very cute. But, I'm not seeing anything here besides citeness to sell these little things.
They're portable: but so are PDAs. And unlike the tcube, PDAs come with an integrated screen and some means for inputting data. These don't, so they're of limited use on the road. Even for telecommuters, you might as well stick with your laptop.
I suppose if you wanted to transport an entire data center to the other side of the floor, or even across town, these could be carried in a crate rather tna shipped on a truck. But, honestly, how often is this a consideration when choosing hardware?
I suppose they could come in handy for a home network or informal hosting operation out of your basement. But unless they're cheap, I doubt people would choose them over the eight too-obolete-for-gaming-but-perfectly-good-for-any- other-purpose desktops they already have in their basements.
What is the target market for these? People who like cute little multicolored boxes?
It's a long story, but I don't have stable fingerprints; scarring interferes with them. Any time I've needed a fingerprint check (for example, my concealed-carry permit), it was problematic producing 'acceptable' fingerprints in the first place, and thereafter difficult to match current fingerprints to old ones. Although this could make me a great secret agent or something, I'm going to have trouble if any future employer of mine moves to simple fingerprints biometrics as a means of identification.
Nerds are outmoded. Surviving nerds get laid about as often as my 96-year-old grandma. Trust me; the lady talks a good game, but the demographics just won't support it.
Re:They'll let anybody into the club these days
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 1
Today that could read, just because you have a web-surfing cellphone, a PDA you don't know how to use, an AOL account, and a pair of trendy horn-rimmed glasses, doesn't make you a nerd. Nerdly appearances can be deceiving!
I would guess (given the article seems to be slashdotted) that it allows the same sort of referencing, playlist-sharing, and new-music-recommendation capabilities of existing music-sharing services, without the problematic issue of sharing the copyrighted content itself.
IN other words, they're getting their users to do their advertising for them, without giving anything back. But it does seem to me to be a step in the right direction.
As yet another motorcyclist, who I can assure you travels with the flow of traffic and drives extremely conservatively, I've already had the unenviable experiences of having women on cellphones attempt to merge into me, having hothead teenage boys ride at highway speeds about two feet from my ass, etc., none of which was brought about by me, driving along I285 at 70MPH like all the other vehicles on the road. When riding my bike, my attention goes towards defensive driving and having eyes in the back and sides of my head.
The interesting thing, though, is that I had the same things happen when I was driving a Miata to work every day. The fact is that a lot of car drivers don't look before they change lanes or turn. If you're smaller than an SUV, they don't see you. If you're lower than a large sedan, forget it. The only difference between your average motorcyclist and your average small-car driver is that the motorcyclist, in an accident with another car, will probably (1) die, and (2) not take anyone else with him. As a non-motorcyclisy, this is actually a benefit for you.
So, given your feelings on the dangers presented to you from other drivers of all vehicles, you ought to be lobbying for more motorcycles on the road. You can barrel along on all four wheels, while itinerant squids driving sportsbikes in shorts and flipflops impact into your oversized grill like so many flies.
They'll let anybody into the club these days
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
All this means is that there is more evident stratification in geekdom. Once upon a time, you were either a geek or you weren't. Now, there are levels of geeks. There are wannabe geeks, plain-old geeks, gamer geeks, alpha geeks, BOFHs, etc. Think of it as a multi-level geeking scheme. Geekdom with middle-management. A pecking order. In other words, associating yourself as a geek has become akin to associating yourself with any other group: gotta work your way up.
There is a large difference between a pilot's need for information and a motorcyclist's need for information. A pilot above or in the clouds, over the ocean, or in unfamiliar territory, needs the help of navigational aids to see his track and course, etc. A motorcyclist's immediate track is right in front of him, in the form of a road. A pilot can use things like an attitude indicator and a turn coordinator in when he doesn't have visual reference to the ground; this applies not at all to the motorcyclist, except (arguably, to a limited extent) at night. A pilot's attention in instrument meteorilogical conditions needs to be focused on instruments and gauges, hence the usefulness of a head's up display. A motorcyclist's attention *always* needs to be on the road, he never 'drives with reference to instruments'.
