TrackTime
Track your activities, projects, music and websites on a beautiful timeline. TrackTime tracks all your activities on a timeline and provides statistics on applications, music, websites and your own projects. You can see: – how long you listened to music by a specific artist, – which websites you visit most and how long, – which applications you use and when,

Using Tracktime would depress the hell out of me.

Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts. Abroad, researchers found that children in Romanian households who won a $300 voucher to help them buy computers received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian. Stateside, students in a North Carolina study posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers increased. And a Texas study found that ‘there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.’”

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/business/11digi.html

Well DUH. I work with computers for a living. If I had kids, they wouldn’t be allowed on computers until 10 years old, at the earliest. ANYTHING a kid can be doing is time better spent than sitting at a computer. Computers are tools. They are easy to learn tools. Don’t learn them before you have a need to learn them.

Okay, not totally true – this is work I enjoy. I am learning new computer technology. Mind you, I would prefer not to be learning it on the fly, on the weekend, when I am not suppose to be working. But then, that is the lot of a computer geek. And as a note – wow, are my skills out of date. They are getting “in date” fast, but geez. 7 years since we upgraded a server, and the tech is nothing like it was.

Anyway, I picked up nine hours this weekend. Not too bad. I’ll get it as comp time.

This rollout is keeping me from posting much anywhere. And its decreased the time I can spend with my birds, which really bites.

We saw dolphins, and whales today, from the deck of the ship. Also some really neat terrain. My flickr feed will have plenty of pics, when I get back home. She got a picture where you can actually see part of the whale, and part of its spout. Its almost certainly a humpback whale. I saw one jump. It was a baby, but it was cool. We saw 2-3 different dolphin pods. Well, actually, I think one was a porpoise pod – they had more a porpoise look to them than a dolphin look. (Smaller and stubbier than dolphins).

I showed mom what Photoshop Elements can do, just in terms of smart fix tonight. She’s going to buy it. Digital cameras – even “prosumer” ones like we have – just don’t have the same range that film cameras do. So Photoshop elements can make the pictures a bit closer to reality. I really suck at picture manipulation. Its never really interested me. Once she starts playing with it, she’ll get better than me very, very fast.

I am sooooo ready for this plane trip to be over. But enough of that (I’m writing this offline, waaaay up in the air, traveling at almost 600 miles per hour).

I’ve just finished watching most of the first season of the new Doctor Who. Which, believe it or not, I hadn’t watched before. I did watch the first couple of episodes, but I wasn’t too impressed. Thats changed. Its a powerfully good show, and I do believe that I just got hooked. It might even be better than the original Doctor Who – well, most episodes. It is certainly not as good as the Talons of Weng Chiang though. Ten hours of airplane flight will let you catch up on this sort of thing.

I didn’t bring the DVD’s with me. Christmas eve, on a whim, I used the mac program ripit to copy the dvds to my hard drive, and ran them from there. Now, it doesn’t do compression (which Handbrake, which is free) will do, but its dirt simple to use, and its like using a DVD. Which has advantages, and drawbacks. The program gets a big plus from me, though.

Speaking of which – fat guy with a large gut in coach, with even a small laptop (13.3 inch) isn’t very useable. If you have to fly coach a lot, and your a big person, I can really see the attraction of a netbook. (A netbook doesn’t have a dvd drive, has a small screen, and is pathetically underpowered – but those are advantages under certain conditions).

Man, I do miss my parrots though.

Okay, one of my favorite webcomics is El Goonish Shive. Fair warning – it is very, very slow paced (unfolding over YEARS) and is a bit odd. Okay, its quite odd, by my standards of odd. Its not only odd, slow paced, but it has an erratic update schedule.

Its also very, very good. From the mundane mysteries (who is going to be what gender next comic) to the not so mundane (Chaos gave Nanase a spell to turn into a battle angel? WTF?).

Anyway, I knew at one time that two collections of it had been published, but had been unable to find them in print anywhere. They have, however, turned back up! Something about lost in the warehouse, or whatever. Who cares? I ordered them!

I had downloaded all the strips and imported them into Iphoto, where I’ve been slowly creating a pages document to print them out. Its a good comic, and one I can see myself rereading for years. So this puts me in a very good mood.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/techspecs/

Looks much more interesting than the Kindle. For me, the thing is pdf support. If this thing is great on showing PDF’s, then I’ll get one. Early next year.

I hate programing computers, and as such, I’ve never really learned. But, I’ve recently found myself in need of a lightweight program, to help me with a not at all work related project. And I’m getting one hell of a headache trying to understand the simplest underlying logic of programing.

What I consider logical, computers don’t. Whats even more perplexing, is that what I consider logical, other people don’t. The conclusion is obvious – its rough being the only logical thing in the universe. /wink

This is just a bitchfest. For small spreadsheets, I love Apple Numbers. Its easier to use than Excel, and produces output that I find visually appealing. Something Excel just doesn’t do. Its not as powerful as Excel, but I can live with that.

For even a medium sized spreadsheet though, the performance is atrocious. I have a medium sized spreadsheet that I’m working with for the eqmacwiki. Its got about 140 columns, and 3,500 rows. So its not large by any means, falling solidly in the medium sized range. In Excel, doing a column sort takes less than a second. In Numbers, it takes 45 seconds to a minute. I mean, thats HORRIBLE. It makes numbers essentially unusable for this project. Which bites.

OS X comes with a very nice backup utility – Time machine.

Its not perfect – not by a long shot – but its effective, easy to use, and stays out of the way. Basically, you plug in an external hard drive, and Time Machine uses it to keep backups. It backups hourly, daily, weekly, etc, for however much room you give it.

Last night, I used it to recover an application from an update gone bad. That app had a bunch of Internet clippings that I was saving, so it would have been a minor tragedy to lose. I don’t always plug the external drive into my laptop, but luckily, I had the night before I lost the app. (So, 3 days ago, now). Thats all that it takes – plugging the external drive in. No launching apps, etc. Nice and simple.

This is one of the reasons I prefer Macs over PC’s – easy to use, effective apps, that beat out the windows equivalents.

I had been debating scraping up the money to pick one of these up for some time. Not anymore, after this whole “delete two books” thing that just happened. If I buy a book, I own the book. Period.

As much as I love books, there are several things wrong with the ebook readers so far

a) too expensive.
b) the books are still too pricey. Electronic books should be *much* cheaper than physical books
c) No tethering, whether wired or wireless. If you buy it, you own it, the thing never “phones home”.
d) Need really, really strong pdf support. I’ve purchased into the triple digits of pdf rpg game books. A smaller, easier to use reader than my laptop? SOLD! So far, it hasn’t happened.
e) Strong annotation capabilities. I’ve only played with the Sony ebook readers a bit – not impressed with them, in this regard.
f) color display – optional too. Can switch it off and on. That way you can easily view comic books on the things.
g) Has a computer based integration “store” in effect. If the device has wireless of any sort, I want to be able to turn it totally off. I want to purchase and download the books to my laptop, and then transfer them.
h) Backup to a usb stick. Insert it in the reader, hit 1 or 2 keys, and boom, it backs up your stuff to the key. With encryption and tight compression as options.

While overall, this is not a very good blog post, it does contain a great bit of wisdom.

….those topics include a lot of “under the hood” improvements that can really cause problems if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Here’s a hint: start reading RFC’s and/or white papers on the technologies that are implemented. Too many people just study check boxes and radio buttons. Don’t just study how to configure, study the consequences of the configuration.

While its a hell of a lot harder to do, knowing the why’s of the configuration is more important than the how. You can always figure out the how, the why is a bit more difficult.