A few years ago, my father purchased a big LazyBoy recliner, that would affectionately be nicknamed the "Superchair". A few weeks went by and we were all enjoying the chair when dad wasn't around. Built in butt warmer, vibarating back massager, very nice indeed.
So one day at about 1am I come home from hanging out with the some friends, and pass by the chair to head off to bed.
As I walk past the chair it begins to speak directly to me in a soft, stoic, womans voice.
"Stephen, this is Judy. How are you? I haven't spoken with you in quite sometime."
At this point I freeze, I have never been so scared in my life, a chair, the SuperChair is talking to me, and it seems to know my name. I turn slowly towards the chair, part of me wanted to run as fast as I could out of the house, and part of me want to confront my four legged stranger.
I didn't run, I stood frozen for a few more second and then proceeded slowly to the chair.
No more speaking, but the silence was just a erie. I turned on a small light and began to examine the chair.
Ahah! As it turns out the chair had an answering machine built into the flip-up armrest that my dad must have hooked up to the phone line. We've never had an answering machine, so the thought never crossed my mind. The woman was friends mother called about an offer I made to help choose a CD player system...
One thing we didn't ever figure out, why did the chair start speaking right when I walked past it?
So now sometimes when the wind blows just right and SuperChair is feeling a bit alive, you can hear the words swirling around my living room:
until somebody gets pissed after they get laid off or fired and proceed to report you to whatever that Corporate Crime hotline is. Sounds dumb, but I'm sure it could happen. By the way, it's a great idea.
My ultimate dream toy was this big room that had a balcony, in the room would be a scaled down fort, jungle, river, etc... Then, we'd have these little guys that had guns and we could remote control them to fight and have wars and all kinds of cool stuff. Kind of like Rainbow Six, minus the computer part, and scaled down.
Anyway, these new thing got my hopes up, until I realized that it doesn't even look like it can fire a gun.
Why the hell would you make a robot that can't fire a gun?
Let me take that one step further, if you are designing a robot, why the hell would you not just give it guns as hands.::sigh::
Is Hemos going to download the game and then burn it on a cartridge using some sort of imported Jap. technology? If so, please tell me more about it. Yes, I followed the link, but I was a bit overwhelmed by a lot of cards, readers, and other stuff.
We used to have this one arcade game that would come to my town as part of the county fair. It cost $.75 (a LOT for back then!!!) and the gimmick was that it was projected into the air so it appeared 3D, the first level had a cowboy shooting crap i think, i think you travelled through time after that, but i never could even really figure out to play. i think it was called timeblasters or timeshifters, or something like that. anyway, it is one of the first "$.75" games it remember in arcades... the next one being Lethal Enforcers.
I went to see Adaptation (gotta love Spike Jonze) at my towns cool little indy theater the Cla-Zel, and they ran a preview for the American release of SA. I've already seen the actual movie a while ago at a theater up in Toledo, but it was a good trailer...
1. In 18 months time handhelds will be even more capable than they are now, not to mention more energy effecient and easier to get online. Plus becuase they use different power schemes, you have more options for recharging the units via the sun, or your bike, etc... Plus, it makes sense to bring a cell phone. A blown tire, or God forbid, a wipe out, could leave you in a tight spot if you have no way to contact somebody. Why not combine your computer and your cell phone in a handheld? NO there are not really great examples of these devices right now, but there WILL be in 18 months!
2. I assume your trip is similar to backpacking in which we think about every ounce as basically "costing" us carrying energy and the ability to bring something. In this case, taking a computer like a Powerbook G3 (like the Walstreet, Pismo, or Lombard) is pretty expensive weight-wise, if HAVE to take a computer, bring a 12" iBook.
3. If you choose to go the PDA route, think about using the weight you save to bring a really nice SLR digital camera, instead of a little canon Elph or something... Also, GPS would be nice, but by that time i imagine it will be in the PDA that i describe above.
Mind you, i am putting a bit of faith in the steady progression of handheld devices, but i don't think that is unreasonable given the inevetiable convergence of cell phones and PDA's...
Now a question for you....
How did you get off work for that long!!!?!?!?!?!??!
I found these guys a REI.com on sale for $7 bucks a peice, I bought three of them about two years ago and am still on my first one. I put it on my keychain and use it at least once a day for finding stuff in my car at night, plugging and unplugging cables behind dark desks, and pushing it really hard into the palm of my hand so i can see my veins.
Check out this new electronic mail thing. we've started using around the office, and our blimp use is down like 80%, it's just a superior technology...
