Exception is the Soul of Humanity

Timing, or why to plan even minor tech changes.

I'd forgotten I'd even emailed Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. I shot him a question about productivity (his area of expertise), or my oft lack thereof, and thought no more of it.

Then just yesterday as I was porting this site to a new host/domain (not a particularly fun process for TextPattern), I noticed a spike in my (meager, some may even say pitiful) traffic, from a post of Leo's.

I popped over there, expecting it to be from some comment I'd made on one of his posts, only to find myself front and center (so to speak), the catalyst for one of his posts.

Talk about timing - this site was partially ported between hosts, and I hadn't even given thought yet to redirects from my old host. Nothing like panic to make one more productive, even temporarily.

Seriously though, thanks for the mention Leo. One of these days I'll have to get trackbacks working with TextPattern.

References: Unproductivity: 8 Fantabulous Ways to Make the Most of Your Laziest Days | Zen Habits

WARNING: Disjointed ramble ahead.

I wonder if such a job exists yet, and if not how long until it does?

You can get paid to record podcasts and to post blog entries. People who focus on SEO are always trying to find better ways to get people to visit and stay at their sites. One of the best ways to keep someone at your site is to have the information they are sarching for.

Indeed Squidoo’s whole premise is that each Squidoo site contains expert content relevant to the site’s topic. And where SEO succeeds, there’s money to be made.

So if you’re good at finding those nuggets of information on the web that Google, etc just don’t serve up on a silver platter, where are those SEO gurus willing to pay you money to find such items, to add to their “expert” sites?

You heard correctly, Microsoft believes your increasingly tiny mobile phone could also be your next media center. Before you cringe at thoughts of trying to watch Big Brother on a 1.5 inch screen (for so many reasons) – they intend that not only would the phone have the horsepower to run video, but it would be able to (presumably wirelessly) push the video out to a nearby large screen TV. Not bad. They’re calling their concept “Fone+”. But their research ideas don’t stop there.

Other things Fone+ might be able to do include serving realtime medical diagnosis advice (presumably through an expert system) and giving directions to the nearest medical facility when required. It might also perform molecular analysis on organic substances (eg blood) – useful for not only distributing the load of giving medical advice and help, but perhaps in law enforcement.

Unfortunately all this is just concept at the moment, so it looks like for now Apple will still win with it’s iPhone.

References:
Microsoft: Why Not Use Your Phone as a Cheap PC? via
Microsoft Says Your Phone is Your Next PC

For a while now I’ve been using my personalised Google page as my non-work browser home page. It’s something that’s just crept up on me – I’ll just wonder whether there’s a gadget to do “x”, and of course, there is.

It’s now replaced my RSS reader (BlogLines; for quite some time now). I’d tried Google’s Reader but found it too clunky and heavy to use, but iGoogle (what’s they’ve recently badged their personalised Google home page) loads up my home page within about 5-10 seconds on my slow home computer, which is pretty good considering it’s pulling in 22 gadgets, many of which reference outside feeds.

My iGoogle home page aggregates all of my scattered personal things (Flickr, Del.icio.us, GMail, blog – well, those that I care about at the moment), news feeds, comic feeds, podcasts, weather and eBay lookups, and all the Google services I use (GMail, Documents & Spreadsheets, Notepad and occasionally Calendar).

And that’s just on the first tab. With them all minimised it still all fits comfortably on my preferred 800×600 browser size (I don’t like full screen windows. Go figure).

My other tab contains various tools I find useful for work and/or home. I even end up using them half the time instead of using apps and shell commands on the host PC.

My iGoogle tools current include IP Address lookup and other domain/DNS tools, calculator, dictionary, translator, Doc to PDF converter, and maps. In particular the domain/networking tools regularly get a good workout.

Well OK, maybe not quite, but it will be a cool advancement nonetheless. What am I talking about?

Synthetic plastic based blood.

References
Scientists Create Artificial Blood (Slashdot)

Very cool, very cool indeed. The US Navy has developed a portable brain scanner which pushes near-infra-red light a few centimetres into the brain, giving the ability to detect clots that would normally only be found with large and very expensive CT scanners (or by symptoms e.g. death)

And some interesting Slashdot zombies factoids:

• Looks like they’re based in PA, USA… But due to US regulations, they aren’t allowed to test the device on patients in the US, and have outsourced such clinical testing to India.


• Other advantages : infrared light is non-ionizing, so it’s absolutely no dangerous to use that kind of instrument continuously on a person until we are sure there’s no problem.

References:
Cheap Blood Clot Detection Device (via Slashdot.org)

A few tidbits from the article which caught my eye:

• ‘I think the real problem is that “we” (that is, we software developers) are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done.’


• ‘People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now. They don’t want inconvenience, don’t want to learn new ways of interacting with their computers, don’t want delays in delivery, and don’t want to pay extra for quality’

Reference: More Trouble with Programming
The second part of our interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++.

Cute if you know vi.

Reference:
http://www.petebevin.com/archives/vim.gif

In Australia it’s illegal to drive while talking on a mobile phone – even stopped in traffic. It’s legal to drive while on the phone using a hands-free setup, however studies have shown that any use of a phone while driving adversely affects driving skills – it’s as if you’re driving while under the influence of alcohol.

Now the police will stop and fine you if they catch you, but much like speed cameras this could be considered a revenue raising tactic as much as truly increasing onroad safety.

Mobile phone towers share a mobile phone connection around, and as per CSI shows and the like it seems likely that telcos would have little difficulty calculating a phone’s position and hence speed/direction of travel using simple triangulation.

So the obvious thing that jumps out at me is that they could team up and automatically deactivate phones from the carrier networks when they’re travelling above a certain speed.

It doesn’t cater to car passengers on phones, using a phone while on a bus/train, or perhaps calling for help in a kidnapping. But it still strikes me as a more effective road safety tactic. However it won’t happen. Why?

Because the police could claim it’s too hard to implement, as could the telcos. The telcos would also drag their heels for the lack of any profit in it for themselves.