Amazon’s announcement last night’s of the latest and greatest version of the Kindle brings back a bunch of conflicting feelings in me. Part of me is tempted by the promises of a limitless catalog and the ability to carry thousands of books with me, while a larger part of me is perfectly content to hang onto my dead trees.
I’ve been using a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen as my primary work computer for going on 2.5 years, and I’ve been very happy with it. It’s no Macbook Pro, but it’s about as good as it gets for a non-Apple laptop: Fast, well-built, reliable, good technical support, and has a great keyboard.
But in that time, problems developed. It started taking over five minutes after booting up for Windows XP to get to a usable state. Outlook 2007 got sluggish. There was a weird issue with Google Chrome, where it would randomly cause the entire system to freeze — forcing me to do a hard restart using the power button. I started thinking it might be time to petition the boss for a new computer.
Instead, I took the opportunity to upgrade to an inexpensive hard drive with twice the capacity and to finally make the move to Windows 7. I previously tested this version for a bit in a VMware virtual machine when Microsoft was asking people to beta test the operating system before its official release, so I never got to know it well. But having used it exclusively for a little over a month, I can tell you that I’m a big fan. Read on for more details in my leap from Windows XP to Windows 7.
It’s almost comical how much work Microsoft put into the Windows 7 installer given that it’s usually a one-time deal, but the process does set expectations for what’s to come. In that context, it was well worth their efforts. I started a clean install before dinner on a Friday night and when we finished about 40 minutes later, I was surprised to see it had already finished and ready to use. No prompts, no waiting for me to answer a question at some arbitrary screen, just the Windows desktop — ready to use.
Every hardware device built into my ThinkPad was identified by Windows 7 during the installation process, so there was no need to hunt down WiFi or video card drivers after the fact. Most surprising was that the T61’s built-in fingerprint reader worked without installing Lenovo’s client security software, thanks to the Windows Biometric Framework API introduced in Windows 7.
I love what Microsoft has done with the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 7. I know, I know — some of these changes were made in Vista. But considering that I spent all of an hour using that version of Windows, it’s all a new experience for me.
The Windows 7 Start Panel is a smarter way of accessing the programs and files than the old style Start Menu. Applications, files, and folders all automatically get better placement for faster access while everything else is hidden away needed. For example, here’s the Jump List for frequently visited folders in Windows Explorer:
The new Taskbar too, is much improved. Instead of the old Quick Launch toolbar and space-wasting window tabs for open programs, Windows 7 replaces it something resembling Mac OS X’s dock. There are no text labels for applications by default (saving lots of space), and multiple windows get collapsed down to a single icon. Hovering your mouse over the icon for any running application will result in a small preview of each window (or browser tab, in the case of Internet Explorer):
Right-clicking a running program gives you a contextual Jump List that can give you quick access to application features, as shown with Google Chrome:
I was also pleased to see that the notification area of the Taskbar has received a welcome makeover in Windows 7. Every application icon is now hidden in its own overflow area, leaving only a few understated system icons for sound, networking, etc. It creates a much cleaner experience:
I used Windows Desktop Search in XP, mainly to find old emails and information in PDF technical documentation. Searching was sort of slow and indexing seemed to be a drag on the system, but it got the job done.
In Windows 7, search is built into the system for seemless access everywhere. One of my favorite features of the Start Panel (which I didn’t mention above) is the search bar at the bottom. Hit the Start button on the keyboard, start typing, and within a second you can launch an application buried deep within All Programs. If you’re looking for text within a document or a file’s metadata, it just tasks a few more seconds to find and open it.
For me, having one button access to fast system-wide search has been the biggest productivity booster since switching to Windows 7. I rarely have to venture into the program menu, and opening a folder is a few keystrokes instead of navigating a series of nested folders. Easily one of my favorite features.
When Windows XP was first released, multi-screen computing was a novelty, and it showed in the basic support it offered for more than one monitor. Lenovo’s software made things more bearable on my ThinkPad, but switching between the built-in screen and the two LCD monitors attached to the dock on my desk sometimes felt like it was a kludge and not something I should be doing on a regular basis.
Thankfully, using two monitors with Windows 7 feels much more natural. There is still room for improvement, such the ability to extend the Taskbar or backgrounds across more than one screen, but it’s good enough that I didn’t have to install Lenovo’s software in order to manage things.
I’ve been extremely happy with how Windows 7 performs on my ThinkPad T61. I wasn’t expecting it to feel faster than XP, but it does in every task. Granted, it’s hard to determine how big a role the new hard drive plays in the speed increase verus the clean install of Windows. In any case, it’s a noticeable improvement, and makes me glad I did the upgrade.
