Tuesday, November 29, 2005

We got a new HP laser printer yesterday and I have fallen in love with the double-sided printing feature. The unit is neat, compact, and Ethernet enabled. Mac OS 10.4 comes with pre-installed drivers for almost all HP printers so no installation was necessary. The Windows folk needed to install all sorts of stuff off the CD. Hah! Would rather have spent the money on having the office painted but our previous printer just dropped dead. Well, there is pleasure and pain involved in being in perpetual bootstrap mode but give me this over complacency any day.

Abu Mohammad, Munshi Raziuddin's son, came over this afternoon to pick up a fax and to have a chat. They will be touring India soon and after that, will jet off to California to perform at Stanford and then New York. I think I should become their manager - will get to tour the world, listen to great music, and learn Farsi from Farid Ayaz.

In other mundane news, I hate the fact that Flash-powered sites totally kill a web browser's built-in functionality. Obviously, if you "right-click" on a Flash-based navigational object, you get the Flash menu which allows you to do a bunch of useless things like "Zoom In" and "Print". DUH. I don't hate Flash any more, but I wish its contextual menu would incorporate things like, "Open in New Tab", "Add Link to Bookmarks", and "Copy Link Location", etc. After Adobe and Macromedia merge, we'll probably be inundated with Flash-enabled PDFs and the World Wide Web will sink.

Apple's new product, Aperture, is now shipping. The screenshots look gorgeous. An Adobe employee (!!!) , John Nack, writes: "Aperture is a cool product, no question. Apple's designers have a great aesthetic, and their marketing is second-to-none." Was pretty impressed to read this kind of stuff on a corporate Adobe blog. Read the full reaction ...

Finally found a nifty product for downloading complete websites and viewing them offline. Site Sucker for the Mac is tiny, does what it says, and it's totally free. Oh, also found Broadband Optimizer ... maybe it's my imagination but my broadband connection is definitely more sprightly now. Even if nothing has actually changed, perception is truth, so I am pretty pleased. Oh, absolute favourite software discovery for this quarter: Flying Meat's VoodooPad. It's a must-have for anyone who misses Apple's original Notebook and Scrapbook and loves wikis. FlySketch, also written by Gus Mueller, Flying Meat's founder, is also awesome. Gotta love this new breed of Mac developers who write real-world Cocoa applications and keep the spirit alive. THANK YOU!

Am reading a whitepaper entitled (oh, how I hate that word) "Information Objects: Applying Cognitive Load Theory and Object-Oriented Thinking to Information Design". Feel like I am at school. At least I don't have to feel terribly guilty printing such stuff out now thanks to the new duplex printer.

Read an interesting article over on Wall Street Journal's Online Edition: Some Students Find Themselves In Principal's Office Over Blogs - "As parents wring their hands about Internet predators, many teens are worried about a different kind of online intruder: the school principal". The disruptive effects of social networking tools, portable media, file-swapping, instant messaging, are mind-boggling. The establishment is scrambling to figure out the new game in town and just can't churn out rules fast enough. WE ROCK!!! Check out another great article over at Slate: The Rules of Distraction.

"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music".
Keats

Posted by BeanZ | Permalink: 5:21 PM |