A New Artistic Goal

I want to try a new goal with my webpage. In the spirit of online comics that are beloved by all, I'd like to begin posting a panel comic every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on the mainpage.

Here's the catch... instead of doing any drawings, I'll stick to empty panels that just have the filled in talk bubbles. I'll invite you, the reader, to breath life into my words. It'll be fun to develop an online community around this concept where anybody is free to edit the pictures and then I'll post the results each week, giving proper credit to the artists who get involved.

Maybe I'll pitch this to art teacher's at local schools to offer their students extra credit to get involved. Maybe I'll eventually package a book of artwork like the people from Post Secret or Exploding Dog, which both rely on readers for their content.

I fully don't expect this to succeed, but I'm curious how many weeks I can keep up my end of the bargain by systematically adding the artwork with the text bubbles.

MSFT vs TomTom

The gauntlet has been dropped. Apollo Creed is challenging Tiny Tim to the cage match of the century. Tiny Tim, supposedly, stolen eight of Apollo's patented attacks. Here's the details:

• Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture
  
• Method and system for generating driving directions
  
• Methods and arrangements for interacting with controllable objects within a graphical user interface environment using various input mechanisms
  
• Portable computing device-integrated appliance
  
• Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity
  
• Common name space for long and short filenames
  
• Common name space for long and short filenames
  
• Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory
  

So, is this a fair fight? Does the champion have a legitimate chance against the challenger or are will we see an upset during this fight? Film at 11.

Nd Image Gallery: The Photo Web

I'm going to put this out there. I think it's a simple innovation that would improve the state of the art of viewing photo galleries. But really... there's no complexity in this idea, and if I cared personally, I could code it in a day or two. It's just that *I* think it would be an improvement to tweak the way you can browse photos online.

Basically... here's the gist of it. In addition to the "Previous" and "Next" buttons on the left and right side of images that are in online photo albums, also include "Back" and "Forward" buttons above and below with a dropdownmenu available from the metadata in a photo to control a secondary sorting filter.

What this would accomplish is (a) when I'm viewing "John's Birthday Album", I could easily ignore all the images that don't have John in them, or (b) when I'm viewing all pictures with the "John" tag, I could easily filter so that I only look at pictures that were uploaded from between Feb 15 and Feb 24. Or maybe I want to filter all images that are (a) icon size, (b) webpage size, (c) desktop size, or (d) print shop size.

The guy who implements this could even add a checkbox button that sets the dropdownbox axis to the main axis so I can dynamically jump from album to album stalking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H looking at the different groups of people who attended John's Birthday (assuming their privacy settings allow it, that is).

The point is... by adding a dropdownlist that's keyed on metadata associated with online photos, it'd be pretty nice to view the "photo webs" that are accumulating on social networking sites like Facebook and Picasa.

Microwaves

When did microwaves become so complicated? I recall a day when the microwave had 16 buttons on it. Ten for the numbers 0 through 9, plus cook, defrost, time, power, start, and stop/clear. Somehow, somebody decided that this wasn't good enough. For some god-awful reason we've come to the point in society where *some* microwaves are equipped with ultra cool "Reheat" buttons and a special button that just says "Popcorn". Mind you, when you buy bags of microwave popcorn their instructions clearly state, "Do not use the Popcorn button on your microwave".

Anyway, what's this rant about, you ask? I was heating up frozen edamame for lunch time using the "Express Defrost" button (the preparation instruction on the beans say to microwave of defrost for 2 minutes to make them ready to eat). What the "Express Defrost" feature does is load a 2 minute timer onto the microwave screen and then just begins without requiring any additional input. I figured the button was a good match for the edamame. Well, 90 seconds into the timer I started to smell smoke and noticed that my microwave was attempting to catch my edamame on fire. I opened the door (a handy alternative to the "Stop" button if you're in a pinch) and things cleared up pretty quickly. There were char marks on one of the edamame pods.

Anyway, all I am asking is for future generations of microwaves to return to their roots and *not* attempt to outsmart me. Or at the very least, add a feature that senses smoke and dehumanizes me in advance of setting a fire and prints a message "You've attempted to do something stupid". This would be fine. I can handle being called a moron by my food preparation equipment. But what I can't handle is smelling smoke coming from them, because I've been made very sensitive to fires over the past year. I can also handle knowing the microwave is stupid and learning how it ticks for each different thing I need it for. Because I'd be fine with some combination of the following button presses: Defrost-2-Cook-2-0-0-Start. But what I don't want is a one-stop-shop button that DOES THE WRONG THING. This, in my option, is blasphemy and it's designer should be punished with a fate worse than death: listening to Michael Bay pitch movie ideas for 24 hours straight.

Crash

Food for thought: About a month ago, a commercial airplane crash landed and nobody died.

All the attention has gone towards the pilot and crew for being heroes, but what about the engineers who designed the Airbus 320's in the 1980s? Certainly the plane that ended up in the Hudson River had gotten updated and upgraded since the original design, but a successful glided water landing is certainly an impressive thing to pull off. Kudos to good aircraft design!

Co*cast

Suffice it to say, I've finally given into the will of the people and the monopoly that's held in my area by the local internet supply overlords. The conventional wisdom is that the asterisk in the title of this post should be an "M", but for intents and purposes I am going to officially proclaim is should be spelled with a "C" and a "K" instead. It makes me feel better about giving them my business if I can cling to my sense of disdain towards their business practices.

The "installation man" (whatever that means) is coming tomorrow to twiddle his bits. I'm already anticipating problems because the cable interface in my apartment is in the wrong room and lord knows I'm not going to let him run wires all over my living room to make his job easier. Also, based on past experience with ISP-leased equipment (and they want to charge me $3 a month to "rent" a cable modem) I got my own Cisco equipment so that (a) I can expect it to work, and (b) I can save money in the long run.

Hooray!