The view from my window a few minutes ago. The pinkness is gone now, but the UW heating plant puffs on. My personal — gigantic — lava lamp.
January 29, 2016
Dawn's pink steam flows left.
The view from my window a few minutes ago. The pinkness is gone now, but the UW heating plant puffs on. My personal — gigantic — lava lamp.
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I like that kind of thing so much better than politics this leap year, anyways.
I just took delivery of this Android tablet. So far, it's fantastic.
The personal computer as we have come to know it, with much/most of the computing power under your fingers, is dead.
It don't take a Madison weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
The personal computer as we have come to know it, with much/most of the computing power under your fingers, is dead.
It is still hard to produce content on tablets, but they are great for consuming content. I think that PCs will become more and more like ham radio, though, for consumer use, anyways. I like a gigantic screen or two for coding, and a real keyboard, but maybe I am a dinosaur.
But I admit that I would have a harder time without my tablet/phone than I would without my laptop in my everyday life. I can leave my laptop unused for days at a time.
Last year I paid abot $10,000 to have my house re-piped; not because of lead in the pipes, but the house is 30 years old and was piped with polybutylene tubing, which 30 years ago was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread. Well, it turned out it wasn't, and I got to re-pipe like every other house owner on this block. This was not due to anyone's evil intent, negligence, or whatever, but just one of those things that life hands you, so we have sucked it up and paid to have it done.
(And yes, I know there was a class-action suit and a settlement, but somehow the piping on our block does not qualify under that settlement. Just tough shit again.)
tim in vermont said, "I like a gigantic screen or two for coding..."
Most of the programmers I have known have preferred big-giant screens, and usually multiple ones.
Why is this? Most non-programmers prefer a single presentation, like a TV screen. Programmers strongly tend to prefer a huge, multiple presentation, so big that they have to glance back and forth from screen to screen.
I think video people tend to be the same way.
Me, I prefer to have one presentation that I can switch views on. Swipe left, Command-H, whatever. I want to know which mode I'm in. Programmers, I think, tend to be more comfortable operating simultaneously in multiple modes than most people.
Your thoughts?
"It is still hard to produce content on tablets, but they are great for consuming content. I think that PCs will become more and more like ham radio, though, for consumer use, anyways. I like a gigantic screen or two for coding, and a real keyboard, but maybe I am a dinosaur."
The internet, on computers, turned us into active readers, picking things apart, talking back.
If the government wanted to crush our insolence and interference, it could have done no better than what Apple et al. have done to us by moving us onto tablets. Easy to read. Hard to write.
Internet repositioned for the preservation of power.
And I wrote that on my big iMac. I hate even to have to use a laptop. The iPad is for reading. I switch to it in the evening and the switch means, I'm going into passive mode now.
I was just reading an article with an embedded photo of a female Muslim "refugee" taking a selfie, and was wondering to myself, not very charitably, why fundy Muslim type women are often so unattractive. I think it's because they often look so grim and unhappy, not to mention they don't look healthy, physically or mentally; I don't think they eat particularly well or get the kind of sunshine and exercise and laughter and wholesome food that characterize the lifestyle of healthy middle class women in the West. I also was thinking about the tightly covered hair thing. Hair appearance is such an important indicator of health and good grooming, which are the most important aspects of attractiveness. Muslim women whose hair is covered loosely or not at all often look gorgeous but the same woman tightly veiled looks awful. I think hair has a lot to do with it.
My not very politically correct Friday morning musings.
As our hostess says, tablets are for consuming while desktops are for producing.
My favorite place to be is in my home office at my desktop, happily and quietly working on some project or other, materials spread out on the desk in front of me, my husband on the other side (he works from home and our desks face each other), doing the same thing. I read and surf Pinterest in bed or on the couch with the tablet. At my desk I do all the administrative and creative work involved in our family's life and I simply could not do that from a tablet.
I have a couple of reasons for liking multiple screens. You can run a program in a debugger, with the GUI on one screen and the program on another is a big one. Then the GUI still stays in the foreground when the focus goes to the code on the other screen. Mouse clicks to the program are easier to manage.
I also like to cut and paste between screens. I hate having to close a screen I am working on to look at messages like IMs and email. As for liking large screens, if you have a section of code that stretches out a little bit, it is nice to be able to see the setup part, declarations, looping logic, whatever in a glance while looking at a particular section of code that might be a little ways down without the constant scrolling. Really high IQ people might not need that bit of comfort, but I am one of those guys who is always looking at my hole cards in poker too, so that lets me out of that one.
And I wrote that on my big iMac. I hate even to have to use a laptop.
My laptop has a 17 inch touch screen, so while it is no fun on an plane ride, it is a good compromise. When I set it up with a second screen, I am always touching the second screen, which doesn't do anything. I think that large touch screens will be the norm in five years for everybody, even if they aren't using a tablet.
tim in vermont, thanks for your responsive comments.
I used to do software testing, and we always had two computers: one to test on and one to report on. One of my colleagues, at the time a shy woman but a fantastic tester, with a Ukrainian accent, would sometimes show up at my door and say, "Please, may I crash your computer?" Which she always did, and then said, "Thank you," and then left.
, would sometimes show up at my door
You had a door! I only ever had the Les Nessman kind!
Yeah, at Microsoft we were privileged by high net income.
I think the main point is that anything to get a shy Ukrainian woman to come to your door or cubicle is worth it. Crash my computer, whatever.
You had a door
I have a door too.
Helpful when I'm doing a training.
"It don't take a Madison weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Actually, it does take a Madisonian to know it's blowing west.
Does that mean we have a socialist Pope?
I refuse to go cellular. They screw the consumer. You have to buy a ‘plan’ in order to get a good deal on a cellular phone. Also, I do not want to be available to each and every caller 24/7. I want to be able to get away from the phone. So … no, thank you anyway. I’ll make do with my old fashioned landline.
And I feel no need for a tablet or laptop; my cheap Acer desktop PC does just fine for my needs. And, as with cellphones, I do not feel the need to be computing 24/7. Just stuff I would have to lug around everywhere I go.
I am the same way with social media. For me Facebook entries are not good substitutes for face to face relationships. I do not do Facebook, Twitter or any of the others. I want to see and touch my friends and relations. If that’s not feasible I’ll settle for a phone call because I can at least hear their voice in real time.
I don't even have an office or a cubicle anymore, just a series of comfortable chairs, couches, nooks, tables at Starbucks, cars, whatever wherever I can use my phone for a hotspot. I guess I have an office in the sense of Joe Walsh in "Life's been good to me so far" But I hardly ever use it.
@grackle, I used to feel that way about my phone, but I love being able to use spotify to listen to whatever album comes to mind that I remember from 1978, or whatever. I like being able to find the nearest cafe if I need to meet somebody, and to have directions to it, I like being able to read whatever book I have loaded into my Kindle app, or listen to an audio book from Audible through the bluetooth in my car. I like to be able to read Althouse when I am waiting for the dentist. I prefer face to face time with my friends, and I find that far easier to arrange with my phone. A text with "I am going to be in Friday, want to have coffee?" is great. I am pretty itinerant though, so I guess that plays into it.
Thirty years ago if I could do all of those things with a device about the size of a deck of Tarot cards, I would have been burned for a witch.
My advice would be to cut off that branch coming into the camera. Make firewood out of it on your own time. Don't wait for it to break...
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