Thought provoking…
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Doug
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Doug
I ran across a very interesting new Palm application/service tonight - Vindigo. Vindigo is exactly the sort of “killer app” PDA’s have been waiting for. Imagine being able to pull up a listing of restaurants, clubs, shopping, or theaters near your current location. Then image being able to find out details about any of the above, like cuisine type, price range, etc. Then imagine being able to read reviews, both from professional reviewers and from people just like you - and do this all from the palm of your hand!
It all sounds pretty damn impressive, to me. There’s a couple caveats, though: first, the thing is ad-supported, which keeps it free but may or may not be an annoyance, depending on the implementation and how sensitive you are to such things. My reading further indicates that the ads will be based on your location, so you’ll be getting targeted content designed to lure you into that shop right around the corner from where you’re standing. Again, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your situation, I think. Finally, the service is currently only available for NYC. Other major cities are coming soon, with smaller cities (hopefully Indianapolis!) sometime later this year.
I’d love to try this thing out, but I’m not headed for NYC anytime soon. Futher, Vindigo is right now dependant on Windows - it isn’t set up to work wirelessly, and it appears to rely on technology similar to that of AvantGo to get updates. Heck, they may be using AvantGo, from what I can see. Mac and Unix users are just out of luck for now, though a Mac version is planned. Linux/Unix/BSD users, if this interests you, write them a note and lobby for a port!
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Doug
I spent most of the first half of today wandering around Conner Prairie, a living history museum of an 1836 Indiana farming community. It’s a pretty neat place, and the kids love it. I managed to grab some more photos with the digital camera, too, and whipped up a temporary gallery there in the sidebar. Eventually I’ll put together something database driven to store all the images I’m taking, but this’ll have to do for now.
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Doug
I’m currently reading Sarah Zettel’s Playing God, which seems like it’ll be a good read. It’s too early for a review (I’m only about a third of the way through), but she’s tossed out some concepts related to computer-mediated communications that I enjoyed. Zettel has extrapolated our current information technology in a conservative, realistic manner, and I’m enjoying her descriptions. One term I’m enjoying a lot is “knotting” or “tying knots” to describe the process of authoring and adding content to the web. Pretty descriptive!
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Doug
Wired ran an excellent article several months ago about The Long Now, a project to build a 10,000 year clock and library. Reading through Serendipty today reminded me of this project, so I had to go out and see what progress they’d made. Personally, I think this is a fantastic project and sincerely hope the actual clock and library get built. Gods know the world could use some encouragement towards more long-term thinking.
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Doug
I picked up a Sony MVC-FD-88 yesterday, so I finally have a digital camera! It was an early Father’s Day present. I’ve managed to shoot a few disks worth of stuff already, so hopefully I’ll put a gallery together yet this week end.
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Doug
IBM appears to be ready to release the first serious WYSIWYG HTML editing tool for Linux, called TopPage. It looks pretty slick; roughly equivalent to FrontPage in what it does. Unfortunately, it uses a special version of WINE, just like WordPerfect; it isn’t natively a Linux application. Still, it’s application like this that will make Linux a viable choice for the average user’s desktop.
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Doug
The new Gnome 1.2 packages are out from Helix Code. Very nice.
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Doug
I remember reading about this idea a year or so ago in some computer magazine article about new computer interfaces. Looks like they’ve actually brought something to market, and that something looks pretty cool. There are some real opportunities for interface development to move beyond the “folders and files” metaphor, and this may be one of them.
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Doug
I finished Joe Haldeman’s Forever Free last night. Forever Free is a sequel to Haldeman’s award-winning SF classic The Forever War, one of the really outstanding SF works of all time. Unfortunately, Forever Free doesn’t measure up to the original work in any way.
The plotline seemed promising - the veterans of the Forever War, now living on a planet called MF, tire of living among the pseudo group-mind of “Man,” which is what humanity has evolved into by the end of the War. Led by William Mandalla, the main character of The Forever War, they steal a starship and head off on a 40,000 year journey out of the galaxy, hoping to return in a future where Man has disappeared, or at least evolved into something easier for them to live with. The first half of the book is a lead up to the ship hijacking and escape. A sense of impending drama begins to build, and the book seems a decent read up to this point, as the reader anticipates the danger of the journey, Man’s reaction to the hijacking, and finding out what eventually happens.
Unfortunately, Haldeman either at this point just got tired of the whole idea, or someone else finished the book, or maybe he just went nuts. I’ll refrain from tossing out spoilers for those who feel compelled to read it, but I began to realize I was in trouble when I was two-thirds of the way through the book and nothing really significant beyond the hijacking had happened yet. There’s some really impenetrable foreshadowing in the form of a Tauran message, the hijack starship malfunctions, and all the main characters end up back on Earth, a mere 20-some years after their departure from MF. Haldeman wraps up the entire story in a few pages of a sort of double deus ex-machina that’s remarkably scant on details or appealing mystery, and suddenly all is right with the Universe.
Forever Free is a major disappointment from a writer of Haldeman’s stature. I can only assume he was short on cash, and decided to dash off a sequel to his best known work knowing people would buy it. Mistakenly, I assumed he was about to share a new set of profound insights as to human nature as he had in The Forever War. Instead, he merely reminds us that the Universe is a big, mysterious place, and weird shit can happen. There are books by less well known authors that do a far better and more entertaining job of delivering that message.
My biggest gripe, I think, is that the characters of The Forever War will now forever be tainted with the legacy of this piece of crap. Those were good characters, and they had something to say. Now, they just seem like buffoons. Haldeman should be forced to pay me for the space in my head this abortion takes up!
