Technically Speaking

To get my mind off of things I’d rather not dwell on, I thought I’d post a quick link to an article about the upcoming Office 12 release. I gave my initial reaction to Office 12 back in September, after I had seen an online video about the new version of Office.

ComputerWorld tested the newest beta release of the product, and they published their mostly positive review here.

I’m still not convinced that people are going to love the new Office when they can’t figure out how to find anything anymore. The new IE 7 beta has driven me to Firefox. I wonder if Office 12 will finally drive me to be an exclusive OpenOffice user?

Man time goes by quickly. May has been a rough month for me, blog wise, as you’ve probably noticed. I used to get in three posts a week, but this may only be my third or fourth post this month.

So what’s new? I’m considering starting a food blog. Especially after a great dessert we had over the weekend. Do you know what a food blog is? I’ve only been recently introducted to the concept, but I’ve enjoyed reading some of them.

Basically, a food blog is a blog that discusses (can you guess?), well, food. The genre of food blogging generally requires that you start with a picture of the food you’re going to discuss. (More points if you have a cookbook quality picture.) Next you tell a story that is food related (it usually deals with the food whose picture is at the top of the entry). Then you give the recipe for the pictured item.

Here are two examples of some cool food blogs: Chocolate & Zucchini, and Traveler’s Lunchbox. It seems like it would be a fun genre to write in. But I would need a new blog for it, so I haven’t made up my mind yet.

Time rolls forward at an amazing pace. There are lots of things going on in life right now and we are as busy as we think we can handle right now, so that is good.

Anyway, more to come later!

Microsoft recently released a second beta version of their ubiquitous Internet Explorer web browser. MS is playing catch-up to Mozilla’s Firefox browser by offering tabbed browsing and “Add-ons” (which Firefox calls “extensions”). I thought I’d try to install IE 7 and see if the “improved” browser lives up to the hype.

Download and install should have been a fairly simple process, but I was disappointed that the installer didn’t warn me that I was actually replacing my IE 6 installation. (Since it was a beta test, I thought I’d get to keep IE 6 and then run whichever version of the browser I wanted. I was wrong.) The installer had this little progress bar to tell you that it was still installing the software. The graphic was useless. I mean, obviously it was still installing the software, because the installer hadn’t finished yet. I would have liked it more if the graphic had shown a percentage of the installation process, so I could gauge how far along I was in the process. Overall, it took about 5 minutes to install the browser on my work machine, but it felt a lot longer because I was sitting in front of the screen waiting for some visual cue as to how far along it was.

Read the rest of this entry »

About a week ago I saw this article and wanted to blog about it, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until today.

Basically the credit card behemoth Visa has partnered with cell phone maker Nokia to launch a pilot payment program. Visa embeds a smart card in your cell phone that uses radio frequencies to transmit your cell phone data to the reader. When you want to make a payment, you wave your cell phone in front of the card reader and your payment is processed. No more archaic pulling a credit card out of your wallet and swiping it at the terminal.

I hope that the technology is more secure than it sounds. I hope that in order to complete the transaction you have to enter a PIN number to verify that you intended to make a purchase. This security measure would ensure that somebody couldn’t hide a card reader and take your money without your knowledge.

Truth be told, the whole thing sounds sort of silly to me. Why would I want my cell phone to also be a credit card? Why would Visa invest in something like this? Here’s my guess: it sounds like you only get to use one card. If your cell phone is encoded to your Visa card, and that is the easiest way to pay, then what card are you going to use most often?

I’ll tell you what I’d do: keep my cell phone in my pocket and reach for my wallet so I can use my Discover card.

Today I was away from work during the 1:00 hour while “Talk of the Nation” was on NPR. Today’s segment talked about how much information about us is available online. The part of the segment I listened to was a discussion about blogging and how many people don’t realize that whatever they blog about (or what others blog about them) becomes part of a permanent, searchable source of information for years to come.

Two particular stories caught my attention. One was a caller who said she was about to hire a nanny, but before making the final offer, her husband googled the applicant’s name. Turns out the applicant had kept a blog discussing violence and the “bratty kids” she had nannied for previously. A person who would have gotten the job was passed over because of information she had shared about herself online.

Another caller discussed how he had added commentary to an urban legends discussion in the early 80’s to a newsgroup, long before there was such a thing as a World-Wide Web. In a recent job interview, the interviewer made reference to the post—from 20 years ago.

The whole segment was worth listening to. You can find it archived at NPR’s website.

This has fueled more introspection into the question of why I blog, and how much information I’m comfortable sharing online. Look for more on that in a future post.

While you’re waiting, go google yourself and see what people are saying about you. You might be surprised at what you find.