Archive | 2003

Eric Kidd asks where his future is, where the industry will be in 2031, and what to do next?. I’ve been pondering the same question, although my timeline is a little shorter.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.

From Miles at TinyApps.org via David Weinberger’s Joho The Blog

Made it back without incident. Glad to break that string of bad luck!

Abe Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch
Discovered a neat algorithm to squelch
CompuServe incorporated it into the GIF
Good programmers soon caught the drift
The format was published, free and open
Many useful things started to happen
Then Unisys Corp purchased the rights
And changed the terms on LZW overnight
The useful algorithm was off limits
Ransom to corporate greed and profits
On June 20, 2003, the LZW patent expired
Shame on Unisys for what has transpired
Someday Unisys books will be in arrears
While the ideas of LZW survive the years

Funny. From Slashdot.

David Pogue previews the Treo 600 for the New York Times. The good news: the best phone-PDA combination to date. The bad news: “to date” is a bad phrase, as it’s not due out until the fall. A little FUD to depress sales for the summer, both on competitors and on Handsprings’s earlier models.

Looks gorgeous.

I’m traveling back to the client this afternoon. Hooking up with Andy Kramek in Detroit and sharing the flight from there. I guess I’m learning to make this more of a routine practice and less of an event. I’ve got checklists and To-Do lists and bags of stuff. I’ve been pretty good the last few trips in remembering all the important stuff, and only needing to pick up minor stuff like toothpaste or sunscreen.

Three day turnaround from DevCon to Knoxville is just barely enough time to unpack, do the laundry, pay bills, monthly bookkeeping, repack and throw a combined birthday/Father’s Day party. Sleep? Oh, darn. Knew I forgot something…

Andrew MacNeill got to see my blog in Palm Springs and we sat down and walked through some of the power of Radio Userland’s blogging and news aggregator tools. He was impressed. So, as soon as he got home, he set up a Blogger page here. Welcome aboard the blogosphere, Andrew!

What a tough trip! Twenty-three hours door-to-door. The AmericaWest Express puddle-hopper from Palm Springs didn’t bother to show up until an hour late. Like many travellers, that meant I missed my connection in Phoenix. Had to wait hours and then fly in the wrong direction to the City of Lost Wages and wait more hours for a flight to Boston, arriving at 2 AM vice 7:30 PM the previous evening. Of course, there was no bus to get home to New Hampshire at that hour, either. Not one of the three flights I took yesterday left on time – two were over an hour late and the middle one a half-hour. While the staff were helpful and courteous, you can’t run an airline if you can’t move passengers where and when you promise them.

Just checking out, I noticed that I was charged for four days of STSN internet access at $9.95 a day. Apparently, somewhere in the fine print I skimmed was the agreement that I was signing up for my entire stay, and not for a single day, as I had assumed. I had been taking advantage of the conference wireless and frugally avoiding use in my room. Hopefully, I can get the unused days taken off the bill. But watch it out there, folks! That’s a rip-off I hadn’t anticipated.

On my way into the closing session. Another DevCon done. Might not get to post again until I’m home – a long day on the road tomorrow.