How Time Flys

I've had this theory regarding the perception of time based on age. The theory goes, every moment of your life gets internally compared with the whole of your previous life, thus as a small child, one day in school counts for a very large percentage and therefore feels like a long time. As you age, these periods of time account for increasingly smaller percentages of your life and therefore "feel" like they go by faster. I just found this blog post which illustrates this theory perfectly. Thanks Joel. And if you are really interested you can read this article by WBUR in Boston.

Slate and Tablet Computers

These have been around for many years and have been a great benefit to users, but only in a couple very vertical markets. Seems like every computer manufacturer is touting a new slate this month, the last will be Apple on January 26th. In the late 1980's, Apple produced a number of high quality concept videos, here's one. I hope Apple's Slate offering comes much closer to this than anything else we are seeing right now.

Google's Nexus 1

Come on people ... it's not about the phone, it's about the STORE. What is it that Apple has that Google does not? 100 million users and their credit cards. Google will be willing to sell any Android phone through their Google Phone Store because they, Google, get what they want ... users and their credit card numbers. They are starting with their own phone just to show the rest of the phone manufacturers that they can run a real store.

PHP

PHP is a tag based programming language that technogeeks embed in their webpages to make them do fancy things. Mostly it's used to pull information out of databases so that it can be displayed in the web page. I just wrote some PHP for a web page I've been putting together for my mother. PHP looks nothing like c (the computer language I am most fluent in), but has very c-like function names (built-in bits of code). As much as it was very familiar, it actually made the task harder for me as I wasn't expecting it. People don't like c ... but I guess programmers do, at least programmers who make new programming languages.

Horrible title "Chrome OS: Internet Failing At PC > PC Failing At Internet" Interesting Article

Chrome OS: Internet Failing At PC > PC Failing At Internet: "Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet"

A good friend of mine, someone I hired as a systems admin way back in 1994 when he was, like 20, said to me, way back in 1995, that the web browser would be the operating system of the future. I don't know if it's taken longer than he thought (I would doubt it ... he's that smart) but he was right. This article is the best explication of the new Google ChromeOS that I've read. I loved this line ... "ChromeOS officially nukes the 'file' as a core user-facing OS abstraction." Very geeky, very future-humanist :)

Peace

Stumper

Ok, so humanist geeks don't like being stumped by tech in front of a user. "Browser sent a bad request". What's up with that?

The Associated Press: NASA on track for Monday space shuttle launch

The Associated Press: NASA on track for Monday space shuttle launch: "NASA on track for Monday space shuttle launch

By MARCIA DUNN (AP) – 10 hours ago

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA has cleared space shuttle Atlantis for liftoff Monday on a trip to stock up the International Space Station with several years' worth of spare parts."

I don't know about the rest of the world ... and maybe I don't really care, but I am so sad that the shuttle program is ending. I know that it must, and should, but I grew up in the midst of this adventure and I'm having trouble imagining a time when the shuttle will not be blasting off. I didn't miss a lunch for the first ten years, then I got busy with family and such, but recently with NASA TV streaming on the Internet I've been able to watch every launch. I love the spectacle, but it's the dream, the adventure, as some one said, breaking the bonds of the earth, that really gets me. Back int he mid 90's when NASA sent the first mission to repair the Hubble, we were getting NASA TV thorugh ourt cable provider. I didn't sleep for three days. The astronauts were working when the US was sleeping ... but I wasn't sleeping. I watched every minute of the space walks on that mission. I sat, rapt with the wonder of human beings working in space. When the mission was over I canceled the cable. I was hooked and would never have gotten any sleep if I had access to that. Six more missions. Oh, yeah, I'll be watching all of them.