Gorgeous ride this morning.
– Sent from my Palm Pre
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It’s a beautiful fall day in Mpls
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In the Beginning was the Command Line
I posted this years ago, but I just ran across Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". If you haven't read this, you really should.
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About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."Â
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Auto Tune the News Just Keeps Getting Better
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Who do you suppose calls Mr. Clean’s mop customer support line?
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The Pithy Poetry of Life
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Every Mission to Mars Ever Planned (via @wiredscience)
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Google Wave Impressions
Last night I had my first chance to use Google Wave in a truly collaborative project instead of just a sandbox. I'm in Minneapolis, MN and I'm working on a WordPress theme for a client with a friend who is in Fargo, ND. I started by copying a list of to-do's from an email into a new Wave and then I invited everyone involved.
The first useful thing that happened right away is that a discussion ensued about how to tackle each item on the list and who was going to do the work. Next some instructions for checking the theme out in Subversion. Then later at night the real fun began.
@toddfromfargo and I started up a chat session together. Then we started coding. One by one we went down the list. If he made changes he committed them in Subversion and I would update my copy & visa versa. I spent the night flipping between chat, Wave, the command line and Textmate until everything was crossed off our list.
Then in the morning @jeffjenson logged in and made some more notes. Tonight: repeat.
There has been a lot of excitement about Wave, but the real question is still, is it useful? After finally getting to use it on a real project I can say it definitely is. Previously tracking all those changes might have meant a string of 15 or 20 emails. Now everything is in one place and it's still being updated as I write. Thumbs up.
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When all else fails, describe the logo
Hanging w/ Nick watching the Vikings. He boiled the brats in this.
– Sent from my Palm Pre
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MN Twin Cities Photo Google Wave
With Wave invites starting to filter out into the community, I thought it might be interesting to start a photo Wave. Let me know if you want access.
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