I forgot to mention that we got the iChat AV working wonderfully with the iSight and our Canon DV camera on two different computers in the same household. Good incentive to upgrade to Panther, so now we’ll see how long it takes my sister to upgrade her computer in Brooklyn. Also, once I found the…

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Cousins were over for casual pizza dinner tonight, and I sent the boy into the living room to ask his uncle whether he would like a Sam Adams or a Hefeweizen. He got the whole question out wonderfully, and returned to me in the kitchen with a coherent answer (the latter). I handed him the…

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On Wednesday, I went to see Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (warning: this website brought my computer to its knees… is Flash the culprit?), the first movie made using the Aubrey-Maturin characters from Patrick O’Brian. I read Master and Commander long before I started writing here; here are my notes on…

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Rajesh Jain at Emergic cites a NYTimes article about the sudden interest in Friendster and other community sites (yes, we’ve been down this road before… anyone remember SixDegrees and TheGlobe?). From the article: When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other’s social…

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New version of MacOS X, Panther (aka 10.3), is now running on the desktop as well as the laptop. I wasn’t in a hurry, until my sister bought an iSight in the Burlingame Apple Store yesterday. We wanted to test iChatAV between the laptop and the desktop, so that set off an afternoon of backing…

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Several made the trip out here, and talked to several more throughout the day. Turkey is still in the oven, but we’re enjoying ourselves. Had a nice surprise this morning when we went on a walk in Golden Gate Park, and found the Conservatory of Flowers open and uncrowded. It re-opened a couple of months…

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A bit slow, but interesting: Search Engine Decoder. [via Emergic]

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I just reviewed an illuminating re-think of mapping the California recall votes, thanks to a pointer from Jeffrey Veen. Wow. You can really lie better with pictures than numbers, if you want to. I visited the Exploratorium here in San Francisco yesterday, and smiled my way through various hands-on and eyes-on exhibits, several of which…

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Just read this IBM developerWorks article about the poor state of documentation. Fair enough, but whining about it without providing more specific examples, for real-world products, isn’t tremendously helpful. (I rarely write documentation, but I have done some for internal tools.) The only tip to improve the process was on indexing. Want to make a…

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Bookmarked this NYTimes.com article on the digital home and its discontents several days ago. Written by James Gleick, whom I’ve read regularly, this essay points out that our implementation of technology in the home is ahead of the maturation necessary to make the technologies used invisible. Plug and play? No way. Once you’ve entered the…

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