ll make me feel better about lost sleep. 🙂

Hide & Seek

A fine evening to you, good reader. As you may be well aware, I consider it my sworn duty to bring you the juiciest, meatiest, something-elseiest links and stories, fetching them from the murky depths of our Internet. Truly, I have been places mere mortals ought never tread on this vast web, and yet I return to present these living treasures to you, quivering and steaming on a silver platter. The links, that is. Yes, I steam them. It’s an arduous process, but I love you.

Today, friends, I have discovered something so incredibly cool and stupid that it boggles the mind. Geocaching! What is it, you ask? (After I link to an FAQ even? Don’t you people click links?) Let’s say that you’ve got a bunch of people with handheld GPS devices that tell them their exact current location on this planet to within 20 feet. What would they all do with that sort of technology? I’ll tell you what.

They get a small, watertight container of some kind and make a little mini-treasure to put into the container (be it trinkets, a secret message, a CD, anything interesting will do) and they go somewhere. Anywhere. No, seriously, anywhere on the darn planet. But probably somewhere near their home. And they hide the plastic container with the mini-treasure inside it (called a "cache" by the cool kids) and take note of the GPS coordinates at which it is hidden using the handy-dandy GPS device. Then they give their hiding spot a title and post the title and coordinates to the Geocaching site. And then they wait for one of the other people with a GPS device to find it, and there are further opportunities of interaction through the cache by leaving messages to other treasure hunters in a little notebook inside the cache. Do you feel that? That’s what it feels like when your mind boggles!

When I first saw this, I simply couldn’t decide if it was extremely cool or extremely stupid. But as my good friend Andy Fast is fond of saying, it’s “… a little from Column A, a little from Column B.” Yes it is. If GPS devices didn’t cost $100 (at the cheap end) I would jump at the chance to do this. They’ve even got little things called Travel Bugs which I’m still struggling to understand, but treasure hunters who find a cache with a Travel Bug inside it are supposed to physically move the bug to another cache as a favor to the person who first planted there. The bugs eventually move across continents and across the world, in small journeys. And it’s all recorded on the web at that website. It’s fascinating stuff.

The thing I like about this is that it is an entirely original idea (when’s the last time a pirate buried a treasure in the hopes someone else would find it?) and it’s not being pushed by a corporation or even popular culture. The idea has created a little subculture and community on the web (and because of the web) by its sheer merit, and now there are lots of crazy people driving/walking around, GPS in hand, looking for little plastic containers with notebooks inside them, hoping to leave a message. That’s the power of the Internet.

Man, I am so excited about web design. But that’s another entry.

Peanut Gallery questions: What would you put in your cache? If someone gave you a GPS device as a gift, would you participate in the Geocaching community?