February 28th, 2010, 1 Comment »
It’s always great when I discover a succinct essay or lecture that summarizes the state of the union for a particular industry, art form or research topic. The other day I watched this half-hour talk by Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell discussing trends in casual gaming. He starts a little slow but gathers steam:
Here’s a kind of response to Schell’s lecture, specifically discussing this idea of external rewards.
April 13th, 2008, No Comments »
Who is Fabian Brunnström? With a name like that, I wondered if maybe he won the latest edition of Swedish Idol. In fact, he’s an undrafted forward (listed as a left-winger here) in the Swedish Elite League, and allegedly one of the best hockey players outside the NHL.
Yesterday, the CBC reported that the Canucks were close to signing Brunnström. From Scott Morrison’s blog:
No fewer than 20 NHL teams expressed interest in the 23-year-old Swedish winger, who went undrafted and played the past season in the Swedish Elite League with Farjestad.
As reported on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, Brunnstrom had a short list of five or six and further reduced that to one: the Canucks, whose general manager, Dave Nonis, did a good job of selling the youngster on the team and the city.
On the broadcast, Morrison calls Brunnström “the hottest player not in the NHL right now” and “speedy”. Here’s an earlier article from The Hockey News:
Brunnstrom, a 6-foot-1, 195-pound forward, is a classic late bloomer. Last season he was playing First Division in Sweden, which is two steps under the Elite League and was a star at that level, which prompted Farjestad to sign him this season. He skates very well and his three goals and 13 points in 21 games are probably not a clear indication of how good he is offensively.
He’s finished fifth in team scoring with second line minutes, and 23rd overall in the league.
Why wouldn’t he come to Vancouver? Canada is considerably more similar to Sweden than the US, it’s got the most favourable climate in the country and the Canucks are chock full of Swedes. I assume that the team has some kind of Swedish quota, and the Canucks are signing Brunnström anticipating Naslund’s forthcoming departure. Darren Dreger speculates that he might sign at $2 million per season.
If the Canucks do sign him, Brunnström will undoubtedly get a long audition with the Sedin twins. They’ve been missing an effective triplet since Anson Carter was stricken with delusions of grandeur. Who knows? Maybe he’ll fit in where everybody else on the roster hasn’t. I’ll also be pleased to see the team get younger.
Here’s a little video compilation of in action:
He’s wearing a #96 jersey. If he does play for the Canucks, he’ll have to decide whether he wants the monkey that comes free with that number on his back. When a team has a bad year, there’s often extra pressure on signings like this. Hopefully he can shoulder it.
Thanks to James Mirtle for the tip.
November 21st, 2007, 5 Comments »
Google recently announced its foray into the telecommunications space with Android, an operating system and software developer kit for mobile devices. I watched the video, which was fairly dry (and Sergey, you can afford a shirt with a collar), but I was missing the context and meaning of this announcement.
Over at Slate, Tim Wu has written a readable overview of what Android might mean to the staid telecoms industry in the US.
Nor is the problem of retailing Android phones trivial. Anyone with an Internet browser can use Google search or Gmail, but in the American mobile world the main barrier to market entry is reaching consumers. Today, more than 90 percent of Americans buy their wireless devices from their carriers. It is true, again, that Google has T-Mobile and Sprint provisionally on its side. But if only some outlets will sell a Gphone, fewer people will buy them.
Incidentally, I wasn’t super-interested in the subject matter, and abandoned it after a few episode, but I learned a lot about the early days of the telephone industry from Cory Doctorow’s reading of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown.
August 1st, 2007, 3 Comments »
Anyone who’s ever given a presentation with a projector understands this equation:
Laptop + Projector = Rage, Frustration and Finally Tears
Every time the MC, the A/V and I wrestle with my laptop and the projector, I give the same spiel: the technology industry has failed us here. This should be a plug-and-play operation, but it almost never is. It’s a nightmare of adapters, dongles and too many settings (resolution, input, mirroring displays, and so forth).
And it always comes at the worst possible time. At best, you have ten or fifteen minutes to mess about with the technology. In the worst case, you’re doing it while 30 or 100 people stare at you expectantly.