For all my fellow Apple fans in area, also be sure to check MacHack from June 19-21, 2003 (in Dearborne). It's a bit expensive, but there is a $50 price for students... Hard to believe there are two great conferences this Spring/Summer in the Detroit area, combine this with the Borders in Ann Arbor's computer reference section and you've got a few geek vacations planned in the crumbling heart of the automotive world!
By the way, has anyone ever seen a better reference selection in a brick and mortar store? I could spend all day there if my girlfriend didn't need jeans at Urban Trendsetters or whatever that place is that charges $30 for the Atari shirt that I can just go up to my attic and find...
Her: "PHP again, what does that even mean? You're just reading the same book over and over again..." Me: "No, no, no, this is PHP and XML, the other one was just PHP!"
Is there such thing as computer heat that is not waste? Unless you are recycling the heat somehow, which seems unfeasable, it seems that all heat would be waste.
Alarm clock designers, cheap plastic toy manufactors, and eMachines annouced plans to "reinvent" their catalogs, creating whole new lines of items, based on the idea of a solid base, with a flexable-like and a flat screen interface.
A representative from eMachines was quoted as saying, "Good designers copy, great designers steal directly from Jonathon Ives."
Honestly, other than the "snow" colored version, I thought the iMac was pretty ugly... The new 17" however, very nice...
As an admitted Apple zealot, I used to get so pissed off about finacial analysts getting thier collective panties in a bunch about Apple going out of business within a year or so... Now I just don't care what they say. Apple is a good company, they respond quickly to market trends, and often are the ones setting trends, but they are not too quick to create a stupid PDA that nobody wants (anymore). They have about $4 billion on paper, the good kind of paper, CASH. For a company as relatively small as Apple is, they innovate and create or help to create more standards they just about anyone out there.
One last thought, just to show I'm not a completely blind follower of Lord Jobs. Had Apple not gotten OSX so gosh darn right, I would have bailed, OS9 was showing it's age and starting to get real flakey under stress. I'd either be running a user-friendly (although OSX has taught me a good deal of under the hood UNIX stuff) or, shudder to think, Win2K. However, I believe they did get OSX right, in my opinion, besides the first Macintosh, it's the greatest thing Apple has ever done.
Apple needs some fast processors from IBM and the education market back.
They will be fine.
My experience with upgrading from VPC5 to VPC6
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I run OSX 10.2.4 on a 700 mHz iBook with 384MB of RAM. Not, a "loaded" machine at all, but quick enough for web dev. and some light multi-media work. I ran VPC with Win 98, and the results were pretty pathetic, I'd click on a window to move it and would have to wait five seconds for the system to even respond, it was basically unusable.
Enter VPC6. I upgraded to VPC6 and installed Win 2000 Pro, (which has always been the best of the worst in my opinion), and was pleasantly suprised to find it runs pretty smoothly, apps are actually useful now, I use Nokia's WAP development toolkit, and while it's not setting speed records on my computer, it works for what I need it to do.
So, all of you familar with the scientific method are now asking, "So was it the upgrade of the OS or VPC that made the speed in increase?" Well, I didn't do any controlled experiments, but it feels like it was the upgrade. Your unpleasant, but neccesary results may vary.
On a related note, Microsofts purchase of Virtual PC was a predictably smart and evil business move. Does anyone actually believe that Microsoft, will make this a better program? I'm glad that VPC6 was a relatively nice upgrade, I don't expect to see another useful emulator until Bochs on OSX devaporizes...
I've written a small, yet (I think) innovative content management system (read: fancy blog) on OSX using Apache, PHP, and mySQL all in my humble little iBook. However, the rules seem a bit vague. The submissions:
"May be an application, an application plug-in, System service, device driver, code library, kernel extension, user interface widget, or anything else of a similar nature."
Anyway, it runs and was developed on OSX, so does that make it eligble???
Downside is that the serial interface to the controller tops out at 300 kbps
This seems doesn't seem like that big of a deal, for the kind of appications this is targeted for (security system modules, refrigerators, answering machines, etc...) I'd think 300 kbps is more than adaquate, you can even do some streaming video, with a reasonable bit-rate.
if I don't understand the motivation behind a project or hobby, I just keep my mouth shut and move on. In this case however, I feel compelled to say this seems like a really dumb waste of time.
Paco: "Hey man, did you beat Diablo 2 yet?" Dignan: "I dunno, my computer is playing it now..." Paco: "Oh, so you paid for a game your not playing, and you have to share your computer with a scripting engine?" Dignan: "Yes, I am stupid, I am a stupid head, a huge stupid headed freak."
