One of the strange benefits of being out of work is the amount of time spent looking at online job postings. In this case, I’m looking at ads on Craigslist, specifically at ads for online bloggers. It seems everyone is looking to carve out their own special niche in the world, and nowhere is this more evident than online.  This particular ad discussed their design and writing style by posting an example blog.

The example blog is about an artist’s website – a common writing theme these days.  Turns out there is a guy, Cardon Webb from Queens, NY who redoes handwritten posters, simple posters selling a car or furniture or giving away a cat or searching for a lost dog. He goes home and designs beautiful posters with the original information, then returns to the poster and replaces it with his full-color high-quality artwork. He is careful to ensure that he only does this when there are two or more posters displayed in public. These words do not do his work justice.

To quote from the website:

[the artist] TAKES THE VERNACULAR OF SELF-DISTRIBUTED FLIERS AND TEAR-OFFS WE HAVE ALL SEEN IN OUR NEIGHBORHOODS. IT INVOLVES HIJACKING THESE UNCONSIDERED FLIERS AND REDESIGNING THEM, OVER POWERING THEIR MESSAGE WITH A NEW VISUAL LANGUAGE. I THEN REPLACE THE ORIGINAL WITH THE REDESIGN IN ITS AUTHENTIC ENVIRONMENT.

Examples of Cardon’s work from HowDesign.com

Traveling down-under to Australia earlier this summer, I arrived at Sydney airport to discover they sold SIM cards for AU$20. If I had taken my mobile phone (and IF it was unlocked, which is wasn’t), I could have just bought a card, plugged in and be good to go.

Upon my return to the States, I discovered an UNLOCKED Motorola mobile phone on DailySteals.com — for US$20. So as an experiment in frugality, and feeling kind of like Jason Bourne (“there’s a phone in your right jacket pocket, use that one …”), I bought it.

The package arrived, a polythene / plastic envelope with a nebulous shaped box inside. Ripping apart the envelope revealed a 9″ tube. As advertised, inside was a Motorola phone — from Mexico — in Spanish. 300 pesos. Un telephono MOTOFONE F3. Un cargador (charger), Un bateria (battery), Instructivo de Uso (instructions), Un chip Inteligente (Sim Card). Way too cool.  Especially as I’m working on my Spanish, the timing was just fun. (Mi telephono es sobre de la cama) <ha, ha>. Ok, back to the phone.

Motorola Motofone F5

For $20, you can bet it’s basic. The numbers are HUGE. And it does texting, but there’s no alpha keyboard, so it’s like your old Nokia phone back in 1997. This phone is so basic, it won’t draw any attention. Hmm, perhaps you’ll see people running the other way when you use it. According to Wikipedia, folks have even thrown it out of a three floor building and driven over it, and it still worked. The phone is sold in a variety of colors, and two GSM variants — North America (850/1900) and Europe (900/1800). So no, you can’t take this phone with you when you’re traveling across the pond, but it will work great in Argentina. And no, this phone will not work in Australia. At least not the one I purchased in el Norte. Look up your country on the GSM Frequency Chart.

Plug in the charger and a few hours later, away we go. Change language from Spanish to English via the voice prompt, pretty good. Now for a card. I went to Cricket. The guy was busy with someone and so unable to give me even a nod of the head, so I left and went to the AT&T store.

Here’s the deal: along with a unique phone number, I can recharge the card online, dial 611 or go in to the store. Minimum purchase $25, with choice of three plans: basic ($0.25/min), $1/day for unlimited use or $3/day for unlimited phone, media and data-plan. Quick math shows if you have a full media phone (which this is not) and used it every day, you would pay $90/mth. Use the phone even one-time in a day, and that’s your daily quota. So I chose the charge-me-by-the-minute plan. I can upgrade plans any time, if I’m going to make a lot of calls. That’s $30/mth for basic service.

So for now, this is my cellphone. Total outlay $70 for the last two months. $20 for the phone and $50 for the phone card. I still have $47 available. Jason Bourne may have been on the run, but he knows how to keep technology simple and practical. Looks like I’ll still need to grab another phone at the Sydney airport after all …

Oregon has the MOST sensible voting program I’ve read about: your ballot comes in the mail and you fill it out in the privacy of your own home. Then you either drop it in the mail or return it to one of the ballot drop-boxes located throughout the community.

