afongen

Lisa Guernsey in the New York Times: In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus.

I’ve been watching this trend develop from afar, not often finding myself in conferences or lectures where there’s a wifi connection available. It’s at the same time exciting and intimidating. I never stay long in IRC because the cacophony quickly becomes overwhelming (if I can speak of “cacophony” in a text-based world), so I’m not sure that I would respond well to a mixed, simultaneous online-offline environment

Years ago, while working as an engineer at a radio station, my father learned to follow several audio input streams simultaneously. He carried the same skill into reading while watching TV and listening to family conversation. Growing up with this, I picked up on the reading-while-watching-TV thing, but it stops there.

I was about to write that I didn’t think that an online component would be useful or effective in a very small group, but then I realized how handy it could be in discussions or meetings to easily pass links or make quick notes for everyone to see. This is what first attracted me to Hydra. I suspect that an online back channel would be most useful in a lecture or conference only once a group reaches a certain size, yet that threshold may be very near a group’s optimal size, beyond which the back channel becomes too hard to follow and too great a distraction. It certainly would for me. I’d have to school myself to tune out one or the other.

Later on, I’d love to have a transcript of the online discussion, ideally synched with audio and/or video.

I urge you to read Clay Shirky’s “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” if you haven’t already. His “In-Room Chat as a Social Tool” is also quite instructive, especially for ideas about how these tools are actually used.

On a related note, Ray Ozzie’s idea for a combination wiki and collaborative text editor, and (Hugh Pyle’s quick implementation) is more than a little intriguing.

And hmmm… Groove text tool? A quick search for that led me to Groove’s Notepad, which appears to be a Hydra-like tool for Windows, but more. Groove does such cool stuff, I wish I could use it.

You can control and even stop animated GIFs. You can block images from different and/or selected servers. Now with the “Flash Click to View” extension for Mozilla/Firebird, you can block Flash until you want to see it. Finally, an end to those god-awful annoying Flash ads.

A friend arrived home the other day to discover ChemLawn signs in her yard. Her lawn and fenced garden had been treated, and a bill left for her.

Or rather, a bill had been left for her neighbor two doors down — ChemLawn had gone to the wrong house. Our friend never hired them to treat her lawn. And now everything in her garden — the garden she tended every day, the garden that had been thriving — is dead.

When she called ChemLawn to complain, they told her that she “didn’t have to pay for the treatment.”

When she pressed that no, ChemLawn would be compensating her for damage to her garden, they responded, “Well, we don’t know how much those plants were worth.”

Who says stupid shit like this?

That’s where it stands now. Rest assured that is not where it will end.

Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites is now available online. The whole thing. This book is essential reading for those who need to, well, build accessible web sites. I still think that it is hands-down the best book out there on the subject.

(Online version discovered via Mark Newhouse’s WebVisions presentation, “CSS, Markup, and Standards”.)

Every now and then the universe seems to beat me over the head with something until I pay attention.

Years ago, I encountered almost daily references to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for an entire month before I finally picked up a copy — at which point the references abruptly stopped.

A while later I found myself in the same boat with Antonin Gramsci, until I holed myself up in a library and devoured his Notebooks. Nothing like immersing oneself in the thought of an imprisoned Italian Marxist to add flavor to a week spent visiting your girlfriend at college. But it worked: Gramsci stopped haunting me.

Now the same thing seems to be happening with Moleskine. I can only hope that buying and using one of these very, very nice notebooks will have some effect.

I’ve got a few things in the works here but they’ll have to wait — I’m heading to the lake for the weekend. It’s Kiara’s family’s cabin. I don’t actually like it there much, but watching Owen swim in the lake will be a blast: he loves to be in the water. Gets that from his mom.

We’re celebrating the triple birthday: in a highly unlikely coincidence, Kiara’s father, her brother, and I all have the same birthday. How’s that for uncanny?

S: The boy is sleeping, so speak in hushed tones.

K: (rests hand on S’s head)

S: …or communicate in Morse code by tapping on my head.

K: (silence)

S: ???

K: I’m trying to remember if it’s P waves or S waves that pass through your skull when I tap on it.

Macromedia has announced Contribute 2, though it has not yet been released. A coworker is doing an exhaustive review and user group test of Contribute for possible use at work, and along the way we’ve noticed some oddities. Version 2 will likely be released before we make a decision. Not sure what effect that will have.

Aside from features like FlashPaper, which looks to be a PDF competitor, it’s not yet clear what’s new. Beyond bug fixes, I’d be interested in something that’s more suited to an environment in which more than one person is using a computer. In Contribute 1, a web site administrator sends a connection key to the site updater(s). The connection key contains the username and password necessary to access and edit the site, and is available for use by anyone with access to that computer. I’m not comfortable with that, and it’s downright unusable in a situation like a computer lab. This and other little niggling details have been discussed on the newsgroups quite a bit, so I’ll be curious to see what Macromedia’s done.

At least there will be a Mac version now.

As to FlashPaper, I’d like to see how accessible it is. Text in Flash files should be accessible to screen readers … some screen readers, at any rate … but I don’t know how structured text is dealt with. I expect it to take a while to approach the sophistication that PDF has, if that’s even a goal.

That reminds me: I must look at Acrobat 6. I have it but haven’t even looked to see what’s new.

Here I am, diligently ignoring the announcement that AOL is nixing Netscape. Much too busy.

An internal memo from eBay.

It has come to my attention that several employees are talking at their desks during scheduled work hours. I must convey the importance of NOT talking at your desk, or to your desk partner. Talking greatly decreases work productivity, and company morale.

If you need to talk to someone, please schedule a meeting room where you can talk, or use the break rooms. If you are caught talking at your desk, you will be escorted into a meeting room and questioned as to why you are talking, and if it is relevant to your job. If not, you may be subjected to disciplinary actions.

We want you to work hard at eBay, and enjoy your work. Please contact management if you have any questions.

I wasn’t sure whether I should post this, because I’m never quite sure that the “leaked” memos at InternalMemos.com are for real. Is posting this just rumor-mongering? But then I realized just how very funny this one was, and I don’t care if it’s real. It could be.