Since I wrote the script to that exchange, I took some liberties with Dignans last reply, but you get my general point.
me and my girlie like to AOL Instant Message TM peoms back and forward to see who can write stupid limmrick type things faster, sometimes we get going fast enough that we'd basically be writing them in real time, which in someways is akin to freestyle rap, which is interesting.
anyway, here are a few of the dumber ones, for some reason a lot of them have animals doing stuff as their themes...
There was a snake named Luan That jumped in a pool not a pond She said with a lisp, "oh I can't drink thissss!" and laughed as she slithered along The end
There twice was a frog named Samantha Who married a strong young grey Panther He said to her nightly, "I would hold you tightly" But my paws would quell your sweet banter The end
Three boats in a dock near the harbor All waiting to go travel farther The first captain said, "You two, go ahead" But the two, being led by courtesey said, "Grab hold of wind and we'll follow!" The end
Now that I read them again, they're not really perfect limmricks, but oh well...
I hate to dodge the question, but... I completely forgot how many of the little green pills I was supposed to take each day. At first i thought it was two before dinner and then one in the morning, but I tried that and i now i can't sleep...
Anyway, if you could look up that info for me and just shoot it to me in an email that would be great, send it to sje... aw heck, just post it as a reply, apparently the data is insecure as is! </humor>
Uh, when I was 19 I needed three co-ops for college, I applied for a salaried position, not telling the firm that I was a co-op student. Made some good money, fufilled my credit hours and right before the start of the fall semester was ready to quit to continue school. So about ten minutes before I was about to walk into my bosses office and quit. He calls me in on his own:
Boss: "You know times are hard for us now..."' Me: "Oh, definetly" Boss: "I hate to do it, but we gotta let you go.." Me:::feigning sadness:: "Wow, I didn't see this coming" Boss: "I'm sorry. but we've got unenployment all set up for you, and ready to go. as well as small severence package" Me:::trying to repress so much giddiness:: "Well... That helps a little at least"
His performance as Gollum ranks in my mind as one of the best character studies in the last ten years, to feel so much pity for the poor creature, yet to then see the evil that lurks in his heart, vastly improved the ability of the film to convey the spirit of the book. In fact, I would almost go as far as to say that Andy Serksis' interpretation of Gollum effected me more that reading Tolkiens description. This would probably be the only case of that, the films usually can only try to compete with my imagination, but for whatever reason, this is one case where the opposite occured...
Slashdot Mirror
Small, yet usable.
Great battery life.
Last years models are pretty cheap!
Asian font support is second to none.
I knew it was good for something!!!
April fools's was on the 1st.
Stop posting these ridiculous stories...
Oh... it's... not.. a joke...
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A few years ago, my father purchased a big LazyBoy recliner, that would affectionately be nicknamed the "Superchair". A few weeks went by and we were all enjoying the chair when dad wasn't around. Built in butt warmer, vibarating back massager, very nice indeed.
So one day at about 1am I come home from hanging out with the some friends, and pass by the chair to head off to bed.
As I walk past the chair it begins to speak directly to me in a soft, stoic, womans voice.
"Stephen, this is Judy. How are you? I haven't spoken with you in quite sometime."
At this point I freeze, I have never been so scared in my life, a chair, the SuperChair is talking to me, and it seems to know my name. I turn slowly towards the chair, part of me wanted to run as fast as I could out of the house, and part of me want to confront my four legged stranger.
I didn't run, I stood frozen for a few more second and then proceeded slowly to the chair.
No more speaking, but the silence was just a erie. I turned on a small light and began to examine the chair.
Ahah! As it turns out the chair had an answering machine built into the flip-up armrest that my dad must have hooked up to the phone line. We've never had an answering machine, so the thought never crossed my mind. The woman was friends mother called about an offer I made to help choose a CD player system...
One thing we didn't ever figure out, why did the chair start speaking right when I walked past it?
So now sometimes when the wind blows just right and SuperChair is feeling a bit alive, you can hear the words swirling around my living room:
"This is Judy.... This is Judy... This Judy...."
until somebody gets pissed after they get laid off or fired and proceed to report you to whatever that Corporate Crime hotline is. Sounds dumb, but I'm sure it could happen. By the way, it's a great idea.
My ultimate dream toy was this big room that had a balcony, in the room would be a scaled down fort, jungle, river, etc... Then, we'd have these little guys that had guns and we could remote control them to fight and have wars and all kinds of cool stuff. Kind of like Rainbow Six, minus the computer part, and scaled down.
