Ok, I admit I was a bit testy last night. I have the flu, I have a father-in-law for whom I’ve bought two computers and three operating systems (XP, Linux, Mac) who still can’t pick up his frigging email, and I just wanted to go to sleep.

Instead, I found myself doing Kafka’s version of the Turing Test: Can a computer convince you that it’s usable if you’re connected by telephone to an intelligent human who, when it comes to computers, knows how to move a mouse and find letters on a keyboard but little more?

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions in the comments section of the previous post, including your restraint in offering rude suggestions.

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I just spent an hour on the phone with my father-in-law failing to help him find his email client. It used to be there, but it vanished from the tool bar at the bottom. Now we can’t get it back. None of the Finder options seem to actually help us find anything.

I know it’s there. I know it’s “easy.” But it sure ain’t intuitive. Anyone want to give me the most basic instruction about how to find things on the !@#$% Mac, OS X?

As Dr. Dean would say, “Aaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhh!”

[Ten minutes later] I can’t even walk my father-in-law through the process of using Safari to get to his ISP’s home page so he can use the Web client to get his mail. He clicks into the adress bar. It highlights. He presses the Delete key. It clears. He types in “www.rcn.com” and presses the Return key. (Why isn’t it called the Enter key? Why is Mac still stuck in the world of typewriters?) A window comes down, obscuring the address bar, telling him that the server can’t be found because somehow the address has become http://wwwwww.rcn.comcom (or something like that). We try it three times. I give up.

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RCN, my ISP, has recently upped its performance to 5 gigabits. (I sometimes get my units confused so go ahead and have a good laugh at a dumb liberal arts major.) According to DSLreports. I’m running at 4.1 and SpeedCheck says I’m at 4.4. I don’t mean to rub your faces in it, but downloading is pretty durn peppy. Why, my pornographic spam is downloading in a fraction of the time that it used to! (Upload times are still under 700kbps.)

So, when will RCN start offering Voice over IP?

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My Vonage phone arrive yesterday afternoon. I followed the simple instructions for plugging it into my cable modem and now I’m making calls to anywhere in the US or Canada – 500 minutes/month for $15.

So far, the sonic quality has been as good as a “real” phone. Yep, them Voice over IP bits can hold their own. And the plain ol’ telephone company, the one with the network that’s too smart for it’s own good, ought to be worried.

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X1 is the best desktop search engine I’ve found for Windows. It indexes your email, your contacts, and all the files on your desktop. Want to find that email talks about phlogiston? By the time you’ve finished typing in “phl,” X1 will have found it. I use it maybe 5 times a day.

Now X1 is starting to market itself. Good. It’s worth the $100 in time savings alone. It’s held up well as my email archive has grown to 110,000 messages. And the company has been very responsive to bug reports and enhancement requests. So, go X1! I hope you make a bundle.

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HP yesterday announced further moves to bring it to the forefront of user-hostile digital restrictions management.

Palo Alto, California-based HP said that it had licensed Intel’s high-bandwidth digital content protection technology, which is designed to ensure that video cannot be intercepted and recorded as its travels between devices, such as between a personal computer and a TV display screen.

Felice Swapp, who heads up much of HP’s digital rights management work, said that the Intel technology is invisible to consumers, and that it made more sense for HP to license that technology from Intel rather than to develop it itself and possibly create a competing standard.

Let’s argue about DRM later. For now, let us all join together at the felicity of the name of the person who heads up HP’s DRM initiative…

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Some folks have started a futurist/singularity/cosmic sort of blog. I’m not much of a believer in the thought-is-software idea and have only achieved enlightment a couple of times in my life and then it came in the form of a pill, but the site is lively in the Bucky way and is full of colorful illustrations.

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I’ll be on the road through Wednesday, researching an article for Wired on how we end-users are going to find the snapshots we’re looking for when we each have 25,000+ photos on our desktops.

I’m leaving tonight to visit Corbis on Monday. They have a few million photos, so they’ve given this issue some thought. I’m particularly interested in how they create and manage the taxonomies and other metadata.

Then, after traveling all day Tuesday, I’ll spend most of Wednesday in the Iron Mountain hole in the ground where Corbis stores its prints and negatives.

The article is not about Corbis, though. Corbis, I hope, will give a way into some of the issues. I’ve already spoken with a bunch o’ folks about what’s going on in this field. If you know of someone I should talk with about how we’re going to manage the oceans of digital photos we’ll be storing, let me know…

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I’m talking at the Wireless Future conference. Here comes the blurb:

Time is running out to register for the Wireless Future conference, which will be held March 12-16 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Explore the future of licensed and unlicensed wireless technology with such luminaries as Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs), Kevin Werbach (organizer of Supernova and author of New America Foundation’s Radio Revolution), Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legendary Dave Hughes, David Weinberger (author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Dewayne Hendricks of Dandin Group, Joichi Ito of Neoteny, Ltd., Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury, John Quarterman and many more! This is a great conference for wireless entrepreneurs, business strategists, developers, inventors, creative thinkers and anyone else interested in the promise of mobile technology. Sponsored by Andrews Kruth, Metrowerks, Motion Computing, RockSteady Networks, The Futures Lab, Polycot Consulting, Austin Wireless Alliance and Ink PR. [Link to Wireless Future] [Direct Link to Registration – currently $225.00 for four days, includes access to South by Southwest Interactive programming.]

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In response to my post about a Microsoft presentation at Emerging Tech, Bob “Professor” Morris points us to a Microsoft page that explains something important about its XML schema for Word, Excel, etc.:

Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.

So, Microsoft’s patents prevent me from writing a program that reads a Word XML file? Wow, that’s harsh.

And besides, isn’t “schema” already a plural?

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