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Palm OS isn't dead (yet)!
Yesterday we had lunch at the Bondi Bar and Kitchen. The restaurant (the restaurant part is a bit of an afterthought; I'd consider it more of a club). I noticed that the waitresses were carrying Palm OS devices, possibly Zire 72 devices. The silk screenscreend buttons were clearly visible and it appeared to have a mag stripe reader underneath it. I'm not sure if they had 802.11 connections or they used IR to transmit the orders, but it was interesting. However, the waitress seemed to spend a lot of time using the stylus to enter the order. I don't know if this is the most efficient way to enter orders.
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Poorly designed book
I read to our son every night and recently, my wife pulled out a book called Five Shiny Stars. One day she told me it played music (there was a tag on the front of the book indicating it did), but I never heard it. So lately I've thought it was broken, so I banged the book against my head and magically it started playing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". Last night as I was putting Aiden to bed and reading the book, the son started playing when I turned to the last page (like it is supposed to do) without me banging my head against it. What was different about last night? It was still light outside when we put him to sleep and the sun was sneaking past the curtains. I looked closer at the book and show that there was a photo cell which triggers the song to start. This has to be the stupidest way to trigger music on a book that talks about going to sleep! Normally people read books about going to sleep when it is dark. I would have expected there to be a pressure type trigger to turn on the song.
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DisplayLink First Impressions
Today I received a Sewell Direct USB to DVI adapter which uses the DisplayLink technology. The other day my father received his new iMac and said that I could have my 20" flat panel display back that he had hooked up to his Windows box. At the same time I saw that DisplayLink had released beta drivers for the Mac, so I couldn't resist trying out this technology. I haven't used 2 displays in a long time since I've been using laptops (I don't like using the built in laptop display as a second display as it feels awkward). Installing the drivers was a breeze, but the release notes kind of scared me and I realize that performance is not going to be that of a regular display, but I figured I'd give it a try. I hooked up a Dell 20" display and it was immediately recognized. It seems to work well, but you can definitely notice the lag. I wanted to get it to have fairly static stuff displayed on it like my iChat buddy list, probably some iChat windows and maybe iCal. It won't be very usable to Safari or things that change rapidly. It seems to work OK for mail and even composing a message wasn't all that bad.
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Can we end non-binding resolutions?
The US House of Representatives this week apparently passed a resolution saying that China should talk to the Dalai Lama (which, of course, has pissed off the Chinese). This resolution carries no weight and means nothing. However, it took time for our lawmakers to draft it and pass it. Why do our elected officials waste our taxpayer money with this stuff that means nothing? They are lawmakers, not resolution makers.