Sunday, July 24, 2005

Static

The concept of failure in transmission is changing.

CD's don't skip, they stutter.

Digital TV doesn't snow, it pops and tiles and pixelates and goes black.

Mobile calls and digital radio don't fade in and out of static. They become choppy and disjointed and then drop.

15 years from now, static or snow as experienced in analog transmissions and currently seen in shows will totally date the production as being from a pre-digital era. Much SciFi will look strange. Very young kids will simply not understand it when they see it. People in shows 'faking' static to get out of a phone call or radio contact is a joke these viewers just wont get.

Friday, July 22, 2005

I am turning into such a negative Nancy on my professional review blog. Can't help it, though, I keep reading paper after paper week after week about these lofty mobile architectures to allow us to do all kinds of crap everywhere, but nobody seems to have surveyed or even care what we users would want to know and see before feeling comfortable doing all this crap. No, let's just slap some boxes together in Visio and proclaim it a comprehensive architecture, without a clue whether it will actually pass the necessary data around.

It would be like creating this mobile phone network where the person called might have to pay for calls but then forgetting to include Caller ID so the user could actually make an informed choice, or a network where a caller might pay more depending on whether they were calling in or out of network but not including this information in the number. All because you forgot to ask users what they wanted before you made your network. Oh wait, that actually kinda happened for a while. Let's do it again!

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Oh. Joy.

It seems "Kurt" (sp?) has been handing out my cell number to some people. So far both that called are female. I wonder if they are his honeys.

Been telling 'em Kurt's asleep in the next room, cuz it was one of those nights, ya know? Can I take a message? What's your name? No, I ain't his dad, just a friend who's hanging with him.

(Ma?)Ria's gonna be calling back at 9. The first woman declined to leave a message.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Eelectrons Leave Trails

Within the next 72 hours, T-Mobile will send me an email containing a list of numbers called yesterday after 8 AM EST from all devices identifying themselves to the network as having my mobile number.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Missing

People make fun of mobile phones. But when I carry one, I can show what I was seeing. I can read what you sent me. I can call you if I forgot something. Today I walked to the store alone without you all with me.

Alarm

Have just been broken into while we slept. Dean heard the slam of the front door as they left. All biological entities ok, but all work & personal laptops stolen save the printserver in the closet (currently being used for this), my mobile phone is gone too.

Don't bother sending me email or calling my cell, it'll be a while.

Friday, July 15, 2005

'Code or 'Late

Reading two entries from friends today who got impacted by the JK Rowling Marketing Hype Machine doing work for the Braille end of publishing, I was struck with quite the geeky thought: while I am sure the colloquial and official terms for creating a Braille edition of a book is 'translating', I have worked with various forms of marked up text so much that I would call it 'reencoding' or 'transcoding'. After all, you aren't switching languages, just character sets. Then I started wondering about how punctutaion is handled exactly (pretty darn complicated), which led me to do some actual Googling, and found that the verb most used on the web is 'transcription'.