Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Michelle Singletary, columnist with the Washington Post, is starting the Color of Money Book Club.  Each month she will promote one personal finance book that can help us navigate out of the mess the economy now seems to have found itself in.  Her first selection is The Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason $ 6.99 from Signet.   She selected this for several reasons - 144 pages quick read, inexpensive, but most important an old book with time tested wisdom about building wealth, using parables set in ancient Babylon.  We are invited to an on-line discussion of the book Oct 23 at noon CDT http://www.washingtonpost.com but if we want to win one of the dozen copies she will be giving away, our entry must be postmarked by Oct 7.  Details in her Oct 2 column. 11:41:49 PM

Remember Longitude, the PBS special shown in America on A+E, based on the book by Dava Sobel?  How about The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester?  Well, to that collection add The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, featured Inside Borders Oct 2002 edition, a book store chain recently arrived in Evansville Indiana, where I live, but undoubtedly a familiar chain name in many larger cities.  What these 3 books have in common is that they help us understand the history of science by following along the struggles of the people who made the discoveries. 2 astronomers in the 1700'ds attempted to measure planet Earth, and their research led to our metric system, but apparently they made a mistake, and covered it up.  What mistake?  Aha, now you will have to read the book, 11:34:12 PM

This problem that dws describes below, is sometimes I have contributed to with my blogging, that people who do not heavily participate in News Aggregation might not see.  It is also something that a lot of newbies, which Doc obviously is not, might get in a habit of doing without realizing how it can aggravate many of their site visitors.    The main reason it happens a lot with me is the whole business of a flaky OS connected to a flaky internet connection ... at any moment our browser connection might crash, so we want to key a little, save it, key a little more, save it. The first suggestion is to have the 3 buttons activated so that if you think you might want to tinker with a post some more, you do not use one of the publish options until you no longer think that way.  However Radio Wish, we also need some additional buttons to save something longer while posting the stuff around us, and also being able to clearly see what has not yet been posted, and what has been updated since that last publish. My second thought is if Radio Outlining can be done in stories (I do not know if it can), then as we get into something that calls for some further re-write, such as in my mini-essay on the plight of a Nigerian woman that my Google referers tell me a flood of people think is a hoax, then perhaps it is time to move that stuff to a story, and leave a pointer at the old permalink redirecting visitors to where it went, with a variation on John Patrick's technique. But a Radio Wish that would further enhance this mutual Knowledge Management would be to have a public url that has our stories alphabetized by title, that is to our shortcuts what the public stories page is to our stories directory.  Your radio application has to be running to access the our links.  To the extent that we can make it more user-friendly for people to navigate our stories, and also incorporate outlining and everything else, the more we will put in stories that which some of us are now putting in the date navigation area. [dws.] QUOTE Doc, I love ya man for all you've done and said so well for years. But I hate the way you blog here; Doc Searls Weblog. Am I the only one? Maybe it's something at my end but I don't think so. What I get through my aggregator looks like Doc keeps changing the same item all day long (maybe in an outliner of something), reposting it time after time as it grows throughout the day. This produces two problems at my end: I see the same stuff over and over in my aggregator, each time with something added at the top. If I want to post a reference to a item from Doc I have to dig through the whole days mega-post to find and edit out the one item I want to reference. If you know Doc personally, please gently tell him that a blog should be one item, one post, next item, another post. Thanks, dws. UNQUOTE [dws.] 4:09:30 PM

