All posts by tracy

Mac Tablet Netbook Thingy – My Predictions

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Update: See how I did with my predictions.
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  • Forget the iSlate. It’ll be called the “MacBook Touch” or thereabouts.
  • It’ll have a multi-touch screen (like the iPhone), but also will let you use an optional bluetooth keyboard and/or mouse.  An officially sanctioned Apple case will include a kickstand for using on a table top.
  • There will be both a regular LED and an OLED option.  The OLED version will be significantly more $$, but in addition to that you’ll get more flash memory.  For example, $499 for LED/32GB, $699 for OLED/64GB.
  • Front-facing iSight camera. NO rear-facing camera.
  • Microphone (duh).
  • Integrated battery (i.e., non-removable) with at least 4 hours of active life (slightly longer with the OLED version).
  • This thing will be THIN, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3Gs.
  • The OLED version will be HD quality.

Okay, this is all guesswork, and certainly not breaking any new ground. But I’m just going against the rails on some of the predictions I’ve seen out there (removable battery, “Minority Report” style full motion interface).  I *definitely* think OLED will play some role in this device, but that technology is still much more expensive than the traditional LED that we’re all more familiar with.  Given Apple’s history, they tend to lump in other goodies with their more expensive upgrades as a way of making it seem like more of a value.

We’ll find out next week!

Posted via email from taupecat’s posterous

I’m for Conan

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So now Leno is portraying himself as the victim in this whole mess? http://bit.ly/8syf4k  Really?  I’m sorry, but his whining and complaining has gotten him everything he’s ever wanted.  He’s a three-year-old, and NBC are the over-indulgent parents who’ll bend and break to his every whim.  Even listening to his “explanation” of everything on his show last night is disgusting, because he makes it like all the decisions were being made between HIM and the network execs, without ANY INPUT FROM CONAN WHATSOVER. WTF???

The only way for NBC to make this right is to cancel Leno’s lame 10 P.M. show, fire him, and keep Conan on “Tonight.”  But that’s apparently not going to happen.

I’d boycott NBC for all of this, but I don’t watch any of their shows to begin with.

(On the flip side, I’m not sure 11:35 is big enough for both Conan and Dave, as their styles tend to attract a similar demographic.  But with Leno frelling up the ratings leading into it, it’s impossible to know for sure.)

I just wish I could stay up late enough to watch any of these shows without being completely dead the next day.

Posted via web from taupecat’s posterous

Happy Holidays from the Rottons

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Greetings from the Rottons!

It’s been another year of change for the Rotton household.  In July, Sasha celebrated her first birthday. She’s now walking and babbling off in a language that only she understands. However, she can say things like “Mama,” “Dada,” and “hot dog” (which actually means Mickey Mouse, long story).

Sammy has gone from being a toddler to a full-fledged little kid.  He often demonstrates that he’s too smart for our own good: he can do simple arithmetic, reads voraciously, and has just started taking ice skating lessons with Mom.

Mark continues to work for the Discovery Channel, but Tracy has moved on to working for a federal government contractor.  She will be working with the Administration for Children and Families (part of HHS) to reengineer their website.

We’re also in the hunt for a new house, staying in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Hope the new year finds you happy and healthy. All the best for a very merry Christmas and a bright and prosperous new year!

Mark, Tracy, Sammy & Sasha

Kornheiser on Insurance

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Still don’t think that our current medical insurance system is screwed up? Listen to this clip from the Tony Kornheiser show (aired September 9, 2009). Apparently Tony doesn’t make enough money to qualify for dental insurance. Hello? Do they know who he is?

https://soundcloud.com/taupecat/kornheiser-insurance

A Radical Idea

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UPDATE: Brennan placed on IR today. So as Rosanne Rosannadanna would say, never mind.

I hope Colt Brennan gets cut today. For his sake.

After his injury on Thursday’s preseason loss to the Jaguars, the rumors have been flying around that in order to save face and keep four quarterbacks on their roster, the Redskins might keep Colt Brennan but place him on injured reserve, leaving Chase “don’t call him Daniels” Daniel as the #3. That would be the end of Brennan’s season, before it even begins.

