Sunday, December 08, 2002
Ironic search leading here:
"reasons to feel good about myself"
Glad to be of service, mate. :-)
5:59:53 PM
Volley, and Return
Porter and I seem to share the notion of secret fantasies - off-the-wall things we'd like to do in our lives, like focusing on being a DJ for a year.
Secret Fantasy #4: collect musical instruments.
Secret Fantasy #26: perfect pitch.
Sean notes that most of these fantasies do not require a lot of cash - they're not bling bling. Yesterday my girlfriend said to me: if it can be fixed with money, then it's not really a problem. A lot of these dreams cannot be purchased with money - things with a price tag don't have the same cachet for me because I know that given the time, work and sacrificing other things, I can probably acquire it.
Mostly it's a matter of time - becoming a DJ or devoting a year to reading books and climbing mountains takes a lot of time and dedication, and unforuntely the freedom to pursue a lot of these abstract dreams costs money and the cojones to forsake the material rat race and a lot of the comforts that you have. I could easily take a year or two to learn abstract algebra, ski, mountain bike and climb mountains if I were willing to quit my job and sell my car and house.
5:47:50 PM
I'm a tech whore. That's why I blogrolled Gizmodo.
(It's nice to see you pushing pixels again, baby.)
5:27:36 PM
Every Pixel is Sacred
In the midst of some other xmas shopping, I started checking out the handhelds at CompUSA. I've been thinking about upgrading my handheld, for reasons I cannot yet disclose because it is tangentally related to a present I got for my girlfriend for xmas. I got myself a Palm V long ago but I decided to reexamine the PalmOS vs PocketPC issue. This handheld from HP is the first PocketPC handheld that I've even contemplated because it has a very nice form factor - it's half an inch thick and has a screen a little bigger than the Palm series. All the PocketPC or WinCE handhelds in the past have been huge, clunky and expensive, although they have always had really nice screens and I much prefer Jot to Graffiti for character input.
I'm also considering the Tungsten or the m515. I've used Palm's handhelds for a while and I am a sucker for good industrial design, and I think that Palm has the edge in design over the Handspring or the Clio (plus I think that Sony is smoking crack with that memory stick thing). I think that $499 is a lot to pay for a handheld, but the Tungsten is a nice handheld - small, light and a gorgeous screen.
So the iPaq and the m515 are at the same pricepoint. The iPaq comes with more memory and a slightly larger screen. But there is one thing that continues to drive me away from the pocketPC. They waste pixels on the screen. Yes, the top of the screen has the Windows start menu, the bottom has some application navagaion and a freaking System Tray! So you only get about 250 vertical pixels and they waste about a third of them with navigation that is useless most of the time. I don't think that's very respectful to the user. The PocketPC evangelist looked at me like I was from another planet when I told him that, but he couldn't tell me if it was possible to make those menus go away. The palm has a smaller screen but all the controls are optimized to take up the fewest pixels possible and the menus stay hidden until you actually need to use them. The PocketPC has way too much cruft left over from the PC. There's no reason to open and close apps when they are all resident in memory anyways. It reminds me of a Monty Python Song:
Every Pixel's sacred
Every Pixel's great
And if a Pixel's wasted
God gets quite irate.
Anyways. It's funny how wasting pixels would drive me away from buying a Windows-based palmtop.
I got my girlfriend the Palm m500 as a gift when she got a job because it works on the Mac, it's small and she's too practical in her approach to technology to get sucked into glitzy features like color.
I'm enough of a design snob you'd think I'd be a Mac user, but I've always thought that Apple fleeced their users to an extent that PC hardware manufacturers never could. The Mac is a very developer-hostile machine, it's no wonder that the only reasonable apps are Apple's or ports. It's so hard to write code on the Mac it's insane. So what about Linux? Well, I'm not so bought into the software should be free ya ya peace love waterbed crap that I'm willing to compile a kernel myself for a machine I use for leisure. I ran Linux in college and even contributed to the movement because all the CS machines were Unix so I could run Linux in my room and never need to go to the computer lab to do my assignments. But nowadays I want a bargain that will stay out of my way, and even though I feel like I'm selling a little bit of my soul with every Microsoft application I use, nobody's been able to pony up an alternative yet.
5:21:34 PM
Last Update: 1/1/2003; 10:06:03 PM
