Chip sent this to me over the weekend. The photo was taken in 1985, and shows me demonstrating a MIDI sequencer to a bunch of kids. I don’t remember if it was a Boy Scout troop, or what. Chip, my nephew, is the dark-haired kid in the picture. The equipment shown includes a Commodore 64 … Read More “Memories of an Alphageek” »
Category: General Technology
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I was sorting through Picassa when I came upon a couple of older photographs. I actually did this a long time ago, but since it’s fresh on my mind, I’ll bring it up here. Back in 1996 (or was it 1995?) we went to Maine for a week. Laura had a conference at Bates College … Read More “Photoshop Deception” »
While I was in Atlanta at NECC, I fired up iTunes at my hotel. I was quite surpirsed to see that someone had shared their iPod library. I was even more suprised that I could access all 12.5 GB of his music. I could listen to it, but couldn’t copy or do anything else. This … Read More “Unexpected Sharing” »
This is incredibly addictive, probably even more so than Google Earth was for me when it first came out. These folks have frozen a moment in time of life on the streets in these five cities, and the ability to view that moment from multiple perspectives is very compelling. Collections of "sightings" have popped up … Read More “More Googley Goodness from Streetview” »
The Google Earth blog had a link to the technology behind Google Maps’ new Street View feature. The technology was created by Immersive Media, and features a camera with eleven lenses arranged in geodesically on a sphere. The camera not only takes still images, but does video as well. Immersive Media has put several demos … Read More “Immersive Media” »
We had a monthly Dean’s Wine and Cheese gathering at Furman Friday evening. As Laura and I arrived, I was been hailed by some of her colleagues as an expert in Moodle. I don’t know about expert, but I have recently installed the program on a Linux server, and we are starting to use it … Read More “Moodle on a Stick” »
Last night we had The Glen Miller Story on TCM playing as we did some household chores. Figuring prominently in the film was the song "Pennsylvania 6-500." This song, of course, is a reference to the phone number of the Pennsylvania Hotel using the old telephone exchange system, where Miller played frequently. Laura reminisced that … Read More “Pennsylvania 6-500” »
So, today is the big day. Daylight Savings begins a couple of weeks earlier than normal, and all our computers are going to come crashing down…. …or not. As I glance at this laptop I see that it reads the correct time, and I haven’t done a thing to it apart from the regular Windows … Read More “Daylight Savings” »
When it comes to communication, our district really tries to cover all its bases. A snow day is a good case in point. We alert the media and we post messages to our website. Even with all that, we will always get complaints from a parent that didn’t get the message because we hadn’t used … Read More ““I woke you up to tell you to go back to sleep”” »
Back last summer I wrote an article on this site complaining about triple tags and the clutter they create on tag clouds. The idea was that a tag cloud is meant to group items with similar characteristics. However, triple tags are meant to identify a specific item. They are often called "machine-readable" because they are … Read More “Flickr’s Machine Tags” »