peter's hip pocket

The Flipstart PC grows up before launch

My friend, Keith, produced a lot of the promotional work for this upcoming handtop, which appears to be undergoing last-minute tweaks.

OutlookMT test 3

Test 2 didn't work so well, so now I'm trying it without Word as my e-mail editor.

OutlookMT test 2

This ismy 2^nd test of OutlookMT, a tool for weblogposting from within Microsoft Outlook 2003. I’ve now turned on strongHTML filtering from within Word, which I use as my e-mail editor.

 

Caption this...

Another typical March Seattle day.

Courtesy of the KIRO-TV TowerCam.

Apple still in school

BW Online | March 3, 2004 | Apple's New Chapter in the Classroom

Despite some some setbacks lately in its education efforts, Apple has been able to keep building market share and excitement. My old Aldus/Adobe buddy Greg Gardner appears to be doing well at Apple!

I Wish She Was Still On Vacation

From Common Sense and Wonder

From Maureen Dowd's column today:

Can you believe President Bush is still pushing the cockamamie claim that we went to war in Iraq with a real coalition rather than a gaggle of poodles and lackeys?

The UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Norway, Denmark, poodles and lackeys? They sound more like a significant portion of the European continent. According to her logic, any country that was part of our coalition is automatically a poodle and a lackey. So how do you change the coalition to include non-poodles and lackeys when any country that joins our coalition automatically becomes a poodle or a lackey? It seems like a very Kafkaesque situation. Let me put it another way in case it is confusing. The only way to have a broad coalition, by her definition, is to get countries that don't support us to join it, but if they don't support us, why would they join it? What this all boils down to is that I don't think the coalition would ever be broad enough to satisfy the likes of Maureen Dowd.

The folks at Common Sense and Wonder continue to be among my favorite daily reads.

...And from the "Confirming What We Already Suspected Department"

"Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time."

"Avoid IM...unless real-time interaction will truly add value to the communication. A one-minute interruption of your colleagues will cost them ten minutes of productivity as they reestablish their mental context and get back into 'flow.'"

"Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message."

—Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution (Jakob Nielsen's AlertBox, Jan. 5, 2004), and Information Pollution (August 11, 2003).

Max Jacobs on Bush's space vision

Via Common Sense & Wonder

There is always a reason why not to explore, not to be bold. I'm sure there were people telling the various European exploreres (sic) not to sail across the Atlantic, but thank God they did. Imagine if the discovery of America was delayed a couple of hundred years? The world would be so completely different and I think also would be much worse off. After all there was a very good reason why so many people across the world have risked everything to come here. Just because we don't really see the immediate benefits of exploration doesn't mean that they won't be massive over time.

Yes, I would rather private industry do all this since they would probably be able to do these things more efficiently. But barring a Bill Gates turning his sights away from Malaria and onto space, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything other than Hilton building a hotel in space. At this point, I will take any sort of research in space I can get. If it has to come from NASA, so be it.