Thursday, September 06, 2001
I have certain issues with carrying a bag, but I can't believe this is going to help.

My in-laws just gave us an old P2-400 machine that they were no longer using, and I set it up for my daughter to use. I did a clean install of Win98, for which I found these two links useful. I think the last time I did a clean install was MS-DOS 2.11! (For which a clean install meant FORMAT /S followed by copying the DOS directory over. If only installing Win98 was so simple.)

Tuesday, September 04, 2001
Emergency Exit is the travelogue of a couple who took their dot-com severance pay and set off to see the world. Check it out.

Friday, August 31, 2001
There is an Washington Post article today in which a bunch of travel agents are whining about airlines reducing their commissions. Well, as far as I'm concerned, the airlines should eliminate their commissions; the days in which that business model made sense are over. If people want help booking travel, let them pay for it directly; for most people, simply buying an airline ticket, it makes much more sense to do it online themselves. Of course, I have a pair of potential biases: Nearly every travel agent I've ever dealt with regularly messed up in one way or another, and plus I'm a control freak.

Thursday, August 30, 2001
Sigh. When I first heard of the Compaq iPaq Music Center, I thought it was my long-awaited "ReplayRadio." Then, on closer examination, I notice it doesn't have a radio tuner! Furthermore, for $800, you could buy an entire PC and dedicate it to the same purpose. Sometimes I have to wonder what (or whether) companies are thinking when they design certain products.

Saturday, August 25, 2001
As promised, I'm focusing my reading solely on stuff that is on my Amazon.com wish list. The first five I've knocked off:
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. This was really uneven; I loved the first third, the middle third was pretty good, and I had to force myself to read the last third. Get it, but if you're not hooked by the time you get to the interview, drop it.
- The Hook by Donald E. Westlake. Very good, if slightly disturbing.
- The Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver. Great thriller, though its portrayal of computers and the people who use them was a little cheesy.
- 1st To Die by James Patterson. He really knows how to write a thriller. This one was good, though not up to his best.
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This was interesting, but I wanted to like it a lot more than I actually did. A little overambitious, I think, but interesting, and worth reading.
I also axed a bunch of books from the wish list about which I had to admit that, as interesting as they might look, I was never going to read them.

Wednesday, August 15, 2001
With the recent 20-year anniversary of the original IBM PC, several times I've heard the old story of how IBM first approached Digital Research to buy DR-DOS, but Digital Research didn't like their terms, so they went and bought MS-DOS from Microsoft instead. I find myself wondering how the world would look now if DR hadn't made that mistake. Would they, or some other hegemony, have created the same sort of mediocre near-homogeneity we see now? Or would the OS market be fragmented into a bunch of legitimate choices? Would that be a good thing or a bad one? Certainly it seems to me it would be a good thing if great operating systems like the BeOS stood a chance: could get enough market share that significant third-party developers would write for them. Probably Apple would be a greater power than they are now, though certainly many of their mistakes are no fault of Microsoft's. Also, Go might still be around, and then who knows what the PDA market might look like now? Certainly the world would be a different place than it is now, and I guess I have to think that it would be a better one, absent Microsoft's strong-arm business tactics and their attitude of market share at all costs, that it's just fine to ship lousy software as long as people will still buy it, and that it's better to add a feature that will entice more people to buy than to fix a bug that annoys zillions of people, but few of them badly enough to make them go to a competitor (where there even is one).

Thursday, August 02, 2001
Weird: Just today I found myself wondering what ever happened to Living Colour, and then tonight I see that they are playing here on Saturday. Plate of shrimp.

Tuesday, July 31, 2001
I just saw the Royal Excelsior PDA at Costco for $25. Its functionality is a bit limited: six-line display, 384KB memory, no way to put your own apps on it (AFAIK), allegedly clunky UI, but it does provide fundamental PDA functionality (datebook, address book, to do list, memo pad, calculator, and a few others), it syncs with a PC, and the price is certainly right. The form factor is really nice -- just a little smaller than a Palm, which I've always thought were just a little bit too big. It's probably too limited for most people (though at that price, it might be fun to try to hack it), but I have to think there's still a lot of room for manufacturers to play in the space between this, at $25, and the Palm, starting around $100. I, for one, would be happy to give up a little of the Palm's functionality to make it a little smaller and cheaper.

Monday, July 30, 2001
MIT Media Lab's blogdex lists the 10 most-blogged links, with an aim towards centralizing the timeliness of blogged news. I wonder how long until enough of us point it out that the blogdex site itself makes its own list?

Wednesday, July 25, 2001
Tales of travel beverages:
1. I've discovered one, exactly one, way in which United Airlines is superior to American Airlines: they have frappuccino. On the other hand, American has the radical policy of actually having their planes take off on time, so I'll happily buy my own frappuccinos.
2. American Coke from a can sucks. From a bottle isn't much better. I love visiting parts of the world where they still make Coke out of sugar instead of corn syrup. Not only does it taste about a thousand times better that way, but it reminds me of my youth, when my grandmother kept stocked with Coke (again, the sugar kind) in those little returnable 6.5-ounce bottles. The empties would pile up on her back porch, and if we would lug them to the store and return them, she'd let us keep the money.

Monday, July 23, 2001
I thought I remembered seeing, long ago, a book subtitled The Death of Customer Service in America, or something to that effect. Now, despite much trying, I can't find any vaguely similar title. Perhaps I imagined it in the first place.

Wednesday, July 18, 2001
I just saw Kalifornia for the second time. It's a good film -- grittier and more realistic than more typical killer movies like Natural Born Killers. Those two would make a great double feature. Oh, and be sure to pay attention to the location captions in Kalifornia [spoiler].

Tuesday, July 10, 2001
Two facts about telephone customer service: (1) They are always suffering "unusually high" call volume, and (2) The touch-tone options have always "recently changed."

Thursday, June 28, 2001
As I've mentioned before, I use my Amazon.com wish list to record books I'd like to read, which I typically get from the library. However, I find that my wish list grows over time -- that is, I'm adding to it much more quickly than I'm reading books on it. Partly this is because I often read stuff that never makes it to the wish list, especially stuff that is easier reading than some of the more ambitious stuff on the list. Anyway, I think I'm going to read nothing else until I've read all the books that are on my wish list right now.