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- After a couple incidents where I lost vital data to hard drive failures, I've moved my stuff to a Drobo. So far, it gets an A for ease of setup and management, an A- for reliability (on one occasion, it had trouble rebooting), and a B- for drive performance (USB plus the data protection overhead makes for slow transfers).
- Vista Media Center is the best iteration of Microsoft's living room interface, but it's still far from ideal. To do anything interesting, you're still forced to install plugins from small developers, whose work usually lacks the polish of the native MS stuff. (Thank you to those developers, though... without them, VMC would be borderline useless.)
- Until you find youself building an all-purpose media center, you don't fully grasp just how byzantine the world of Windows video can get. The end result is satisfying, but the effort it takes to reach it is substantial.
02-17-2008 07:08:00PM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [0]
Marc Canter: I resent Facebook execs continuing to hide behind the shroud of privacy to some how ‘protect me’ from who - myself?That's just it. This isn’t about protecting you from yourself. It’s about protecting everyone on your friends list from you. If I agree to declare myself your friend on Facebook, that in no way implies that I’ve agreed to be your friend on Myspace, LinkedIn, or whatever.
So even in a best-case scenario for "open Facebook" enthusiasts, FB can only open things up to the extent that they allow individual users to say, “yeah, UserX can take my unique identifier with her”. And the number of people who would bother to check that box in their settings is probably somewhere between zero and Scoble. There’s no benefit to me in letting you drag my Facebook persona around with you, after all.
In all this talk of social silos, folks keep mentioning “my data”. But ultimately, “my data” in any social network is pretty sparse... photos I've uploaded, bulletins/notes I've posted, and so on. The important stuff (the social graph) is actually “our data”, and I have no business unilaterally deciding to take it elsewhere.
11-13-2007 10:23:05PM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [0]
Long time no post.
- I've been using Vista exclusively for the past six months or so, and to be honest... I like it. The funny thing is, it's really more of an OS refinement than a typical upgrade. (It's like Windows ME in that respect, only functional.) For example, my favorite parts of Vista are Search Folders and the search box in the Start menu. The former is handy, and the latter has become my default method of launching apps... just type the first few letters of an app's name and hit enter.
- If you have even a tiny bit of trouble keeping track of login info for websites or credit card stuff when making online purchases, install Roboform. It has become probably the most important tool on my machine, providing me with an encrypted password store that integrates tightly with the browser... and you can get a version that works from a USB key, making it easy to take your identity data with you from machine to machine.
- Recently picked up Logitech's new VX Nano laptop mouse, and I am ridiculously pleased with the little sucker. It has the smallest wireless receiver I've ever seen, protruding less than a half-inch from the USB port... a life-saver if you're like me and tend to move your machine around a lot. The mouse itself is pretty small too, but it still manages to squeeze an adequate number of buttons into the design. Most impressive, though, is the stepped/free toggle in the mouse's scroll-wheel. Click the wheel and it will switch between conventional wheel motion and a "frictionless" mode that allows the wheel to spin freely with the smallest flick of the fingertip. This makes it super-easy to scroll through excruciatingly long lists or documents with ease, and will be a must-have for all my future mouse purchases.
- I moved from a Treo 650 to a 755p a few months back, and echoing my feelings about Vista, it's a pleasant refinement. EVDO support is great, but the thing just feels a little more solid, a little more comfortable, and a little more polished. With that said, this will probably be the last Palm OS device I buy unless they get their act together and release a major upgrade in the next six months or so. As annoying as Windows Mobile can be, there's just way more momentum on that side of the smartphone world right now.
10-24-2007 05:55:23AM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [0]
My friend Shelley has been occasionally accused of trollery. When I look at the situation, it seems an unfair characterization. Real trolls aren't passionate about anything... that's why they get their jollies provoking other people. They love watching the emotional fireworks that they can't generate within themselves.
And Shelley, well, say anything else you may about her, but don't accuse her of being dispassionate. She writes the things she writes because she believes them, not because she likes watching virtual veins throb in the various foreheads of the bloggerati.
So where does the "troll" label come from? Personally, I think it's the result of poorly (or perhaps "overly") distributed identity.
If you read Shelley consistently, via the blog that comprises the best available view of Who She Is, it's clear she doesn't live under a bridge. But what if all you see of her is the stuff she occasionally posts at Robert Scoble's place? What if your only exposure to her comes from external links to one of her occasionally heated blog entries? If that's all you can see, well, hell... maybe the whole "troll" thing is a little understandable.
Which wouldn't really be a huge problem, if it weren't that we're all being sold these ideas of "global community" and Web-based renown. "If I communicate broadly enough, generate public awareness of myself, and basically touch all the bases, good things will happen. I'll find community, and constructive critque, and fortune."
Um, no, I won't.
All I'll really succeed in doing is generating hundreds (or thousands) of MicroMe identities, little splintered bits of self under the control of bloggers and search engines that only see me as a way of adding texture to their reader/user experiences. Maybe I'll end up some sort of "Web celeb" caricature of myself, and maybe I could even turn a profit from it, but that's it. The good stuff, the deep stuff, will continue to elude me.
Real community comes from rubbing shoulders on a daily basis. Real reputation comes from your community's hard-won respect filtering outward.
So does that mean we should avoid promiscuous commenting and shun incoming links in an effort to consolidate our selves? Nah, that would be boring, and probably pointless. But we can certainly adjust the expectations that go into our interaction with the larger world. We can focus on cultivating our real communities and the relationships within them, and count on the goodwill thus generated to balance the stuff that's beyond our control.
We can, in short, be ourselves. And know in our guts that we don't need to be anything else.
06-21-2007 11:46:44AM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [0]
I have three reactions to this:
O'Reilly Radar > Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct
We've drafted a code of conduct that will eventually be posted on bloggingcode.org, and created a badge that sites can display if they want to link to that code of conduct.
- I love it, because anyone who sticks that ludicrous badge on his/her blog is opting out of my "People Interesting Enough To Read" list, and I can always use help pruning my aggregator.
- I'm relieved by it, because the world just wouldn't seem to be its reliably screwed-up self if there weren't Shiny Happy People running around who appear to be more worried about the dangers of open communication than things that might actually harm someone.
- I'm amused by it, 'cause y'know, only in the VC-infested waters of the tech blogosphere would worries about copyright infringement and NDA violation be rolled into a proposed definition of "civility".
04-09-2007 07:48:52AM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [1]