::sigh::
Anyway, these new thing got my hopes up, until I realized that it doesn't even look like it can fire a gun.
Why the hell would you make a robot that can't fire a gun?
Let me take that one step further, if you are designing a robot, why the hell would you not just give it guns as hands.
It better know karate.
Is Hemos going to download the game and then burn it on a cartridge using some sort of imported Jap. technology? If so, please tell me more about it. Yes, I followed the link, but I was a bit overwhelmed by a lot of cards, readers, and other stuff.
We used to have this one arcade game that would come to my town as part of the county fair. It cost $.75 (a LOT for back then!!!) and the gimmick was that it was projected into the air so it appeared 3D, the first level had a cowboy shooting crap i think, i think you travelled through time after that, but i never could even really figure out to play. i think it was called timeblasters or timeshifters, or something like that. anyway, it is one of the first "$.75" games it remember in arcades... the next one being Lethal Enforcers.
I went to see Adaptation (gotta love Spike Jonze) at my towns cool little indy theater the Cla-Zel, and they ran a preview for the American release of SA. I've already seen the actual movie a while ago at a theater up in Toledo, but it was a good trailer...
1. In 18 months time handhelds will be even more capable than they are now, not to mention more energy effecient and easier to get online. Plus becuase they use different power schemes, you have more options for recharging the units via the sun, or your bike, etc... Plus, it makes sense to bring a cell phone. A blown tire, or God forbid, a wipe out, could leave you in a tight spot if you have no way to contact somebody. Why not combine your computer and your cell phone in a handheld? NO there are not really great examples of these devices right now, but there WILL be in 18 months!
2. I assume your trip is similar to backpacking in which we think about every ounce as basically "costing" us carrying energy and the ability to bring something. In this case, taking a computer like a Powerbook G3 (like the Walstreet, Pismo, or Lombard) is pretty expensive weight-wise, if HAVE to take a computer, bring a 12" iBook.
3. If you choose to go the PDA route, think about using the weight you save to bring a really nice SLR digital camera, instead of a little canon Elph or something... Also, GPS would be nice, but by that time i imagine it will be in the PDA that i describe above.
Mind you, i am putting a bit of faith in the steady progression of handheld devices, but i don't think that is unreasonable given the inevetiable convergence of cell phones and PDA's...
Now a question for you....
How did you get off work for that long!!!?!?!?!?!??!
Good luck!
I found these guys a REI.com on sale for $7 bucks a peice, I bought three of them about two years ago and am still on my first one. I put it on my keychain and use it at least once a day for finding stuff in my car at night, plugging and unplugging cables behind dark desks, and pushing it really hard into the palm of my hand so i can see my veins.
Pretty cool stuff...
Check out this new electronic mail thing. we've started using around the office, and our blimp use is down like 80%, it's just a superior technology...
For all my fellow Apple fans in area, also be sure to check MacHack from June 19-21, 2003 (in Dearborne). It's a bit expensive, but there is a $50 price for students... Hard to believe there are two great conferences this Spring/Summer in the Detroit area, combine this with the Borders in Ann Arbor's computer reference section and you've got a few geek vacations planned in the crumbling heart of the automotive world!
By the way, has anyone ever seen a better reference selection in a brick and mortar store? I could spend all day there if my girlfriend didn't need jeans at Urban Trendsetters or whatever that place is that charges $30 for the Atari shirt that I can just go up to my attic and find...
Her: "PHP again, what does that even mean? You're just reading the same book over and over again..."
Me: "No, no, no, this is PHP and XML, the other one was just PHP!"
Is there such thing as computer heat that is not waste? Unless you are recycling the heat somehow, which seems unfeasable, it seems that all heat would be waste.
Alarm clock designers, cheap plastic toy manufactors, and eMachines annouced plans to "reinvent" their catalogs, creating whole new lines of items, based on the idea of a solid base, with a flexable-like and a flat screen interface.
A representative from eMachines was quoted as saying, "Good designers copy, great designers steal directly from Jonathon Ives."
Honestly, other than the "snow" colored version, I thought the iMac was pretty ugly... The new 17" however, very nice...
As an admitted Apple zealot, I used to get so pissed off about finacial analysts getting thier collective panties in a bunch about Apple going out of business within a year or so... Now I just don't care what they say. Apple is a good company, they respond quickly to market trends, and often are the ones setting trends, but they are not too quick to create a stupid PDA that nobody wants (anymore). They have about $4 billion on paper, the good kind of paper, CASH. For a company as relatively small as Apple is, they innovate and create or help to create more standards they just about anyone out there.
