Category: Revelation

iPhone thoughts

Vicki made an off-hand comment to me the other day to say that according to AT&T I’ve fullfilled the contract I signed when I got my Treo and I’m eligible to get another phone if I sign up for another 2 year contract. Of course, my first thought was “iPhone!” My second thought was that this was a rather cruel thing to tell me when we’re officially in the blackout period when I’m not allowed to buy anything for myself for fear that I’ve made Vicki’s Christmas shopping harder.

I guess the question for today is “Would I want an iPhone even if I could buy one?” And I’m not 100% sure the answer is yes. Buying the Treo was a no-brainer: it could do absolutely everything my existing phone could do, and everything my existing Palm Tungsten E could do, which meant I could reduce my gadget load. It also tempted me to add data to my cell phone plan and so now I use it for email and for mild web browsing (ostensibly for checking weather while away from base, but used more often for checking my friend’s page while in boring meetings). If I could do everything I do with an iPhone that I do with my Treo and my iPod, again it would be a no-brainer. But that’s where it gets difficult. So let’s look at it piece by piece.
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Some Of My Favourite (Steampunk) Things

Brian Scearce wrote this on a mailing list I’m on. It’s too good not to share.

To the tune of “My Favourite Things” from “The Sound Of Music”:

Steam-run computers with shiny brass fittings
Read-only memory: Jacquard-type pittings
Ethernet using just tin cans and string
These are a few of my favorite things!

LCDs lit up with shuttered white candles
Objects with actual ivory handles
Striking a bell for the part that goes “ping”
These are a few of my favorite things!

My latest million dollar idea

Every now and then I have an idea that I think would probably be valuable, but rather than running with it I just chicken out and document it. Sometimes it turns out to be a decently good idea (such as when I thought that there might be money to be made going around to homes and offices and running anti-virus and anti-spyware software on a regular basis, since most people can’t seem to be bothered to do it for themselves), and other times it turns out that somebody is already doing it (like when I had the idea of combining small/fast/expensive disk storage with bigger/slower/cheaper disk storage with even bigger/slower/cheaper tape storage, and software to stage data between the different levels of storage depending on usage patterns).
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Dirty Jobs

Any time I’m feeling that my job sucks, I just have to watch a few episodes of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe”, and suddenly I don’t feel so bad. There are some pretty horrible and thankless jobs out there, and the people who do these smelly, disgusting, dirty, dangerous and/or back-breaking jobs make civilized life possible for the rest of us.

It’s resume time again

It’s coming up to the end of my contract. My boss’s boss’s boss asked all the contractors for copies of our resumes to help him get approval to renew the contracts, as we’ve all been here far longer than is allowed by company policy, and so he has to do whatever crafty tricks he does in order to keep us. But I figured a good resume isn’t a bad thing to have if his tricks stop working, so I spent some time on it and asked some friends to review it.

My old resume was, in the words of one person who looked at it, a “bit last millenium”. He suggested that I find a nice template somewhere and redo it. The problem is that I like having the resume there on the web both for portability and accessibilty, and most of the templates you find are Microsoft Word. But in googling around, I stumbled across a pretty nice looking resume that was implemented as an XML file with an XSL file to translate it into html. Now that is 21st century! Unfortunately, I lost the link and the guy’s name in my rush to stealadopt his technology. The XML has optional “hide=’true'” attributes so you can leave out different bits for different applications, although I haven’t made use of that.

The new resume looks pretty good. Have a look. Offer me a fulfilling job with lots of money.