Also, while the laptop tool over five minutes to boot into Windows XP, it’s down to about a minute with Windows 7. Shutdown time, too, is usually a lot faster, though a few times a week it takes about five minutes for the process to finish at the end of the work day. I haven’t bothered to investigate potential causes yet, but you can be sure I will if it starts happening more often.
I couldn’t be happier with my upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. It’s fast, rock-solid (I haven’t seen any of the crashes or freezes I constantly had before), and has some great new features that make me more productive.
As much confidence as we have in the story we’re telling, we are also comfortable saying, “But what do we know?” This is our best version of the story of Lost, and it’s the definitive one. The worst thing we could ever do is not end it, or go with some bullshitty ending like a snowglobe or a cut to black. That was genius on The Sopranos, but The Sopranos isn’t a mystery show. For us, we owe our best version of a resolution here.
– Damon Lindelof in Wired Magazine issue 18.05
I was a latecomer to Lost, having waited several years to start watching the first season on DVD. I continued watching the series with interest (but also with a lack of urgency) until a couple of weeks before the final season started in February. Then, determined to get caught-up, I embarked on a two-season, 31-episode, viewing marathon that allowed me to experience the closing chapter of Lost alongside millions of other viewers.
Needless to say, I love this show. With its mixture of fantasy, religion, philosophy, science fiction, action, and character-driven stories, it is unmatched by anything else on television — past or present. And unlike most other television series, the creators of Lost were able to fully tell — and end — the story they envisioned.
And that’s what I want to talk about here. Not the show’s flaws — there are plenty — but how producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse chose to end things. Or not end things, depending on your opinion.
Warning: Spoilers Below
It seems that the city of Grand Forks has succeeded in placing itself at the center of the unmanned aircraft business. This is great news for the region’s economy. MPR:
Unmanned aircraft systems are becoming big business. It’s estimated the Department of Defense will spend as much as $80 billion on unmanned aircraft in the next 10 years.
Phyllis Johnson, vice president for research and development at the University of North Dakota, says Grand Forks is at the epicenter of a growth industry.
“I think this region is positioned as well as anybody, if not better than most,” said Johnson. “We have all the pieces right here to really grow this industry and take advantage of everything that’s out there.”
There was a lot of uncertainty in the area when the Department of Defense recommended realignment for the Grand Forks Air Force Base back in 2005. Thankfully, instead of seeing it close with the departure of the 319th Refueling Wing, a new mission developed around the emerging use of unmanned aerial vehicles. And while the RQ-4 Global Hawk isn’t scheduled to arrive until next year, it’s already having a positive impact on Grand Forks.
Just this afternoon, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held down the hallway from where I work in the Center For Innovation to celebrate the opening of Northrop Grumman’s new Grand Forks office. According to Minnesota Public Radio, they expect to have about 100 employees here within the next two years.
In addition, area educational institutions are getting involved, too. The University of North Dakota is now offering the world’s first degree in Bachelor degree in unmanned aircraft systems operations and Northland Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls is preparing to train mechanics qualified to fix and maintain the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft.
Having this new industry in the region also presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Locating a supporting manufacturing or software in Grand Forks provides easy access to the United States Air Force, Northrop Grumman, and a variety of UAV training and educational resources. It’s possible that our little city could play a key role in this industry for well into the future.
Grand Forks owes a big thanks to North Dakota’s Congressional delegation and city officials for their years of hard work in making this opportunity possible. Between this and the potential for clean and renewable energy in the state, we’re positioning ourselves well for the future.
I’ve been tinkering with my blog and online profiles1 — Twitter, Facebook, and the like — for years now, attempting to find balance in what gets posted where and how its shared, if at all. For a while, lifestreaming was The Future, so I experimented with it right here on my blog for about six months. Then Facebook became the place to share, so I sent many of my online activities there. My next strategy for dealing with all this stuff is a different direction, however. To quote The Offspring, “You gotta keep’m separated”.
I made the mistake of auto-posting my activity feeds for the same reason so many other people do — it’s easy. Click a checkbox, type a username, then set it and forget it. But in this case, easy is also lazy. It gives me yet another excuse to not take the time to think and post about something that interests me and possibly the people I interact with on a given site. I lost sight of the fact that the point isn’t to make things easy for me, but to show respect to those who give me a slice of their limited attention.
The Unlink Your Feeds manifesto put it so well, I’ll quote a full page from it in full:
I have a vision of a new social networking paradigm. Handcrafted social networks.
I imagine a world where people take each network for what it is and participate (or not) on those terms. Instead of a firehose slurry of everything buckets, I imagine separate streams of purified whatever-it-is-each-service-does. I envision users that post when they’re inspired and don’t mind skipping a few days if nothing particularly interesting comes up.
