Over at usabilitypost.com , Dmitry Fadeyev posted a brief but good writeup about why we should drop support for IE6 in order to give people a reason to upgrade. Based on a recent experience I had at a focus group on a Coast Guard base here in California, that may be harder in large organizations than regular run-of-the-mill users. If you’re in the Coast Guard, you might not have any other choice. (more…)
My friend and I were watching the season finale of the tv show House tonight and we started talking about whether or not we would want to know if we were going to die in a few hours. The topic came up as the character Amber lay in the hospital unconscious, death inevitable, with the last opportunity for her friends to reawaken her for a few more hours.
Most people, given this question, say they wouldn’t want to be woken up. What’s the point? This is what my friend believes. He didn’t understand at first why I answered different, that I would want to be woken back up if even for only such a short amount of time.
To me, we are special in all of the known universe in that we are conscious. There are other conscious species on our own world, but they are few and far between. Only a handful can even arguably be said to be as self-aware and experience emotions as we do. Cetaceans, some of the great apes, and elephants. As conscious animals, we are collectively few and far between. This makes us all special.
For me, the chance to be aware of the world is more important than nearly anything else. If I only had one more chance to be awake, I want those last few hours to be able to breathe, think, and be able to remember. When my body gives out and the remarkable chemistry of my brain that has given me the ability to be me fails, there’s no mythical place that my consciousness goes. I am a product of the physical world that created me, and when those physical processes no longer work I am gone. The last few hours and minutes of life should be cherished for the special moments that they are.
No, I’m not dying. But our conversation was something that made me think, and I think it was worth sharing.
Twitter continues to be a source for breaking news. As of 4pm PST, there are a lot of people on Twitter talking about a massive explosion at a propane facility in Toronto that occurred around 4am this morning. This news has yet to filter into the mainstream news websites like CNN and MSNBC. The CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Company, finally picked up the story around 5pm their time.
Meanwhile, various people have been spreading the news via Twitter and home-made videos posted on Youtube. The following amazing video was submitted to YouTube at around 5:00am EST, shortly after the explosion happened. As of this posting, over 164,000 people have viewed just this video.
This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are.
I work in downtown San Francisco and wanted to post quickly about what I just heard at the Apple store
on Stockton.
There’s about 800-1000 people still in line as of noon (see attached
pictures). The line wraps clear around the block up to the Ellis
parking garage.
(more…)
I have been seriously concerned for the last 10 years or so about the amazingly out of proportion influence the media/entertainment industry has been having over the legal system here in the United States.
We have seen the collective entertainment industry having a huge amount of power as “copyright holders” that is disproportionate to their economic contributions to society overall. The information technology industry, loosely including everyone from hardware vendors to software development to web services, is vastly larger than the media and entertainment companies in terms of their economic footprint.
A lot of people have great ideas, myself included. We think about them, write and plan them out, and search around for competitors. We see other people that have already implemented similar ideas and we start doubting. We talk to our friends, families, coworkers, and strangers. Some of these people are encouraging us to put words into action. But others say “hasn’t that already been done?” or “that doesn’t seem very valuable.”
The old saying goes, “Stick to your day job.”
For whatever reason, we listen to the naysayers because it reinforces our own doubt. We shelve our ideas, or start procrastinating because doubt is telling us we have other more important things to do at the moment. The moments turn into days, then weeks, months, and before long we’ve lost the initial drive we had when we were inspired at the start.
Fear doubt. Be afraid of it. If you start doubting, start thinking about the thing that scares you the most. Spiders? Imagine shoving your hand into a bucket filled with thousands of the squirming, hairy, eight-eyes things with huge fangs. Make your brain start getting the same association with Doubt that it does with whatever makes you squirm.
Lets use Fear as a tool to succeed.
This is the best news I’ve heard in a while in regards to Second Life. Lip sync is going to be available to anyone using the official Second Life client. Its also possibly one of the most important innovations to come to SL in years.
Mike Monkowski, former IBM speech group programmer and currently in the IBM semiconductor development group, has been diligently incorporating lip sync code he developed independently into the Second Life client for over 6 months. According to an announcement from Mike a couple of days ago, his lip sync code has been added into the official Second Life client. (more…)
I’ve had an interesting exchange of emails for the last couple of days.
One or more versions of a Second Life client for mobile phones is being tested currently. It seems like we will see Second Life on our phones very, very soon.
I have been running the Machinima feed at Twitter, http://www.twitter.com/machinima, since April and its been a great opportunity to find some amazing work people have been doing in Second Life.
Today it happened again. Jon Brouchard, SL name Keystone Bouchard, created a video about an amazing new interactive music project that he just launched in Second Life called Wikisonic. Even more, there is a real-life version of Wikisonic being built at a museum in San Jose, California. Details on that are at the end of the post.
Link to Jon’s blog and post about Wikisonic. SL teleport link here. Interview below the video.
A new way to clear floats using CSS. If you’re not a web developer, you might find this post a bit pointy-hatted. This is a refined method of clearing floats using CSS without additional html markup, based on the work of some great people. (more…)