The I.T. Crowd

Episode 1 - Yesterday's Jam

Episode 2 - Calamity Jen

Episode 3 - 50/50

Episode 4 - The Red Door

Episode 5 - The Haunting Of Bill Crouse

Microsoft Impresses - Virtual Earth Street Level

http://preview.local.live.com/
Wow. That's some pretty incredible tech going on. According to Scoble's post, there are some 10 million images for San Francisco - what a dababase indeed! I can't even imagine how long it must have taken them to assemble all of the images.

New Apple Mac Mini

Hmm, it's not often that Apple makes a mistake in their specs, especially if it's an image:

"10/000/1000" Ethernet (from http://www.apple.com/macmini/)









UPDATE: Looks like they fixed it (http://www.apple.com/macmini/)

Funniest. Video. Ever.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5096390531229048703

Cha-Ching! OneNote Drawing Tools!

Saw this linked from Tech.Memeorandum. Looks very promising.

Convergence

Apple going Mobile?

The iPod I'd really like to see would be able to connect directly to iTunes, wirelessly, either through my net connection via WiFi, or through my phone via Bluetooth.

Oh, and it would have a radio built in :-)

Apple Tablet

From time to time, rumors surface about a tablet offering from Apple. I have to say that a lot of the Apple folks just don't get it. In their mind, a tablet pc is just a regular pc with pen input capabilities, comparatively nothing more than just Mac OS X with Inkwell.

How wrong they are. The pen input capabilities are only part of the story. Here's a simple example. My primary role is as a software designer and developer. I use my tablet as a kind of "scratch-pad", half full of notes, and half full of design diagrams. Because of that, I tend to not convert my hand-writting (what could probably more accurately be refered to as my "scrawling" hehe) and leave everything as a drawing. But the sweet part is that the tablet doesn't care. When I search for a word of phrase, it automatically searches through everything; the notes, the diagrams, the diagram labels; everything. How sweet is that.

Of course, because Microsoft is Microsoft, the Tablet PC software is integrated together. I'm in a meeting, I write something in OneNote, select it, right-click, and make it an action item in Outloook, and it's synced with Exchange.

Now, that's not to say an Apple Tablet wouldn't be capable of doing these things. I'm just saying that most of the comments I've seen from Apple people don't seem to realize the level of integration that the pen has with the Tablet PC.

That's also not to say that the Tablet PC software is perfect. Oh how I long for a OneNote style application based on tagging. That would be utter perfection! In fact, I might just have to write one...

The Social Web and Comments

Matt Mower on The evil of comments (via Scripting News). I have to say that, to a point, I would agree. The problem is that the technology just isn't there to support this. If someone writes "Nathan sucks!" on their weblog, I currently do not have an automatic way of knowing that someone just wrote that. Sure, Technorati are supposed to allow me to do this, but, again, the technology just isn't there

Lisp Programming

An older article which nevertheless is a very interesting commentary on LISP programming.
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Links to Business Tips (for web-based companies)

Some links that are worth reading for small businesses working on the web.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/web_development_20.html
http://davenet.scripting.com/2001/02/13/howToMakeMoneyOnTheInternetV20
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/02/08.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/09/dont-blow-your-beta/

TaggingEngine

http://www.taggingengine.com/

Coming soon. Hopefully.

Test Website

http://www.venturesteps.com/projects/test/

This is very much a pre-alpha.