I can perhaps see a use for a HUD of GPS information superimposed on a map, if it can be toggled on and off, adjusted for position and brightness, etc. Me personally, I'm more comfortable with a map in my tank bag, which I can look at when I'm stopped at a light, rather than attempt to read while I'm riding. A speed readout on a HUD has limited value off a racetrack; you can gauge approximate speed based on your speed relative to cars around you and based on the wind noise and resistance you feel. You have no need on a motorbike to concentrate on speed, unlike an airplane, when airspeed during departure, approach and landing is absolutely critical. And anyone off a racetrack who needs a light to tell them when to shift up or down shouldn't be in any manual-shift vehicle on public roads, much less a motorcycle.
IMHO, this sounds like a cool, neat idea, especially to guys who would really like to have fighter-pilot gear, but off the racetrack, it would be far more distracting (read dangerous) than useful.
When I was a kid and teenager, I hated computers -- they were inflexible, boring, and involved too much typing. My mother worked with computers all day in a cubicle at DEC, and I swore I wouldn't grow up to be a cube-dweller, but rather would do something fun, outside, where I could see the weather coming and feel alive. Sometime in middle school, I decided I would fly airplanes. It became something of an obsession.
I got my private pilot rating in high school, then went to college for aviation. I graduated with a MS in Aviation Management/Flight Technology and got most of the other available fixed-wing ratings in the process. Then I worked for 2 years as a flight instructor -- at $18K a year. Very fun and personally rewarding job, but I foresaw several more years of dues-paying at like salary, and I was living like a poor person.
Then I found out that my not-so-smart high-school buddy was making about twice what I was as a network guy. I had done some page-layout and writing on Macs in college, so using that I moved back to my home city, got a technical writing job, then a year later transitioned into a web-design/development job, then after two years parlayed that into a programmer's job, quadrupling that flight instructor salary (over six times that salary one year, thanks to bonuses). That's where I am now.
It's kind of odd how easy it was, really -- thanks to that boom when fogging a mirror would get you a job, and showing a modicum of aptitude and effort would let you keep it. I've also been very lucky in having jobs where I was encouraged to acquire new skills on the job by taking on technologies I had never worked on before. This is by far the best way to learn, and these opportunities seem to be everywhere, even today, if you show the requisite aptitude and willingness.
I think I'll stick with this career -- it's not necessarily as enjoyable as doing crash-and-goes with primary students and getting the life scared out of me a couple of times a year, but it is certainly easier, and the current and potential salary is greater. Sometimes I do get heartburn over the fact that I spend so much effort now on such unimportant matters in the 'great scheme' of things, when I used to focus on teaching people how not to kill themselves.
So true -- a PDA, for 99% of the population, is a luxury, not a necessity. When people are worried about layoffs, etc, they don't buy new gadgets quite so much. The PalmPilot boom was in part caused by the infotech-is-cool-and-we're-all-stupid-rich boom.
Name-genericizing is a bad thing for Palm. Just like people no longer try to buy the *brand* Kleenex, but instead purchase any decent-looking facial tissue and call it all 'Kleenex', Palm Pilots losing brand differentiation would mean possibly losing sales. This is why The Coca-Cola Company protects the name 'Coke' with a vengeance -- they don't want people calling every soft drink a Coke (although in the south we tend to do this informally).
Lighten up, take a joke, cripes
on
Million Man LAN
·
· Score: 1
Take life a little too seriously, much?
The best reason to go: Good pings for everyone
on
Million Man LAN
·
· Score: 1
...and having just tried it, it's actually pretty good.
Searching on my typical 'handle', 'webwench', for example, I usually get about 100 hits out of Google off one site -- atTheFaire.com, mostly. That webwench is apparently pretty busy. I can click through page after page of results and not find one about me.
In Northern Lights, I get one search result for AtTheFaire, rather than tons, and one result for each of several sites, and I'm the subject of #7.
I have to say, I like it. Just in time for it to go away.
It would be better to have a couple of links: a link for 'make this guy a friend' and another for 'make this guy a foe'. People can simply go to their 'preferences' page to reflect upon lists of all their friends and foes.