I’m like Thumper’s mother. “If you can’t think of anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”
I imagine people taking the extra 10 seconds to reformat a post for each service if the message is so relevant and important that it needs to show up more than once. I imagine being able to choose who I follow and what subset of their postings I get with a high degree of granularity.
There may come a day when this vision gets implemented on the server side. When all the social networks give me fine grain control for hiding subsets of the updates sent out by my contacts. But until that day comes, it’s gotta be solved on the client side.
So going forward, here’s how I’ll be using each of the sites I post to. If you’re interested in following one or more, please do. You get my personal guarantee that, unless noted below, I won’t cross the streams.
I refuse to call it Social Media. Blame the Social Media Experts if you want. ↩
I’ve been using Google Chrome since the first beta was released back in the fall of 2008, and it quickly became the default browser on my laptop. For over a year, speed and an uncluttered interface were its main selling points, as it lacked the one big thing Firefox had over it: extensions. The ability to customize and extend Firefox in ways unimagined by the Mozilla team has allowed it to become a powerful platform instead of simply a web browser. Then finally, last December, Google opened up its browser
The thing is, after using Chrome for a while, I realized that I didn’t really need — or miss — all those extensions I had collected in Firefox. Instead, I’ve found that since that I’m usually wanting to initial a search or take some sort of action on the page I’m viewing at the moment, simple bookmarklets are almost always Good Enough.1 These lightweight snippets of JavaScript sit out of the way in my Chrome bookmarks bar until needed, when each is just a click away from performing its specialized task. Best of all, since they’re just bookmarks, Chrome automatically syncs them across any Mac or PC I use.
Taking this obsession one or two steps further, I’m now experimenting with a web app called Quix that allows me to access all of my favorite bookmarklets from a sort-of command-line interface. When I need to take an action, I hit the Quix link in my bookmark bar and up pops a text prompt:
If I want to format the current page for easier reading, I can type read. To save the page for later viewing on InstaPaper, I type insta. If I’m looking at a page about a book and want to see if our local library has it available, I type odin. You get the idea.
Quix comes with a ton of commands already defined for you, covering a good 80% of what I need. The great thing is that I can define my own command file to override the default Quix commands or add my own custom ones. I’m hosting the text file as a gist on GitHub, so anyone is free to view and customize it for their own use.
There’s a lot to be said about simple solutions, and browser bookmarklets fit that description nicely.
Google added extensions to Chrome late last year, and since then, the only two I use are LastPass and FlashBlock. Both offer functionality that isn’t easily duplicated using the bookmarklet model. ↩
Having decided that our boys don’t have enough things that induce parental annoyance, when I saw this kids harmonica being offered during last week’s Woot-Off, I just knew I had to snag one.
Since I forgot about the thing immediately after ordering it, I was delighted to see that the mail lady delivered it yesterday afternoon. And although they had never seen a harmonica before, the boys were quick to give it a try.
Here’s Asa (2 1/2 years old) with a quick demo:
And, Kael (4 1/4 years old) with a longer performance:
Any suggestions on the next instrument we can introduce to our fledgling band?
Every couple of weekends, the four year old and I make a trip to the library to pick out a fresh batch of books while his little brother stays at home with mom for an afternoon nap. Yesterday, we came back with about two dozen new books for bedtime reading.
It turns out that I’m a sucker for children’s books with great typography — especially when it’s used to great effect in the storytelling. While browsing yesterday, I found one I just had to bring home based on its cover — Big Plans
The story follows a boy who has “BIG PLANS. BIG PLANS I SAY.”, and he’s not afraid to let everyone know it. I love the design of this book, which, while not fully appreciated by a four and two year old, adds a lot to the humor and tone of the story. WhatTheFont wasn’t able to identify the fonts used, so maybe I’ll have to submit a sample to their forum to figure out the main typefaces.
In any case, well done Bob Shea and Lane Smith. Well done.
I’m reluctant to add to the [already noisy][1] Apple iPad discussion, but I wanted to follow up on [yesterday’s post][2] while the thoughts are still fresh in my mind.
With just a day left until Apple’s special event the company scheduled for January 27th, speculation on the expected-to-be-announced Apple Tablet (or whatever the official name turns out to be) has reached a fevered pitch. I don’t think any rumored Apple product — iPhone included — has garnered so much coverage by bloggers and the press. And the unofficial claim by Steve Jobs that the device is the most important thing he’s ever done doesn’t serve to dampen expectations, either.
And while you can be sure I’ll be tracking Wednesday’s event coverage on GDGT Live and TWIT Live, I’m skeptical that Apple’s tablet device — or any tablet for that matter - will be a commercial success. Not necessarily because they’ll make a dud (possible, but unlikely), but because the very idea of a tablet computer seems unnecessary.
Still — I can’t wait to see what Apple has made. Read the rest of this entry »
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