Oy. Glenn Fleishman has tagged me in a game of blog tag. The rules say that I now have to post five things most people don’t know about me. I then get to tag five other bloggers.

Five things:

1. I hate fish so much that even before I was a vegetarian, I’d sometimes lie that I have an allergy to them. (I like feeding fish, however.) I will leave the table (without making a fuss) if seated across from someone reverse engineering a lobster or crab.

2. I am afflicted with a malady that requires me to tap along to any beat, including directional signals.

3. I’ve played almost every first person shooter there is. My player name is “Target,” which gives you an idea how good I am.

4. I am a closet hobbyist programmer. But because I have difficulty with indirect relationships such as pointers, I couldn’t get from C to C++. To my great embarrassment, I currently program mainly in Visual Basic.

5. I was on the student-faculty committee at Bucknell U. that came up with the idea of letting students design their own major, and I was in the first graduating class that could take advantage of this opportunity. And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains why I graduated Bucknell as a Meaning major.

I tag Euan Semple, Denise Howell, Chris “RageBoy” Locke, Jeneane Sessum and Susan Crawford… [Tags: blogtag]

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I’m in NJ tonight for my brother’s award ceremony. He’s Rheumatologist of the Year, an award he earned by caring about his patients and not processing them like flounder. He’s also the most ethical person I’ve met and damn smart, too. He’s getting an honor he richly deserves. (Yay, Andy!)

Then I take the 3:20am train from Newark to DC for Day 2 of the RootsCamp unconference. If you’re there, I’ll be easy to find: I’ll be the incredibly cranky old man in the corner. [Tags: andrew_weinberger rootscamp]

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SJ Klein is giving us a quick overview of the One Laptop Per Child project.

They have deals with five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. Each will be getting 1,000 laptops.

The monitor can run in ultra-low-power mode, reflecting ambient light. “The display technology is the most remarkable technology in the laptop.” The display “IP” is co-owned with the screen producers.The OLPC is working to make it reusable in 3 years wrt patents.

It weighs 3lbs. A pound of that is plastic. The plastic is 2mil instead of the 0.7mil of a typical laptop, e.g., a Thinkpad.

It comes with Squeak, JavaScript and Python as programming languages. And MediaWiki. (And more.)

Q: What is it missing? What will the critics say, “It’s fine, but it’s missing a ____”?
A: It’s not a normal desktop computer. It has a 512MB flash disk and 128Mb of RAM. It can run lots of apps simultaneously, but not typical office apps.

It has an integrated browser.

Q: Does it run Flash?
A: Yes. There’s a lot out there in Flash. But it’s not an open format.

Ethan points out that the bulk of the machine is behind the screen, so there isn’t a lot passing through the hinge; the hinge is the most common point of failure in laptops.

SJ says that the battery runs about 2 hours if you’re running flat out. But for reading, he hopes and thinks kids will get about 8 hours. The best recharging technique is a pull thingy that’s sort of like a lawn mower starter. The battery is nickel metal hydride.

It’s designed to last six years.

Q: (Me) The social software?
A: WikiMedia. Drawing/chat program that lets you see everyone that’s there is part of the operating environment (= Sugar). Etc. [Sounds like an opportunity. What social software might work in these environments and cultures?]

Ethan worries about students wanting to use them to the max while the teachers want to confine the usage to class-focused activities. Ethan doesn’t want the laptops to assume that education has to be entirely webby and non-traditional.

The OS is a modified version of Fedora. The file system is different because it’s compact flash. E.g., you can’t use swap and they’ve had to write low-level stuff to keep Linux from writing to the first sectors of memory until it burns out.

[Tags: olpc sj_klein berkman]

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Talk loud. Be foul-mouthed. But please not both.

Neither would be ok, too.

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I’ve been using Tab Catalog for a while, but it seems to have gotten better. I’m not sure if that’s because the Firefox 2.0 version was upgraded or because somehow my preferences got switched, but I’m enjoying it a lot in either case.

Tab Catalog shows thumbnails of the pages in your tab bar. So rather than having to rely on the truncated names in the tabs, you can go for the gestalt. Since I often have twenty or thirty tabs, being able to see the pages themselves is very helpful. Very cool. And free, of course.

Thank you, Shimoda Hiroshi. [Tags: tab_catalog firefox utilities tabs]

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Zotero (zo-TAIR-oh) is a Firefox 2.0 extension that captures Web pages (and files and PDFs), finds the citation info on those pages and puts them into standard bibliographicv form, lets you take notes, and lets you search. In future versions, it plans on letting you publish your collection and will integrate with Microsoft Word and others. It’s free and it’s Open Source.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m liking the sound of it a lot. (Here are the specs for my dream system, which I once called Notetella, but which I suppose now I’d have to call note.licio.us because, well, that’s the law.) (Thanks to Luis Villa for the link.) [Tags: zotero research bibliographic ]

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Scott Rosenberg has a great interview with Steve Johnson about Steve’s new book, The Ghost Map. It’s one smart writer interviewing another smart writer. Plus, Scott and Steve are both really nice, a virtue often under appreciated, especially when it shows up in folks whose egos could justifiably be way bigger than they are.

Scott closes with a question about Steve’s new site, Outside.in that aggregates stuff by zip code. [Tags: steve_johnson ghost_map scott_rosenberg books]

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Yesterday I flew from Boston to Chicago in the window seat of a three-across row. The person next to me, who seemed to be a vigorous man of around seventy, talked non-stop the entire way. Non-stop. He’s done a lot of traveling, he has a lot of opinions.

I saw what was coming and ducked out quickly, donning a head set and pretending to work and listen to music. But I felt terrible for the woman in the aisle seat who absorbed the blunt force of the man’s self-absorbed river of spews. I wondered if I should make up an excuse for her or engage him in “conversation” so she could have a break. But I lacked the fortitude. Besides, she’s a grownup — maybe in her late forties — and should know how to break it off politely.

So, here’s the twist ending. It’s not exactly O. Henry, but…

About two hours in, the man went to the bathroom. I leaned over and asked the woman if she was ok.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“He hasn’t stopped talking. Omigod!”

“I’m enjoying it.”

Maybe I would have thought so if I had been willing to listen. Maybe I missed an opportunity.

On the other hand, as we were leaving the plane, the man skipped ahead. “You’re a nice person,” I said to the woman. And the woman directly behind her said, “And how!” [Tags: misc]

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Coming back to the US from Toronto, you clear customs and immigration in the Toronto airport. Tonight, all the US passport holders were all standing in one line — maybe 20 of us — when an Immigration person told us to split into two parallel lines to take advantage of the two open desks. The guy who was seventh in line now became the first in the new line, taking the next 7 or 8 people behind him. But, because our new leader was a fair and wise leader, he let the next six people on the original line go ahead of us. Only when the woman who had been ahead of him had been served did he go through Immigration.

I thought this was so cool it was practically Canadian! [Tags: politeness americans canada toronto line_integrity]

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Today in the lovely summer resort of Chatham, as I went for a run between 7:10 and 7:43am, all the vehicles that passed me on the road were pickup trucks. [Tags: chatham]

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