Vancouverite Tim Bray: "In math, I had worked like a dog to get Cs, and all of a sudden I was getting As in the computer courses. God was reaching behind my shoulder, telling me, ‘Kiddo, this is what you ought to be doing.’" He went on to innovate search engines, partner with Yahoo!, and invent XML.
Normally, I wouldn't pay much attention to a site that collates news stories–especially one that's still in beta form–but an article by Newser ( www.newser.com/ ) cofounder Michael Wolff in the October issue of Vanity Fair intrigued me. Wolff, who indicates he was involved in some kind of disastrous never-again venture during the first dot-com boom, spends much of the article talking about why one shouldn't get into the news business these days.
Let's say you were interested in the noble rural sport of moose-taunting. ("Hey moosie, your mother's a whore.") Like cow-tipping, it can be dangerous (I have two cracked ribs that indicate I may be more than a little familiar with the consequences of teasing large ungulates), so perhaps you decide to research it a little using Google.
Of all the marvels of the Internet, key is being able to search it. The information you want could be out there, but it might as well not exist if you can't find it. Searching would still be impressive even if you had to go to a special building downtown to do it; the fact that it's accessible from your home or workplace is simply amazing.
Every so often, a technology comes along that has a subtle impact on our daily lives. It doesn't have to be a big before-and-after invention like the light bulb or the telephone. It can be just a little blessed thing like the rewind feature on a VCR (and its refinement on digital video machines–a buffer of just-watched live TV). This is the sort of thing that insinuates itself more subtly into our media-consuming lives, because it's a feature so useful it should have been there all along.
Recently, while perusing the advertisements and Web sites of a few major electronics retailers, I had several occasions when I was spontaneously moved to declare out loud (even though I was alone) that I couldn't believe how inexpensive some products had become. Take hard drives. I found a terrabyte unit (that's right, a thousand gigabytes) for $329. Admittedly that price only applied to sales via the on-line store, but it's an indicator of what we'll be paying soon in the malls.
Summer is here, so it's a good time to look at some Web sites. If you were to leave your computer and go outside, you might discover that you're actually in some kind of huge Matrix-style virtual-reality simulation. I've been out there–I'm thinking of calling it First Life or something. Best to stay in the house, I figure.
The past few weeks have seen a lot of speculation on which public or private entity would purchase the parent company of the Bell mobile-phone service. Even Telus was in the fray for a few days, staying in just long enough to further drive up the price of BCE's stock. That offer made some people nervous, since the combined firm (Belus, perhaps?) could hold the contracts of about two-thirds of Canadian cellphone users. I guess they worried that would create a monopoly situation.
How would you feel if the government decided which mobile phone you were allowed to buy? Pretty pissed off, I'd imagine. How dare it restrict you to a few models with inferior capabilities? What gall.
Last week, I talked about how a friend's surround-sound system would stubbornly and persistently revert to stereo playback, leaving three-fifths of the speakers with nothing to do. Turns out the core problem was with the programming that the installer performed on the universal remote.
The other day I was watching a movie at a friend's house (the excellent Mrs. Henderson Presents , starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, if you must know), and she complained that the surround sound in her home theatre never seemed to work. I'd watched a movie there once before but hadn't really noticed the lack.
A long time has passed since I reviewed a computer game—I usually leave that for Trigger Happy—but Star Wars: Empire at War managed to make the leap from Windows to a Mac version (Intel-based Macs only) relatively quickly, so I thought I’d leap too and buy it (Lucasarts, $60, rated teen). Not to mention the fact that May 25 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of the original movie to theatres, and much of the cast is represented in this game—in likeness and voice-clip form, anyway.
Theodore H. Maiman passed away at age 79, here in Vancouver, on May 5. Twice nominated for a Nobel Prize, winner of the Japan Prize and the Wolf Prize in Physics, and an inductee into the American National Inventors Hall of Fame, Maiman will perhaps be most remembered for building the world's first working laser in 1960, while conducting research under the auspices of the Hughes Aircraft Company.
Even though the World Wide Web is about 20 years old, and Web-browsing software for things like Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer is under 15 years old, the impact has been considerable. And traditional media have probably been hit the hardest.
Recently, a handful of interesting Web sites have either launched or otherwise come to my attention. It seems that darn Internet keeps a-growin'. Let's take a look.
There are a couple of comments on the redesign of a favourite Web site I'd like to make. Yes, the venerable Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com/) redesigned its look a couple of months back. Even though I use the site dozens–sometimes hundreds–of times a month, I've been fairly indifferent to the changes. The old design (which persisted for about 600 years in Net time) was good for quick glances at movie ratings and viewer comments–perfect, in fact, for a five-second visit.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd digitized the good stuff from my collection of videotapes and stored the files on DVDs. I bragged about how much more accessible the files had become and how much less room the discs took up compared to the tapes. Naturally, that made some people jealous, and one reader even wrote in and requested a few more details on how one might go about doing such a conversion. So here goes.
This week I'd like to highlight a few interesting gadgets that have come to my attention. And I'd like to start by praising WowWee ( www.wowwee.com/ ). That's a great name for a company that makes such fun products. Most shoppers are probably familiar with the Robosapien and Roboraptor lines from WowWee–they always seem to be on display in electronics and toy departments because they're so cool.
Although I've been discussing all-digitalentertainment setups lately–and obviously music is a big part of that–there's not much point in delving into further details of my activities. Picture a man ripping a CD. Now picture it thousands of times over the course of a year. Imagine him alphabetizing the resulting files and storing them on blank DVDs while watching TV in a window on his computer screen. Not too thrilling, is it?