One last thought, just to show I'm not a completely blind follower of Lord Jobs. Had Apple not gotten OSX so gosh darn right, I would have bailed, OS9 was showing it's age and starting to get real flakey under stress. I'd either be running a user-friendly (although OSX has taught me a good deal of under the hood UNIX stuff) or, shudder to think, Win2K. However, I believe they did get OSX right, in my opinion, besides the first Macintosh, it's the greatest thing Apple has ever done.
Apple needs some fast processors from IBM and the education market back.
They will be fine.
I run OSX 10.2.4 on a 700 mHz iBook with 384MB of RAM. Not, a "loaded" machine at all, but quick enough for web dev. and some light multi-media work. I ran VPC with Win 98, and the results were pretty pathetic, I'd click on a window to move it and would have to wait five seconds for the system to even respond, it was basically unusable.
Enter VPC6. I upgraded to VPC6 and installed Win 2000 Pro, (which has always been the best of the worst in my opinion), and was pleasantly suprised to find it runs pretty smoothly, apps are actually useful now, I use Nokia's WAP development toolkit, and while it's not setting speed records on my computer, it works for what I need it to do.
So, all of you familar with the scientific method are now asking, "So was it the upgrade of the OS or VPC that made the speed in increase?" Well, I didn't do any controlled experiments, but it feels like it was the upgrade. Your unpleasant, but neccesary results may vary.
On a related note, Microsofts purchase of Virtual PC was a predictably smart and evil business move. Does anyone actually believe that Microsoft, will make this a better program? I'm glad that VPC6 was a relatively nice upgrade, I don't expect to see another useful emulator until Bochs on OSX devaporizes...
Anyway, it runs and was developed on OSX, so does that make it eligble???
Downside is that the serial interface to the controller tops out at 300 kbps
This seems doesn't seem like that big of a deal, for the kind of appications this is targeted for (security system modules, refrigerators, answering machines, etc...) I'd think 300 kbps is more than adaquate, you can even do some streaming video, with a reasonable bit-rate.
if I don't understand the motivation behind a project or hobby, I just keep my mouth shut and move on. In this case however, I feel compelled to say this seems like a really dumb waste of time.
Paco: "Hey man, did you beat Diablo 2 yet?"
Dignan: "I dunno, my computer is playing it now..."
Paco: "Oh, so you paid for a game your not playing, and you have to share your computer with a scripting engine?"
Dignan: "Yes, I am stupid, I am a stupid head, a huge stupid headed freak."
Since I wrote the script to that exchange, I took some liberties with Dignans last reply, but you get my general point.
me and my girlie like to AOL Instant Message TM peoms back and forward to see who can write stupid limmrick type things faster, sometimes we get going fast enough that we'd basically be writing them in real time, which in someways is akin to freestyle rap, which is interesting.
anyway, here are a few of the dumber ones, for some reason a lot of them have animals doing stuff as their themes...
There was a snake named Luan
That jumped in a pool not a pond
She said with a lisp, "oh I can't drink thissss!"
and laughed as she slithered along
The end
There twice was a frog named Samantha
Who married a strong young grey Panther
He said to her nightly, "I would hold you tightly"
But my paws would quell your sweet banter
The end
Three boats in a dock near the harbor
All waiting to go travel farther
The first captain said, "You two, go ahead"
But the two, being led
by courtesey said,
"Grab hold of wind and we'll follow!"
The end
Now that I read them again, they're not really perfect limmricks, but oh well...
I hate to dodge the question, but... I completely forgot how many of the little green pills I was supposed to take each day. At first i thought it was two before dinner and then one in the morning, but I tried that and i now i can't sleep...
Anyway, if you could look up that info for me and just shoot it to me in an email that would be great, send it to sje... aw heck, just post it as a reply, apparently the data is insecure as is!
</humor>
Boss: "You know times are hard for us now..."'
Me: "Oh, definetly"
Boss: "I hate to do it, but we gotta let you go.."
Me:
Boss: "I'm sorry. but we've got unenployment all set up for you, and ready to go. as well as small severence package"
Me:
Overall, it turned out very well....
His performance as Gollum ranks in my mind as one of the best character studies in the last ten years, to feel so much pity for the poor creature, yet to then see the evil that lurks in his heart, vastly improved the ability of the film to convey the spirit of the book. In fact, I would almost go as far as to say that Andy Serksis' interpretation of Gollum effected me more that reading Tolkiens description. This would probably be the only case of that, the films usually can only try to compete with my imagination, but for whatever reason, this is one case where the opposite occured...
December 2003 can't come soon enough!!!