When you click the 'make this guy a friend' link, the only thing that should happen is a page refresh, whereupon the poster's 'indicator light' is green. i.e. don't send me somewhere else to see that, yes, I did click the button, so now I pick a rating, then a page hence after I've chose my rating... followed by 2 'back' clicks to get back to the discussion I was trying to read in the first place. (No offense, but your site's slow enough to load is it is -- might as well make it slow but relatively convenient.)
This would make all the sorting of friends and foes faster.
Yeah, yeah, opinions are like you-know-whats, everyone has them -- but one click to perform a friend/foe marking action is certainly better than four.
They have a number of other products that probably have similar underpinnings.
Basically, a database (can be Oracle, Sybase, or SQL Server) keeps meta-information on items stored in the database. Items can be documents, folders, URL links, tasks, discussion topics and replies, etc. Meta-information includes dates of creation, updating, deletion (i.e. the makings of an audit trail), whether the document is checked out for editing and if so, by whom (that makings of a simple source-control system), who can see or edit the document (implies that a table of users is also maintained, which it is), etc.
Livelink provides a server (basically a big CGI app) that you can run through a web server, allowing this stuff to be navigated and maintained through the web. The web pages are customizable. Really, the whole thing is customizable, which means you can write all kinds of little apps and processes above and beyond what is supplied by Livelink (our most common examples are scanning apps, that scan and store new documents in one step, and document expiration processes, which force certain documents to be read and revised every 6 months or whatever). There's also an API for VB, C++, and Java, to allow access methods other than the web.
Depending on the number and size of documents you're storing, documents can be kept in the database itself, or can be kept in a filesystem, and pointers to those documents stored in the database. The second option is usually preferred because the first option will cause trouble when it comes time to backup or restore from backup, or to migrate data, etc.
The biggest disadvantage from a user's point of view is the need to log in, if you plan to keep any semblance of an ACL, source control, or auditing. You could provide one common login for read-only access to most of your files, which would ease the pain a bit. Or you could 'roll your own' solution, based on some of the premises used by this type of system.
I'd like to add that I think the technology to use is the least of your issues. The biggest issue will be in finding and categorizing all of the content that's already out there. When you find 4 different variations of the same document, or 3 different builds of the same source code, or tables for 3 different apps in one database schema, and it's not clear what is what, how will you know who to contact? Who among your users has the extra headcount to spare to give you detailed info on all their files and databases, etc? How much stuff is out there, that was owned by people who have left or been laid-off, who no one else can provide info on? That's gonna be your real battle.
Since my ex has our son this New Years'...
on
New Years Marathons
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yahoo has good TV listings. Amazing what they will marathon on New Years' Day:
ESPN: World's Strongest Man competition
TLC: Seeing is Believing
Comedy Channel: Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
A&E: Magnum PI until 8 p.m., then Law & Order until 4 a.m.
Animal Channel: The Crocodile Hunter (starting at 5 p.m.)
Sci-Fi Channel: The Twilight Zone
History Channel: History's Lost & Found
Since my ex has our son this New Years', and my other of unknown significance left town yesterday, I'll be at home on my a** looking for a good TV marathon.
Alias would be a good one (since I missed most of the episodes), and so would Trading Spaces. I've already had Buffy DVD marathon, so no luck there. Failing these, I'll probably be continuing on the kitchen work that I've been procrastinating on -- touching-up, sanding, and priming drywall, then painting. Whoop-de-doo!
Every year, I find myself disliking Christmas more and more, exactly because of the impersonality that seems built-in to the model. I think this year was particularly bad because of the exhortations to spend out of patriotism (buck up the economy and all that). The modern goal of Christmas is to spend, spend, spend and get, get, get, and to be honest I find myself, in that final shopping rush, looking for what I call 'respectable' gifts, instead of the kind of personal, lovely gift I really do want to give. What I call a 'respectable gift' is one that costs about the 'right amount of money' -- not so much that I am uncomfortable with it, but not so little that the recipient will think I am cheap. It seems impossible to hit the target correctly -- probably (to take a metaphor a couple of steps too far) because the arrow is bent, and hitting the target with a bent arrow would be pure chance.
