Ah, Techie Conferences

Currently eating breakfast at the BrainStorm 11.0 conference of Wisconsin K-12 techies. We're at the Kalahari resort and waterpark in the Wisc Dells. Yesterday was full of Mac OS X tips and tricks, tomorrow will be a full day of Group Policy and today ... I just don't know. What lies between the deep dark secrets of Apple and Microsoft? Maybe the 3-D version of Avatar which is showing here at the resort in it's 9 screen multiplex. It's like a little indoor Vegas, without the casino.

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?