If Todd Collins is truly solid as the #2 quarterback (which I think is a huge mistake, but then again, Vinny didn’t ask me), then either Colt or Chase has to go today, unless the ‘Skins really do pull off this IR move. But for what purpose? To have this same debate this time next year, plus any other QB they draft next April? A further lag on Brennan’s career, to be sure, made worse if he doesn’t get any playing exposure this year.

Better solution: cut him, trade him, whatever, so he can go to a team that needs him more. If he really is the Hawaiian wunderkind everyone thought he was last year, then surely three or four teams would be happy to snap him up and put him in their #2 spot, with a shot of taking real game snaps by November.

Washington is a town that likes to speed-date it’s quarterbacks. If you haven’t shown by your third game that you’re going to take this team to a Super Bowl, then we’re off to find our next true love. Campbell is the longest relationship we’ve had in a long time, and his future, at least right now, seems pretty solid here. So, Colt, if you’re looking for a meaningful, long-term relationship, it’s probably time you asked to see other teams.

Why I Haven’t Been Twittering Much Lately

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You may have noticed, fellow tweeps, that I’ve been kinda quiet on the twitters lately. It’s because I’m still annoyed, at both @twitter and myself, for losing the first 500 posts of my twittering life.

twitter-logoYou see, I knew, albeit in the back of my mind, about Twitter’s arbitrary 3,200 tweet history rule. That’s the rule that says no application that taps into the Twitter API, including the twitter.com website itself, will let you go back any further than 3,200 posts. I’d heard that that was the limit, but somehow it didn’t really register with me and before I knew it, I was at just over 3,700 tweets.

So what happened to the first 500? Hell if I know. I’ve seen other blog posts that say they exist. Even Twitter’s own documentation supports this:

Clients may request up to 3,200 statuses via the page and count parameters for timeline REST API methods. Requests for more than the limit will result in a reply with a status code of 200 and an empty result in the format requested. Twitter still maintains a database of all the tweets sent by a user. However, to ensure performance of the site, this artificial limit is temporarily in place.

(While writing this blog post, I checked my Twitter page and now it claims I have 3,861 tweets. Except that I know for a fact that it was at 3,708 over the weekend. And I’ve only tweeted a handful of times this week. So what the hell is going on over there?)

Twitter needs to get its act together. Maybe if they hadn’t spurned Facebook, they could afford servers that weren’t held together by chicken wire and duct tape. If being able to request more than 3,200 posts (which, at 140 characters apiece, amounts to LESS THAN 1 whole megabyte) could potentially crash the system, than a DoS attack should be the least of their worries.

So getting back to what I knew and when I knew it…

There was a point in time that I could retrieve all my tweets. I paged backward through the site and got back to tweet #1. But did I do anything about it? Make any attempt to save them? Of course not. I figured they were there in the cloud for whenever I needed them. I didn’t realize that that wasn’t quite true.

And so we’re here today, with Twitter’s self-described “artificial limit” of 3,200 lousy tweets. Hey, I really can live without all the live-tweeting I did of Redskins games. But I’m missing most of last year, the year my daughter was born and all the firsts that go along with that. These are my memories, and I’d really like them back.

Sure, I have the photos, and a few blog posts from here of the things I’ve done with my kids, but I’m really a short-form type of person. I don’t keep journals, diaries or blogs up very well as my friends can attest to. But Twitter has been so convenient for me, always at hand on my iPhone, that I’ve used it to keep a de facto log of my life.

I’m pissed at Twitter for holding those memories hostage, and I’m pissed at myself for not taking action before it was too late to save those first 500 (600?) tweets.

So that’s why I’ve been down on Twitter lately. I’m not going to stop tweeting, but I am going to be a little bitter about all this until it’s rectified. And I’m taking steps to get my intellectual property from this point on onto my own equipment as well and not rely anymore on Twitter’s cloud.