* The great struggle of our time is Pre- versus Post-Enlightenment. The problem is that you cannot get the pre-Enlightenment true-believer to reply to post-Enlightenment stimuli (more crudely put, you can’t reason with the Taliban) which creates…issues, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama.
* Google’s Chrome OS (which I take to basically be Chrome browser + Google Gears + a Linux kernel and drivers enough to run netbook-grade hardware) is interesting to me because it threatens to make the netbook a net-book again. The One Laptop Per Child project produced the XO-1, which was sort of a proof of concept but never got to be as cheap as they hoped. However, it led to the likes of the Asus EEE and the current crop of netbooks, which are laptops. Small, cheap, weak laptops, but laptops nonetheless, with Windows (or similar), local storage with locally-installed binary applications, etc etc. Chrome threatens to get even leaner and lighter than that: imagine a machine which you turn on and get A Browser And That’s All. How long can you go in Just A Browser? Actually, pretty far, if you’re willing to do it all in the cloud – recall all the stuff on my previous List Of Google S, and consider that if you throw in Gears for offline mail handling and document composition, etc, you could actually get a hell of a lot done. And if all you need to handle is a browser, a TCP/IP stack, and drive a screen, keyboard and trackpad plus either Wi-Fi or WWAN or both, you eliminate the need for very much RAM or storage or most everything else.
* Which means that if you have an XO-1, you basically can have the Google netbook already – just open the browser and go to it. (God knows the Sugar interface is worthless for almost anything else.) This doctrine of just-enough-hardware-to-run-a-browser is pretty much the Palm Pre in a nutshell, too, and the iPhone and G1 aren’t far off. You could make it big enough to see, light enough to travel, sell out on battery life since you don’t need room for too many other components – hell, scale the iPod Touch up to 6×9 or so and you’d damn near have it. The implications for the local rumors du jour are left as an exercise for the reader.
* My friend is getting her sister back. This makes me happy.
* All you Freudians looking side-eye at my research on airsoft and Nerf guns: feck off.
* After twenty years with a bad knee and two years of post-surgery, I’m FINALLY getting around to rehabbing it. I also have a pass for the gym at my office, at long last. The goal, such as it is, is to try to get myself semi-healthy in short order. To be honest, I’d settle for being able to hike up the hill to the stadium without getting winded and to slim back down to a 36 waist for the first time in a decade or so. God knows I need a new pair of jeans anyway…
* I’m still getting by fine on my iPhone 3G, but I’m having the same trouble most smartphone owners have: if you *use* it as a smartphone, checking mail and reading RSS and surfing the web and listening to some music, it will not last a full day roaming around the city unless you turn off Wi-Fi, turn off 3G, turn off push notifications after dinnertime and use an iPod Shuffle to catch up on your three hours worth of podcasts. And even then, you’re coming back running awful light. Of course, your mileage may vary. You may travel with friends and be too polite to constantly check your phone during otherwise civilized conversation. =)
* From the Bureau of Ouch: this week’s featured Coca-Cola Championship match on Setanta is West Brom vs.Newcastle. That’ll leave a mark…
* I have two conflicting and irreconcilable impulses that run my life. One is a deep and compelling need to keep other people out of my S, and to stay out of their S. The other, apparently, is a deep and compelling need to be a stupendous badass and save the day. So the question is: how does a guy whose biggest need is not to be responsible for other people’s S wind up as an emergency responder – not only for his neighborhood but for his place of work? For that matter, how does such a person wind up making a decade’s career in TECH SUPPORT?
So the question is: how does a guy whose biggest need is not to be responsible for other people’s S wind up as an emergency responder
The answer is simple: You’re mistaken.
Your biggest need is not, as you think, to not be responsible for other people’s S. Instead, your biggest need is to be a stupendous badass.
The need to not be responsible for other people is what keeps your desire for badassery in check, within acceptable limits. (Hey everyone else, stop laughing at “acceptable limits!”)
I think it’s great that you and I both are training to become emergency responders (although for me, it’s only in our neighborhood). I think it fits both of our personalities very well, albeit for different reasons. (I think that’s part of what makes us work so well together.) I’m proud of us, but I sure as hell hope we never need to use our skills…