There were several instances whilst living in Florida where I could not vote because the polling location had moved and the geniuses at the County Voter Registration office failed to inform of the move. An interesting way to manipulate results.

For more on voting manipulation see the movie Man of the Year, staring Robin Williams. Excellent, well written and mildly truthful.

Keep citizens involved in Portland’s growth. Voting YES gives the Portland City Council control of the PDC – Portland Development Commission budget. Unequivocally we agree with former mayors Bud Clark & Vera Katz who both agree — SAY NO TO 26-92. These mayors oversaw Portland’s greatest growth period spanning twenty years, from 1984-2004.

Saying NO keeps the current system in place — a citizen’s committee that oversees the budget. Portland City Council approves urban renewal areas and plans, then citizens on the PDC are responsible for implementing and funding these plans.

If this measure passes, the five-member City Council will have complete control over Portland’s urban renewal, with no citizen oversight. Shame on you, Mayor Tom Potter. After the election, we hope to say NO to your power-grab.

If you love Portland, vote NO on Measure 26-92.

For more details, check in with Doug Blomgren, Chair No on 26-92 Committee, 921 SW Washington St, Ste 470, Portland, OR 97205.

I can’t wait for my very own iPhone. Right now I have a Sony Eriksen P.O.S. special. It even has a button on the side called PTT. Push-to-Talk. Marketing genius meets stupid techno-geek. Whenever (and I mean WHENEVER, you can’t turn the damn thing OFF) — where was I? Oh, yea, stupidity in mobile-phone design.

Whenever you make a call, pull the phone from your pocket, your backpack, your cool Nike backpack with the iPod zip-pocket at the top, you flip it, and ACCIDENTALLY push the PTT button on the Sony Eriksen 525. I hate it. THE BUTTON IS HUGE. IT STICKS OUT!! Everyone I know who has the phone (because it looked cool on the website) hates it. So you have to reply to the menu and say “No, I don’t want to pay for PTT” and then you can use the phone. Held hostage by bad design and the marketing department at Cingular…

How do I know that the Apple iPhone will be everything I want it to be? Because it’s an Apple. BUT WAIT. Apple is NO LONGER a computer company. Apple is an end-user technology enabler. After all, they don’t call themselves Apple Computer anymore… True, you are right, I say. Glad you remembered… Apple has done it. They understand what we (humans) need. We need an interface to the electronic world.

Next, I want the phone to interact with my personal environment. I want it to talk to my car, talk to my house, etc. I know that’s in the design phase, but I can dream-up some pretty nifty apps for the iPhone. “The back door is closed but unlocked…” Ahh, thanks iPhone.

But I digress — back to the phone as it exists now. Intelligence in a box. They must actually sit around and think about end-users. Wow. No, this is no ordinary phone: this is three-three-three must-have devices in one:

• Widescreen iPod > piggyback on the worldwide winner
• Revolutionary Phone > all the new phones suck
• Breakthrough Internet Device > eh? what the Zune ?

(the above is from the Apple website… > comments are mine, all mine >>)

Come on, sing along with me: I want my, I want my, I want my BID (Breakthrough Internet Device). And they are holding up the new operating system (Leopard) so they can focus on delivering the iPhone to the masses? SMART MOVE. kudos. Even though the new OS has smart-backups (wow, I like that), long overdue. After all, Microsoft pushes out software delivery dates, so you might as well do the same… Speaking of Microsoft, the iPhone has GoogleMaps. Wow. Check out the demo.

Gotta love that every 3rd party company from here to Mumbai will be working on smart interfaces for the iPhone. I want to plug iPhone into my car and go.  Give me my maps on a heads-up display. Calculate mileage and cost for Safeway vs. Thriftway. At $4.00 a gallon, that quick savings in the larger store should be calculated as I back down the driveway. Turn left- $2.50 to the store. Turn right – $1.75. ok, not too big a difference, but it increases one’s options! Hey, maybe I’ll break out the bicycle. My phone tells me it’s a less than 8-mile round-trip to the store…

It’s no wonder Jim Cramer from MadMoney recommends Apple. If Nike went over $100 before the split, Apple’s certainly headed the same way.

In our society, when something is hot, or approaching critical mass, all of a sudden a great number of people talk about it. So it is this month with Apple. Not only did Steve Jobs time the announcement of the iPhone to conincide perfectly with CES, but there seems to be a constant low-lying “buzz” about all things Apple. That is Apple, not Apple Computer. Be sure you know the name changed, to reflect the vision of the mighty pomme.

