Category: Revelation

Got a Google Wave account

First impressions on Google Wave:

  1. Who thought that bringing back OpenLook’s “elevator” scroll bars was a good idea? Every user interface expert in the world said they were a bad idea then, and they’re still a bad idea. Actually these aren’t exactly like OpenLook’s scroll bars – instead they move some times, and sometimes they don’t, and they’re just weird.
  2. Why does Google Gears say it’s installed on my browser, but the actual Gears functionality (like being able to drag and drop pictures on Wave) not work? I tried some of the demo programs on the Gears web site and they don’t work either. Is there something I’m missing?

I wish there were more of us on Wave. It looks like a great tool for building project docs in a way that’s less likely to turn stale than just putting up a wiki and saying “update it everybody”.

TEDx Rochester

Hey, it’s been a couple of weeks of interesting conferences. Last week I went to Toronto for Stack Overflow Dev Days, and today I went to TEDx Rochester. (Hey, I did blog about Dev Days, didn’t I? Or did I just write about it on meta.stackoverflow.com? I’ll have to check that later.)

If you’re at all interested in the Internet, and the amazing ways it can bring people together to talk about amazing things, you probably have heard of TED. If you haven’t, head over to http://www.ted.org/ and watch all the videos. But don’t do that right now, because if you do you’ll never come back and I’ll just be sitting there waiting for you. TEDx is sort of an attempt to do what TED does at a local level. It’s not organized by TED, but they’re allowed to show TED videos as long as they don’t charge any money and they don’t use it for advertising. So what TEDx Rochester did was get some really amazingly interesting people from here in Rochester, and have them give talks, and every now and then they showed one of the “real TED” talks on the video screen. I think there were 6 or 7 real “talks” and 2 or 3 videos. I wasn’t really keeping count. The talks went from 2pm to 4pm and from 5pm to 7pm. There was food provided at the 4pm break.

Like any conference where there is only one speaker track, there were speakers that I found really interesting, and ones that bored my socks off. There were a couple that I really wondered why they were up there, like the woman who seemed to be showing us her life story and resume, but not really talking about how she did things or why, or the not very good improv comedy troupe. And a couple that didn’t hold much interest for me but I could see they were well done, like the Brazilian guitar guy and maybe the weird artsy dance-like movement thing.

The only real downers were that

  • the food at the break was placed at only one table (as opposed to three tables for a smaller crowd at DevDays) so the line was horrendous
  • like every conference in the world these days, the wifi SUCKED
  • and the woman next to me with the really bad breath who, during anything remotely technical and therefore interesting to me, would, every 5 minutes or so, sigh loudly and then slam herself back and forth in her chair, moving my chair and the next couple on the row. Yeah, my butt was getting pretty sore by then too, but I didn’t disturb and entire row of people because of it.

But those were minor and pretty par for the course. The conference was great and I can’t wait for next years.

Today’s realization

I was trying to explain to somebody how much cooler you are if you just type a big long pipeline with a bunch of unix commands rather than putting the results of one command into a file, then processing that file into another one, and so on. And how for full geek points, that pipeline really needs to include at least one awk command. And then it hit me:

Unix is an Extreme Sport(tm). Just look how much Mountain Dew the average Unix geek drinks.

More technique video

This time I was the camera man filming Dan and Stephen. I kept the camera at the front of my cockpit, which enabled me to reposition it as needed, but it also meant that my paddle and arm sometimes occlude the image. It’s a trade-off.

There was a fourth person along for the paddle whom you may glimpse once in a while, but he may or may not have been playing hooky from work so we won’t mention him.

[youtube KQMskReo2Yo]

Back in the Thunderbolt

Yesterday I went with Dan and Stephen to Baycreek so that Stephen could try out the new Epic V12 that just came in. It’s one of the specially decorated ones that was provided to the Dutch team in the US versus Holland challenge in last weekend’s Mayors Cup kayak race. Baycreek also got the one that Greg Barton himself paddled for the US team, but that one is already spoken for. I noticed with some amusement that Greg, who is one of the two designers for Epic Kayaks, gave himself a weed guard on his rudder but didn’t give one to the Dutch rival.

Because we were on the bay instead of on a canal or river, I wasn’t so concerned about picking up leaves so I was able to get back into my wonderful Thunderbolt. I also brought the video camera and put it on Dan’s boat. In the following video, I shot a couple of minutes of Dan from the front, and a bunch more where we turned the camera sideways to shoot myself and Stephen. I have to say, I’m really pleased with how good my technique looks. Everybody on the team has been telling me my technique is good, but it’s really cool to see it from another perspective.

[youtube r-R59nOJKSI]