I don't think the system mentioned in the article will make this phenomenon go away. I think it will make the phenomenon worse. It becomes even easier to put less thought into the gift. It makes it easier to 'scorekeep' monetarily ("Damn! He bought me a $50 present, and I spent a lousy $15 on him... I better get him something else"). It turns gift-giving and gift-receiving into a commodities market, where you buy futures ("I think Joe will like a CD this year!"), watch whether the recipient bargains up or down, and finally whether the recipient finally orders what you bought... for delivery a few days later, of course, pre-wrapped for them at the factory.
The root problem, really, is time. Do you have the time to make truly personal gifts for all your gift recipients? I'm not talking cookies -- I've discovered that homemade cookies don't cut it as a Christmas gift, unfortunately;) I'm a divorced mother, and I'm doing well some nights to find time to make myself dinner. Americans on average put in more hours at work than any other industrialized nation, and it's only growing -- just about everyone is feeling a time crunch.
I'd also bet most of us live hundreds of miles away from most of our relatives. Once upon a time, most of your family would live in one town, and you would know much more (perhaps too much) about all of them. Now, you might see relatives a few times a year.
Be honest -- how much time do you spend with your friends that is comprised of more than LAN gaming, shop talk, or non-interactive movie-watching? How much time do you really spend with your spouse, your parents, your aunts and uncles? Given this, on what basis would you select a really appropriate gift for him or her? Hence 'commodity giving' and 'respectable' gifts -- and gift receipts, and gift certificates, and online gift wish lists.
The effect, for me, is a lingering dissatisfaction with my own efforts (or lack thereof), which leaks over into dissatisfaction with the season and the shallowness of the way we celebrate it.
As long as nanotech stays in the blue-sky arena, I think a great place to get a feel for the possibilities of nanotech is Neal Stephenson's book, Diamond Age. It gets a little loopy towards the end, but I'd still recommend it.
That's the only thing I don't like about slashdot -- the desire for karma stifles actual conversation. God forbid you offer up something that could be perceived as trollish or flamebait (liek this post, come to think of it)... a linked link is better than an unlinked link. Sorry you ended up being penalized for it:/
Slashdot Mirror
They're portable: but so are PDAs. And unlike the tcube, PDAs come with an integrated screen and some means for inputting data. These don't, so they're of limited use on the road. Even for telecommuters, you might as well stick with your laptop.
I suppose if you wanted to transport an entire data center to the other side of the floor, or even across town, these could be carried in a crate rather tna shipped on a truck. But, honestly, how often is this a consideration when choosing hardware?
I suppose they could come in handy for a home network or informal hosting operation out of your basement. But unless they're cheap, I doubt people would choose them over the eight too-obolete-for-gaming-but-perfectly-good-for-any- other-purpose desktops they already have in their basements.
What is the target market for these? People who like cute little multicolored boxes?
this doesn't apply when the scarring is continual. And that is already enough TMI from me, I suspect.
It's a long story, but I don't have stable fingerprints; scarring interferes with them. Any time I've needed a fingerprint check (for example, my concealed-carry permit), it was problematic producing 'acceptable' fingerprints in the first place, and thereafter difficult to match current fingerprints to old ones. Although this could make me a great secret agent or something, I'm going to have trouble if any future employer of mine moves to simple fingerprints biometrics as a means of identification.
Nerds are outmoded. Surviving nerds get laid about as often as my 96-year-old grandma. Trust me; the lady talks a good game, but the demographics just won't support it.
Yeah, kinda like social security.
Today that could read, just because you have a web-surfing cellphone, a PDA you don't know how to use, an AOL account, and a pair of trendy horn-rimmed glasses, doesn't make you a nerd. Nerdly appearances can be deceiving!
I would guess (given the article seems to be slashdotted) that it allows the same sort of referencing, playlist-sharing, and new-music-recommendation capabilities of existing music-sharing services, without the problematic issue of sharing the copyrighted content itself. IN other words, they're getting their users to do their advertising for them, without giving anything back. But it does seem to me to be a step in the right direction.
