Insomnia

Everyone has seen those funky videos of the multi-touch screen. Well it seems that Microsoft has decided to productize this. They aim it at the restaurant/hotel and shopping market.

Of course, this will make it into our homes soon enough. I can't wait for boardgames supported by this technology. All the advantages of a computer game with all the social interaction of a boardgame.

Microsoft Surface

Labels: tech

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Seth Godin is really good at observing human behavior. I guess this is what makes him good at what he does. He again hits the nail on the head with this little nugget of wisdom:
Seth's Blog: I'm just not that kind of person...

This is a behavior that I have seen my mother take all my life and I never stopped to think about it. I didn't think it was that common. I used to thing that I wasn't like that. Since it is that common, there are probably some things for which I'm just not that kind of person.

Labels: people

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For a long while, I have wondered what Homer would do if he got his hands on a poutine. I mean, it was made for Homer. But I figured that unless the Simpsons made an episode where they went for a trip to "la belle province" I would never get to see that.

Well it turns out that the greasy delicacy is making it into the states through some fancy gourmet bistro place in NYC. So, maybe I will one day hear Homer say... "Hmmmmmmm curds"

A Staple From Quebec, Embarrassing but Adored - New York Times

Labels: fun

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For a few months now, I have been finishing my afternoons at work with the groovy tunes of... well I don't know who it was and that was the whole point. Now, because of licensing constraints, Pandora cannot broadcast to me anymore since I am located in Canada.

Pandora was a great service that helped me find a whole bunch of music that I never knew existed. It would create a customized "station" for me based on some band name or song name that I supplied. It would use some fancy algorithm to find more music in that style. Often music from bands I had never heard of.

This is a shame. I hope they find a solution soon because the sound of my computer fan just isn't the same.

Labels: fun

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I have been taking digital photos for a while and I rarely print them. This weekend I gave in and bought myself a digital picture frame (Smartparts SPDPF84M).

It has a nice wooden frame and an crisp 8.4 inch LCD screen. It has 128M of internal memory and can also handle a wide selection of memory cards.

Unfortunately, I was never able to make it connect to my computer using the USB cable (computer running Windows XP) . So I had to transfer all my pictures using a CompactFlash card. Also, the company supplies a software to automatically scale and prepare the pictures for the frame's 800x600 screen. That was also a disaster. It is a horrible little piece of software that just didn't work and tried to reinvent every principle of UI design ever invented. I finally decided to use the GIMP to resample and fix my images before I transfered them to the device.

Overall I am happy now that it works. It is proudly displayed in my living room on the end table and I can finally show my friends my pictures without booting my computer. Two thumbs up for the hardware, two thumbs down for the software.

Labels: fun, tech

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I already talked about my wife's Vista issues this but it is getting ridiculous.

She is self employed and each month she produces an invoice to the customer to eventually get paid. This is a simple procedure that involved the following steps:

1. Copy last month's invoice (word document) and rename the document
2. Open the new invoice and change the numbers/dates
3. Print the document
4. Save the document

Well. Using Vista... what used to take 10 minutes now takes almost an hour. Copying a file now in Windows is so difficult that it takes over 10 minutes just to copy the file. The file is 45Kb the simple Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to copy the file now requires Vista to spend minutes (an I am not exaggerating, this is a known bug) calculating how long it will take.

After this happens, you open the document in Word and edit it. That is still quick thank heavens. Once that is over, printing went ok as well.

Saving on the other hand was not that good. After pushing "save", Word complained that there was not enough space on the hard disk to save the file. The file is 45Kb and there is over 100G of space free on the hard disk. After much searching for a solution, we abandoned and closed the damned thing without saving.

Oh! and after that, the computer didn't shut down. (And I did wait for 20 minutes for the machine to shut down) I had to force a power down. I miss XP.

Labels: tech, Vista

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