I'd like to take this Technology Wish a bit further, Radio Tip thanks to a hassle I had posting this, and figuring out how to handle it.  Background: I hope you do not get duplicate posts because I had macro errors until I Prefs / News Aggregator / Where to go after Posting / turned it off ... basically I used the magnifying glass on dws.Radio.FAQ to locate the post I had remembered from earlier, then did my POST from there, but on the way back there is a bug in Radio, that I just discovered today, where it can't find where it came from when we not use standard path posting from New Aggregator, giving us a Macro error.  At this point it lost what was on my home PC and only published to my public site, where I copied that to my home PC and tried again.  Solution: Thus the tip, so that others can avoid the same hassle ... if you plan to use the magnifying glass to gather all of one News Aggregation source together, then POST from there, turn off that Preference first until you are done with any POSTs from that particular source or by that route. [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] QUOTE Radio Wish: [John Robb] Wouldn't it be interesting to have an RSS variant (new name obviously) for subscribing to personal contact data off of weblogs?  Name, weblog name, weblog location, physical address (or as much as you want to provide), spam free e-mail account location, IM link to username, location of RSS feed, Bio info, bio pic, resume, etc.  To a large extent this would replace my bookmark and e-mail contact list.  I truly think that weblogs are starting to become global 24x7 business cards.  This would help me collect them. Answer: [Kunekt] Kunekt Cards make your contact information available as an RSS or RDF (News) feed. UNQUOTE [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] One Dream: I want to be able to take business cards to a scanner to put the info in a personal contact place on my PC ... for those of us without specialized scanners connected to our PCs, think one of those full service photocopy places & the data going onto a CD Rom, in which I might go to the place with my CD Rom of old business cards and get some more scanned in.  Part of the process might also include providing links to software places that process this contact information various ways, just in case we not already happy with what we have.  Companies might issue to their corporate customers and vendors a CD Rom that has on it a company directory of business card like contacts, their web site map, some company brochures, etc.  everything needed when doing contacts with that outfit.  I think business people on the road might like to have a mini-portable business card scanner that would capture the data into a form to later plug into their laptop.  My vision is a box perhaps the size of a pack of cigarettes that can store scores of business cards for several days, then you plug it into some port of your PC to download what it has accumulated. Another Wish: Perhaps the people who do Themes and advice on Navigation Links can guide us into a specialized form for About Us, that has many suggested things we could fill out, but if we leave them blank, they do not eat up space where someone looking at the results.  We might want to have several versions / copies of this.  One that anyone visiting our weblog can click on to get what we publically share with anyone.  Another to be sent with our configuration when we have need of tech support.  Some of the form could be filled out automatically by some software that looks at our PC and our Radio settings, much like the Weather Link now does (Your Radio Application has to be running for this link to serve you). Yet another future desire: When I am using my telephone, I want to be able to verbalize Call Jay in Columbus Call IBM Tech Support Call Susan in Cincinnati Call John in Australia Call Papa John's Pizza And then the telephone would automatically dial whatever the phone # is that is associated with that person or place that I call regularly.  I don't have to look up the number, I don't have to remember a speed dial directory, vastly reduced risk of a wrong number.  Whoever can figure out how to make this work has got a potentially very large world wide audience of people who might want that technology.  I can see several possibilities for getting there. PDA type interface to a box attached to home or office telephone where we can key in stuff, then speak into a microphone that this # we just entered is associated with whoever at what company.  When the voice input to phone switch is flipped on, stating the word Call in immediate proximity to the phone, triggers the voice input to match the next words with its directory.  This would serve people with standalone phones. Have the kind of wire running from PC to telephone plug that we used to use for modem dial up before high speed internet, but now this wire would be used to get data from PC to the phone's voice input box.  We could download updates from John Robb's vision into our phones. Mobile Phone users when they push some button, that connects them to Wireless Internet Telephone Directory that is their personal voice recognition system like I just described.  Then when we use this, the last step in the matching who we want to call in the directory is to actually make the connection. Growth in this industry will mean dimunition of us getting calls that are wrong numbers, although I will still get calls from people who read tiny print ads in the newspaper classified and misdial and get me instead.  Perhaps the newspaper can come with an electronic plug-in for your voice recognition phone system, like a CD Rom except designed to reply to the ads. 3:26:05 PM

News Search Engines (about 3 dozen rich links) 11:54:58 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.