January, 6, 2002 archives
job search, day five: more than one possible consulting gig visible on the horizon. i feel so dirty.
joel writes another great piece he titles fire and motion. another way of thinking about it is getting things done by getting things done. i think it dovetails nicely with his piece on why not to start over.
have i mentioned recently how beautiful the outer banks of north carolina are? i finally got around to cropping down a few of the pictures from last august. i'll post others later. this shot was taken from the beach in kill devil hills (approximately—it might have been as far south as nags head).
michigan congressman conyers is going to hold hearings to look into payola in the radio broadcasting business. i guess he's not getting enough lobbying money from the radio and music publishing businesses. (i'd have less of a problem with payola if radio broadcasters had to buy their spectrum at auction.)
there's a great article on loudcloud's site about employee retention. it looks like that url won't be permanent, so here's the same thing as posted to the fork list. i wonder how much loudcloud itself lives up to this ideal.
verisign buys tuvalu's .tv for $45 million (cash). .tv paid $50 million to tuvalu to license the domain (although that deal was spread over 10 years, so they haven't paid it all out yet). i wonder if this means idealab! is cashing out some of its companies.
the big thing, aside from the money, that keeps me from getting a mac (like the cool new imac) is a remembrance of how mouse-bound the macintosh interface was. (and i assume that os x hasn't changed that dramatically.)
(i'll admit to being an atypical computer user, though. i spend 99% of my time using mozilla, mutt, tin, and a terminal window with bash and vim.)
much ado is made about voice recognition being the next big thing that will impact user interfaces, but i really can't imagine that it will ever make a big dent on the personal computer (outside of being used for dictation). what i think would be huge is eye-tracking. imagine being able to look at a link (with some subtle visual feedback that lets you know where the computer thinks you are looking), and just hit a key on the keyboard to follow it.
doing some more cleaning up, i've catalogued all the windows/dos cd-rom games i own. if you want any, make me an offer. i will throw almost all of these out next time i move. (the ones i imagine i'll keep are the first two x-com games, relentless, and the lucasarts non-star-wars games.)
in any case, they're now all boxed up and i'm once again left with a giant cd rack with nothing on it. that's up for grabs, too. i've got a couple of smaller plastic ones and a small wooden one i could also do without.