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1325 days ago
Ever notice that little crosshair-like icon at the top of your cellphone display? Most cellphones have this, and if you're one among the tribe that actually flips through the manual that accompanies a cellphone, you'll recognize icons like this to be the "location" icon - an indicator of your cellphone having turned on its GPS-like beaconing feature. My last two cellphones have had this "location" beacon feature. When the feaure / function was "new", it was advertised as a twofold "benefit". Apparently, this "location" feature would comprise of two parts: One would be the "emergency", or the "E911" service. This would let emergency services find you during times of a crisis. This was also the part of the feature that the user could not turn off. The second would be the user-selectable part. The tech-utopian pretty picture painted by many brochures went something like this - "You're walking past a ...
1328 days ago
Not too long ago, someone made an interesting comment to me. One of those sarcastoric wonders that make you question things. It went something like... "Who uses MSN Spaces anyway, really?" Strip away the obvious "If its Microsoft, it must be bad" sentiment harbored by a good chunk of the digerati and there are a few gems of wisdom in there. Here's the ones I see: Blog sites are literally available by the bucketload on the Internet today. Most are free and/or offer a reasonably robust set of features for their freeloader members. Almost everyone and their pet (ahem) has a blog. Ergo, blogging has gone from being the world of the word-ily wise to the open space that teems with almost everyone who has access to the Internet. Thus, "its on my blog" doesn't really evoke as much of a eyebrow-raise as it did about a year or six months ago. All these blog services do and offer almost everything but the kitchen sink. Podcast-ability, ...
1330 days ago
The gray hair I now sport let me make unnecessarily grand statements about time and technology, or so I think. Here goes the first of many upcoming ones on this blog: "Before these kids started blogging..." ..and before all cellphones took pictures and before the word "pod" became an ubercool prefix, there existed a time where there was a singular distinction in the computer community. You were either a Wintel, or not. Translated into yesterday's young-person vernacular, it was either PC or Mac. The rest were a closet gaggle. Linux, Unix and the rest were the "What's that? Oh, yeah - our system adminisrator mumbles about that sometime" references that most didn't pay much attention to. PCs ran Windows on Intel hardware. Then came the AMD behemoth...er..."behemoth" and the likes of Transmeta and the rest who tried to make their way into people's motherboards. Some made it. Some made for bad memories. At the end of the day, ...
1331 days ago
There are those who refer to me as a self-styled paparazzi ("who has waay too much free time"). I deny nothing. I find that works to my advantage a lot better than debating the apparent logic, or lack thereof, in their assessment. However, I do plead guilty to carrying a camera lens, in one avatar or another, on my person at most times. The way I see it, life's short and one keeps getting older. One's gotta capture all those memories before age and time make one lose one's mind..or, um...memory. The reasonably bulky camera that one of my hands often sported a few years ago has undergone various transformations since. Form factors got smaller, feature sets got larger. Video clips are no longer time-limited, storage cards are large enough to accomodate almost everything one could think of doing in front of a camera lens, and form factors have gone from evoking decscriptions like "Hm..that's small, but do you really carry that everywhere?", to ...
