This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
2:35 PM Sunday, December 3, 2006
[Not to be confused with S&M.]
Another cold start. I've been writing more about new media and new gadgetry lately. Or more precisely, I've been writing about things that the "old" gadgetry can do that I just discovered. Old gadgetry? Consider the mobile phone, which is old in the sense that it has its roots in the Walkie Talkies of the Second World War, but now it's a multipurpose wireless data capture and communication device, if one goes to the trouble and expense, as I have, of buying one with multimedia functions and subscribing to a data plan, which costs more than just phone service.
For example, I've discovered the usefulness of text messaging. It's not just for Japanese schoolgirls any more. In an era when it's hard to reach anyone on a phone and talk to them, the text message fills an important gap. I've avoided it because I hated keying in text on my mobile phone keypad, with its tiny keys and the need to press a number key repeatedly to get a letter or a punctuation sign. By the way, a text message is also called an SMS. for short message service, not to be confused with S&M, which is something else.
I was cured of that text-entry "fear" at the internet future conference I attended a few weeks ago, called ">play" with a "greater than" sign preceding a lower-case P. The conference was held at the Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley. I had never been to the Business School before. It is a beautiful building with a sunny courtyard where lunch was served. But I digress, as well I should, because this is hypertext.
What enabled me to overcome my fear of keying in text on a mobile phone keypad was the service provided by Mozes, a text messaging startup. Participants in the conference were encouraged to send in questions to the speaker, moderator, or panelists at each session, using their mobile phones, preceding each message with a short keyword, and sending the message to M-O-Z-E-S on the keypad. Sitting in the audience at a conference provides lots of opportunity to take one's time to key in text and get the spelling right, and it was not as hard as I expected. The beauty of it was that my questions appeared on a screen behind the speaker, in a queue with the messages from others, and the speaker answered almost all of them. It was a lot different from jockeying for a microphone or passing in notes on paper scraps. An now, as Monte Python said, for something completely different. I'm going to send my mother a text message (to her email. Yes, she's 90 and she has email. Pretty cool, huh?). It's probably going to be just "Hi, Mom, what's up?", bur for someone who "never calls" it's better than nothing, right?
More links: SMS TextMessaging JapaneseSchoolgirl MMS
More images: PlayConference
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