Bandwidth finally available…
Thursday, August 25th, 2005Ok, the pressure has finally lessened a notch. I have a few minutes each day for random web-browsing. I’m even contemplating doing some personal software development on a project that has been simmering in the back of my brain for the last year or so. Whew!
We had a couple of odd things happen in the neighborhood in the last week. The first was rather unfortunate. Someone shot one of the many squirrels in the neighborhood in the back of the head with a BB gun. Unfortunately, the squirrel didn’t die from it. It was half crawling around for quite a while. It ended up getting herded into a recycle bin. Lisa called around to see if there was anyone who would take squirrels, but the animal hospitals weren’t interested, nor anyone else we could think of. The next morning it was dead. I fear for the cats. If there is some person that finds shooting small animals exciting, I think the cats won’t be too far off target. One lady in the neighborhood already mentioned that it had happened before.
The other interesting point was an encounter I had with a guy two days ago. I was sitting in the livingroom when I noticed a guy dragging a bean bag chair down the street. I knew where he was headed — the dumpster near the apartment complex down the street. I grabbed the camera and headed out the door. The lady that manages the apartment complex gets very angry when people leave trash sitting there. She has called the police on several occasions. Once outside, I started taking pictures of him dragging this thing down the sidewalk. He was talking on a cell phone. As I suspected, he stopped in front of the recycle bins, released the chair, and turned around without missing a beat in his phone converstation. He didn’t even notice that I was across the street, taking pictures the whole time. When he was about 10 feet from the chair, I got his attention. I informed him that he couldn’t just leave that there — it was littering. He said he had gotten it from there a few days back. I told him I didn’t care — he was littering. He then started complaining that he was on the phone — could I wait a minute. I didn’t wait. I told him the lady that manages the apartment would be happy to call the police to report the littering incident, and I would be happy to furnish the pictures of him dragging the thing down the street to the police. He then realized that the person he was speaking to on the phone hung up. He trudged back to the chair and proceeded to drag it down the street, while trying to dial a number on his cell phone.
Thus is the high level of excitement in our lives. I have been playing with a bunch of Google applications: Desktop, Earth, Hello, and Talk. While I think Earth is pretty darn cool (although not that stable on my laptop), I think Hello and Talk have a long way to go. The only ties seem to be related to gmail — there is some linkage with the address book held by gmail. First of all, they both have IM interfaces which have different user lists, and behaviors. Talk is very primitive, although the VOIP feature has nice quality in the trivial tests I have done. With the exception of Desktop, I don’t see a compelling reason to run them all the time. The last thing I need is more applications that I don’t use chewing up memory and ethernet bandwidth. My hope is that these products converge into something more useful. Talk does replace the gmail notifier application, which is ok, but I doubt I will end up using it for more than that.