As yet another motorcyclist, who I can assure you travels with the flow of traffic and drives extremely conservatively, I've already had the unenviable experiences of having women on cellphones attempt to merge into me, having hothead teenage boys ride at highway speeds about two feet from my ass, etc., none of which was brought about by me, driving along I285 at 70MPH like all the other vehicles on the road. When riding my bike, my attention goes towards defensive driving and having eyes in the back and sides of my head. The interesting thing, though, is that I had the same things happen when I was driving a Miata to work every day. The fact is that a lot of car drivers don't look before they change lanes or turn. If you're smaller than an SUV, they don't see you. If you're lower than a large sedan, forget it. The only difference between your average motorcyclist and your average small-car driver is that the motorcyclist, in an accident with another car, will probably (1) die, and (2) not take anyone else with him. As a non-motorcyclisy, this is actually a benefit for you. So, given your feelings on the dangers presented to you from other drivers of all vehicles, you ought to be lobbying for more motorcycles on the road. You can barrel along on all four wheels, while itinerant squids driving sportsbikes in shorts and flipflops impact into your oversized grill like so many flies.
All this means is that there is more evident stratification in geekdom. Once upon a time, you were either a geek or you weren't. Now, there are levels of geeks. There are wannabe geeks, plain-old geeks, gamer geeks, alpha geeks, BOFHs, etc. Think of it as a multi-level geeking scheme. Geekdom with middle-management. A pecking order. In other words, associating yourself as a geek has become akin to associating yourself with any other group: gotta work your way up.
A projection of a rear view is a good use that hadn't occurred to me. Aside from that, I see no applicability for a HUD to a motorcyclist.
There is a large difference between a pilot's need for information and a motorcyclist's need for information. A pilot above or in the clouds, over the ocean, or in unfamiliar territory, needs the help of navigational aids to see his track and course, etc. A motorcyclist's immediate track is right in front of him, in the form of a road. A pilot can use things like an attitude indicator and a turn coordinator in when he doesn't have visual reference to the ground; this applies not at all to the motorcyclist, except (arguably, to a limited extent) at night. A pilot's attention in instrument meteorilogical conditions needs to be focused on instruments and gauges, hence the usefulness of a head's up display. A motorcyclist's attention *always* needs to be on the road, he never 'drives with reference to instruments'.
I can perhaps see a use for a HUD of GPS information superimposed on a map, if it can be toggled on and off, adjusted for position and brightness, etc. Me personally, I'm more comfortable with a map in my tank bag, which I can look at when I'm stopped at a light, rather than attempt to read while I'm riding. A speed readout on a HUD has limited value off a racetrack; you can gauge approximate speed based on your speed relative to cars around you and based on the wind noise and resistance you feel. You have no need on a motorbike to concentrate on speed, unlike an airplane, when airspeed during departure, approach and landing is absolutely critical. And anyone off a racetrack who needs a light to tell them when to shift up or down shouldn't be in any manual-shift vehicle on public roads, much less a motorcycle.
IMHO, this sounds like a cool, neat idea, especially to guys who would really like to have fighter-pilot gear, but off the racetrack, it would be far more distracting (read dangerous) than useful.
When I was a kid and teenager, I hated computers -- they were inflexible, boring, and involved too much typing. My mother worked with computers all day in a cubicle at DEC, and I swore I wouldn't grow up to be a cube-dweller, but rather would do something fun, outside, where I could see the weather coming and feel alive. Sometime in middle school, I decided I would fly airplanes. It became something of an obsession.
I got my private pilot rating in high school, then went to college for aviation. I graduated with a MS in Aviation Management/Flight Technology and got most of the other available fixed-wing ratings in the process. Then I worked for 2 years as a flight instructor -- at $18K a year. Very fun and personally rewarding job, but I foresaw several more years of dues-paying at like salary, and I was living like a poor person.
Then I found out that my not-so-smart high-school buddy was making about twice what I was as a network guy. I had done some page-layout and writing on Macs in college, so using that I moved back to my home city, got a technical writing job, then a year later transitioned into a web-design/development job, then after two years parlayed that into a programmer's job, quadrupling that flight instructor salary (over six times that salary one year, thanks to bonuses). That's where I am now.
It's kind of odd how easy it was, really -- thanks to that boom when fogging a mirror would get you a job, and showing a modicum of aptitude and effort would let you keep it. I've also been very lucky in having jobs where I was encouraged to acquire new skills on the job by taking on technologies I had never worked on before. This is by far the best way to learn, and these opportunities seem to be everywhere, even today, if you show the requisite aptitude and willingness.
