Category Archives: Random

My rantings on whatever I happen to be thinking about.

Better Tools

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If I had to build a house I wouldn’t start by nailing up a frame. I’d look at the design of the hammer and wonder why so many people before me just accepted that design and built things with it. Is this the best design? Maybe he should reevaluate this design. A month later a city could be built around me, and I’d be sitting in my dirt lot staring at the sky thinking, “I’m closing in on a better hammer design, and when I do… oh how it’s going to change the world. People will be able to build all sorts of things.”

Information Out of Reach

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Now this is frustrating, and it’s happened to me more than once. I’m having a conversation with someone and trying to describe a concept. I’m struggling a little because there’s a word for what we’re discussing, but I don’t know it. Sure I could pull out my phone and Google it, but that breaks up the continuity of the conversation, and will probably send us down a different path anyway. Eventually the conversation ends. Later I pull my iPod out of my pocket and start listening to a podcast. 10 minutes in the conversation shifts to the same topic I was just discussing. Ah, right, that’s the term I looking for. Are you freaking kidding me? The information I was looking for was in my pocket the whole time? If I had been 10 minutes late for that meeting I would have had the information I needed? Argh. Too much information, too little time.

So much for NASA

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“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he [Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.“

– NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

Hmmm… there’s something missing there. Something about – oh yeah, that’s right = SPACE!

Here he is saying that line (and a lot more) on Al Jazeera:

Desktop Apps Won’t Die

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It’s not a matter of bandwidth, or cost, or reliability, or security. Yet. We’ll get to those problems eventually. But first there’s still a usability problem to solve. Life in the browser has come a long way in a short time, but it still has a long way to go. More and more complicated tasks are moving out of the independent desktop application and becoming tabs in a browser.  Office apps, image and music editing, and even video editing are web apps now. When you use these web apps you have to convince yourself that even though the user experience is much worse, somehow this is better. In exchange for access from anywhere (previously attainable with portable media) we trade consistent desktop integration, such as reliable cutting and pasting (something Microsoft still struggles with on the desktop).