Via Rococo’s blog (a client), here’s my first sniff of the promised land of wireless connection between computers and displays:
Can I get an amen?
July 14th, 2007, 4 Comments »
It pretty much applies to everybody, whether you’re a parent, future parent, a student or a teacher. I really dig its message:
July 8th, 2007, 10 Comments »
Jules was recently thinking about the past and future of photography:
Film was expensive, developing was expensive, and when a roll was finally finished, it wasn’t uncommon to get it developed and have a whole year’s worth of “special occasionsâ€Â. It was treat. Granted, much of what was developed was blurry, but that didn’t stop you from pasting it into an album anyways!
Today, no reason is required to snap off a few hundred photos. Everyone’s life is completely documented, special occasion or no occasion. Hard drives are bursting with 17 angles of the roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland, and another 15 photos of everyone eating funnel cakes. Are we over burdened with photos? Will I ever get through the 3 gigs of pictures that are safely stored and backed up on various hardware vaults? What will future generations think when they discover a plethora of mediocrity that has been saved forever? Are we adding any value?
It’s a good question, and I think it’s important for Normal Humans to pay a little attention to how they manage their photos.
And Jules is right. If you created a mean average of all the amateur photos taken between, say, 1950 and 2000, you’d get a pretty lame photo.
I’d argue, however, that the mean average of the photos taken between 2000 and 2050 will be considerably better.
Let me change gears for a second. Long before digital video, when asked about how film school could be better, Stephen Spielberg said that they should teach kids to should on VHS tape instead of film. Why? Because VHS tape was cheap, and film was expensive. More importantly, students could waste as much tape as they wanted, because you could record on it over and over again.
We learn by practice and by making mistakes.
I just checked, and I’ve taken about 12,000 photos with my trusty Nikon D-70. Add another couple of thousand with my previous digital camera, and that represents about 600 rolls of film. Before digital, purchase and development costs would’ve made that a healthy investment for a learning amateur like myself.
But I’ve only been taking digital photos for, say, five years. My nephew Miles (that’s him with the bubble gun) was born in 2003. In 2023, how many photos will he already have taken? How much more photography practice will the 20-year-old Miles have than the a 20-year-old Darren in 1994? Ten times? A hundred times?
Especially if you start early, that kind of repeated activity will improve your skills.
Combine more practice with advances in technology that have radically improved sharpness, colour quality and so forth. It’s simply become harder to take lousy photos.
The chunk we’re missing at the moment is sophisticated filtering and sorting mechanisms. Yes, Miles may take 20,000 photos by the time he graduates high school. Hopefully by then he’ll be able to ask a computer questions like:
And he won’t have had to spend hours categorizing, filtering and labeling his photos (messing around with so-called metadata) to get good results. The computer will just know.
That said, hopefully Miles has deleted 16 of the 17 shots of Jules’s roller coaster. I tend to delete about 85% of the photos I take. I wonder what the average consumer does? Do they keep every photo? Half of them? How do you manage your photos?
March 20th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Metaefficient writes about the VentureOne (that’s one astonishingly bad name), a three-tire hybrid that can go 160 km/h and gets 100 miles to the gallon (sorry to mix systems of measurements, but who thinks in litres to the kilometer?). From the VentureOne website (with the dodgy URL FlytheRoad.com–who’s doing their branding?)
The VentureOne is a fully enclosed vehicle that is surrounded by a steel “safety cell†and other safety features typically found only in carsâ€â€things like side impact beams, driver airbag, rear bumper and engine shield.
While the same height and length as the MINI Cooper, the driver in the VentureOne sits as high off the road as a standard automobile. When combined with its 360° glass canopy effect, the VentureOne not only provides a driver with tremendous road visibility, but adds to a sense of overall driving confidence.
They’ve also got a blog (dudes, use clean URLs), which has a bunch of photos from a test drive.
Name aside, this thing looks pretty cool–a lot like those cars in Minority Report, all bulbous glass domes. It’s preferable, obviously, to sit next to your passenger, but I could live with that for shorter trips.