I think I'll stick with this career -- it's not necessarily as enjoyable as doing crash-and-goes with primary students and getting the life scared out of me a couple of times a year, but it is certainly easier, and the current and potential salary is greater. Sometimes I do get heartburn over the fact that I spend so much effort now on such unimportant matters in the 'great scheme' of things, when I used to focus on teaching people how not to kill themselves.
So true -- a PDA, for 99% of the population, is a luxury, not a necessity. When people are worried about layoffs, etc, they don't buy new gadgets quite so much. The PalmPilot boom was in part caused by the infotech-is-cool-and-we're-all-stupid-rich boom.
Name-genericizing is a bad thing for Palm. Just like people no longer try to buy the *brand* Kleenex, but instead purchase any decent-looking facial tissue and call it all 'Kleenex', Palm Pilots losing brand differentiation would mean possibly losing sales. This is why The Coca-Cola Company protects the name 'Coke' with a vengeance -- they don't want people calling every soft drink a Coke (although in the south we tend to do this informally).
Take life a little too seriously, much?
Hmm... Nice pings for you AND all your teammates, that's worth it in and of itself. Play any games you bring, although the big tourneys only feature 3 games, decided by vote.
(Flamebait, but try to take it in the spirit intended, please:)
Why did it have to be millionMANlan, instead of millionPERSONLAN?
...and having just tried it, it's actually pretty good.
Searching on my typical 'handle', 'webwench', for example, I usually get about 100 hits out of Google off one site -- atTheFaire.com, mostly. That webwench is apparently pretty busy. I can click through page after page of results and not find one about me.
In Northern Lights, I get one search result for AtTheFaire, rather than tons, and one result for each of several sites, and I'm the subject of #7.
I have to say, I like it. Just in time for it to go away.
This search engine is what they're taking down.
It would be better to have a couple of links: a link for 'make this guy a friend' and another for 'make this guy a foe'. People can simply go to their 'preferences' page to reflect upon lists of all their friends and foes. When you click the 'make this guy a friend' link, the only thing that should happen is a page refresh, whereupon the poster's 'indicator light' is green. i.e. don't send me somewhere else to see that, yes, I did click the button, so now I pick a rating, then a page hence after I've chose my rating... followed by 2 'back' clicks to get back to the discussion I was trying to read in the first place. (No offense, but your site's slow enough to load is it is -- might as well make it slow but relatively convenient.) This would make all the sorting of friends and foes faster. Yeah, yeah, opinions are like you-know-whats, everyone has them -- but one click to perform a friend/foe marking action is certainly better than four.
There's a product I've been working with for 3 years which does something similar to what you are asking for:
OpenText Livelink
They have a number of other products that probably have similar underpinnings.
Basically, a database (can be Oracle, Sybase, or SQL Server) keeps meta-information on items stored in the database. Items can be documents, folders, URL links, tasks, discussion topics and replies, etc. Meta-information includes dates of creation, updating, deletion (i.e. the makings of an audit trail), whether the document is checked out for editing and if so, by whom (that makings of a simple source-control system), who can see or edit the document (implies that a table of users is also maintained, which it is), etc.
Livelink provides a server (basically a big CGI app) that you can run through a web server, allowing this stuff to be navigated and maintained through the web. The web pages are customizable. Really, the whole thing is customizable, which means you can write all kinds of little apps and processes above and beyond what is supplied by Livelink (our most common examples are scanning apps, that scan and store new documents in one step, and document expiration processes, which force certain documents to be read and revised every 6 months or whatever). There's also an API for VB, C++, and Java, to allow access methods other than the web.
Depending on the number and size of documents you're storing, documents can be kept in the database itself, or can be kept in a filesystem, and pointers to those documents stored in the database. The second option is usually preferred because the first option will cause trouble when it comes time to backup or restore from backup, or to migrate data, etc.
The biggest disadvantage from a user's point of view is the need to log in, if you plan to keep any semblance of an ACL, source control, or auditing. You could provide one common login for read-only access to most of your files, which would ease the pain a bit. Or you could 'roll your own' solution, based on some of the premises used by this type of system.