Take for example today’s post by Apple Recon about the MacMini. Not that the small size and light weight doesn’t inspire, but it’s the superb management of the spin surrounding these product announcements that leads us to give Cupertino so much street cred.

And today, I’ve seen the future of technology and it’s a museum of boxes. So what do you do when you have almost 30 Mac Classic II’s stacked up in your basement? You create a museum of course. And that museum must have a bar. And that museum must be a shrine to everything Jobsinian. Enjoy the other photos of this Mac-afficionado’s home. He could charge admission.

Peter Coffee, an editor of eWeek magazine has published a list of 25 killer apps of all time. This list totally reflects his personal timeline in the computer publishing business and sets a benchmark for ‘killer apps’ although I’m a fan of his work. I’ve been in technology since 197x…’ Big deal. I wrote code on a DEC PDP-11 using a Hazeltine terminal at Univ of Miami back in 1979. The technology sucked big time.

Mitch Kapor made boucoup $$ from Lotus 1-2-3. Many of us cut our teeth on 1-2-3’s macros. The Lotus Magazine from the 1980’s was a GOLDMINE of information for spreadsheet nerds. My 1-2-3 macros were sometimes pages long and could repaint the bathroom and regrout the kitchen counter. Then came Excel with VBA and oh-my-God it was the equivalent of programming nirvana. 1-2-3 was reserved for the back shelf at Goodwill. And of course we didn’t have to shoe-horn it into dBaseIII+ > we just linked or cut-n-pasted it into MS-Access and instant database relativity. Woo hoo!!

So what is the real ‘killer app’ list? I could list my own. Peter has DEFINITELY set off an interesting discussion with this article. Sad part is, many folk don’t have tools in their toolbox and wouldn’t know how to maniuplate data (or want to, for that matter). But if you’re a ‘data guy’ (or gal) what does work for you? Does it work for your corporation? Many of us have jobs because we know how to manipulate data when others don’t. Makes for a strange ‘niche’ in life.

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Sponge divers found a set of gears, a ‘mechanism’ on an ancient shipwreck around 1900. Named after a nearby Greek island, it turns out this ‘mechanism’ is an ancient astronomical computer, estimated to originate around 80 BC. Scholars are not exactly sure what the device was used for, but it appears to track the rotation of the earth around the sun, the phases of the moon, and even eclipses.

Past or future dates were entered via a crank, and the mechanism calculated the position of sun, moon and stars. It appears that this device used heliocentric calculations, which may indicate that viewpoint was more widely held than previously understood.

Approximately 70 fragments of this machine have been discovered, and they are located in the Greek National Archaeological Museum. Photographs, using PTM’s, reflectance imaging techniques applied to both sides of these fragments are available at HP Labs. A most complete history of the device is available on WikiPedia.

Antikythera Mechanism Research Project | Research | Nature Article | Google Map | BBC News | Irish Independent News

Check out Photosynth – a 3-D photo experience from Microsoft. This technology takes stitching photos together to a whole new level. 100’s of photos using back-end technology developed by SeaDragon (client-server efficient streaming of photo data) & Univ of Washington (machine vision research – PhotoTourism). Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research).

Effectively by combining these technologies, Microsoft has created a 3-D model of the world, and now they are aligning individual photos to that 3-D world model. This is a web-service. Currently they use about 200 photos to create these 3-D effects, and they can do amazing things. This interview / product demo with Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Gary Flake of Microsoft’s Live Labs shows some of what this software does.

Splat mode: pictures related to photos (8mpix images). In this demo, Gary Flake shows an artist Gary Fagin’s studio and view 80 mega-pixel images over broadband. Rich detail, a sense of spatial continuity that’s preserved. Also St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. Navigation is reasonably seamless, as the pictures overlap.

Microsoft LiveLabs: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

Yea, this Podtech has the inside scoop on the IT industry. It’s worthwhile keeping his blog on your horizon. Good stuff. Especially nice is his scoop about Sun open-sourcing Java. Nice going. He got the IM… www.podtech.com – hours before the mainstream press!

It looks like the Portland TrailBlazers are going to the finals this year. So far, 4-3. Wow. Who woulda thunk it? Apparently there are four team-members from Portland?