I'd like to add that I think the technology to use is the least of your issues. The biggest issue will be in finding and categorizing all of the content that's already out there. When you find 4 different variations of the same document, or 3 different builds of the same source code, or tables for 3 different apps in one database schema, and it's not clear what is what, how will you know who to contact? Who among your users has the extra headcount to spare to give you detailed info on all their files and databases, etc? How much stuff is out there, that was owned by people who have left or been laid-off, who no one else can provide info on? That's gonna be your real battle.
Yahoo has good TV listings. Amazing what they will marathon on New Years' Day:
ESPN: World's Strongest Man competition
TLC: Seeing is Believing
Comedy Channel: Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
A&E: Magnum PI until 8 p.m., then Law & Order until 4 a.m.
Animal Channel: The Crocodile Hunter (starting at 5 p.m.)
Sci-Fi Channel: The Twilight Zone
History Channel: History's Lost & Found
Since my ex has our son this New Years', and my other of unknown significance left town yesterday, I'll be at home on my a** looking for a good TV marathon.
Alias would be a good one (since I missed most of the episodes), and so would Trading Spaces. I've already had Buffy DVD marathon, so no luck there. Failing these, I'll probably be continuing on the kitchen work that I've been procrastinating on -- touching-up, sanding, and priming drywall, then painting. Whoop-de-doo!
Every year, I find myself disliking Christmas more and more, exactly because of the impersonality that seems built-in to the model. I think this year was particularly bad because of the exhortations to spend out of patriotism (buck up the economy and all that). The modern goal of Christmas is to spend, spend, spend and get, get, get, and to be honest I find myself, in that final shopping rush, looking for what I call 'respectable' gifts, instead of the kind of personal, lovely gift I really do want to give. What I call a 'respectable gift' is one that costs about the 'right amount of money' -- not so much that I am uncomfortable with it, but not so little that the recipient will think I am cheap. It seems impossible to hit the target correctly -- probably (to take a metaphor a couple of steps too far) because the arrow is bent, and hitting the target with a bent arrow would be pure chance.
I don't think the system mentioned in the article will make this phenomenon go away. I think it will make the phenomenon worse. It becomes even easier to put less thought into the gift. It makes it easier to 'scorekeep' monetarily ("Damn! He bought me a $50 present, and I spent a lousy $15 on him... I better get him something else"). It turns gift-giving and gift-receiving into a commodities market, where you buy futures ("I think Joe will like a CD this year!"), watch whether the recipient bargains up or down, and finally whether the recipient finally orders what you bought... for delivery a few days later, of course, pre-wrapped for them at the factory.
The root problem, really, is time. Do you have the time to make truly personal gifts for all your gift recipients? I'm not talking cookies -- I've discovered that homemade cookies don't cut it as a Christmas gift, unfortunately ;) I'm a divorced mother, and I'm doing well some nights to find time to make myself dinner. Americans on average put in more hours at work than any other industrialized nation, and it's only growing -- just about everyone is feeling a time crunch.
I'd also bet most of us live hundreds of miles away from most of our relatives. Once upon a time, most of your family would live in one town, and you would know much more (perhaps too much) about all of them. Now, you might see relatives a few times a year.
Be honest -- how much time do you spend with your friends that is comprised of more than LAN gaming, shop talk, or non-interactive movie-watching? How much time do you really spend with your spouse, your parents, your aunts and uncles? Given this, on what basis would you select a really appropriate gift for him or her? Hence 'commodity giving' and 'respectable' gifts -- and gift receipts, and gift certificates, and online gift wish lists.
The effect, for me, is a lingering dissatisfaction with my own efforts (or lack thereof), which leaks over into dissatisfaction with the season and the shallowness of the way we celebrate it.
As long as nanotech stays in the blue-sky arena, I think a great place to get a feel for the possibilities of nanotech is Neal Stephenson's book, Diamond Age. It gets a little loopy towards the end, but I'd still recommend it.
That's the only thing I don't like about slashdot -- the desire for karma stifles actual conversation. God forbid you offer up something that could be perceived as trollish or flamebait (liek this post, come to think of it)... a linked link is better than an unlinked link. Sorry you ended up being penalized for it :/
OK, no offense to dhamsaic intended, but how does turning someone else's link text into an actual link garner a '4 - Informative' rating?