August 2006
All entries and daily links from August 2006.
The Wayfinding Project
Friday, August 18, 2006 at 5:08pm 4 comments
Not long ago, Steve over at san francisco cityscape got in touch with me about giving our local transit signs a makeover with another friend of his.
We're frustrated no end by maps that are often out of date (sometimes by decades!), many times very confusing and recently a $500,000 connectivity study was published confirming this is a very high barrier to using transit.
We've had quite a few conversations both on- and off-line over how some simple, fast and rather cheap fixes could make a huge improvement. A few months ago I'd left a comment about doing something akin Design Eye for the Usability Guy.
Now we're putting our money where our mouths are with The Wayfinding Project.
We've started with a top ten list of improvements that can be made exclusively through improving signs and maps that would make it easier to find your way around and transfer between our numerous transit systems.
Planetesque
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 4:08pm 0 comments
So what exactly counts as a planet? The experts will be voting on that next week and expand the solar system could expand by more than a third or we might loose Pluto.
Mike is campaigning for Pluto and I listened to astronomers debate the issue with an odd urgency on the radio over something that won't actually change the number of rocks floating around the solar system.
I'm oversimplifying it, but the rules seem a little odd by defining a planet as something large enough it's gravity holds it in a round shape and orbits the sun and not another planet. It feels a bit like someone took the 8 major planets and tried to come up with a definition to fit them, when some of Jupiter's major moons have more in common with Earth or Mars then Jupiter itself does.
It's not a bad definition, but the resistance to let the other rocks into the Planets Club on a historical basis runs against science's principals. If the definition loosens up and we end up with dozens of planets, I don't think it will change anything. We'll just calling start calling the old ones the "major planets."
It's all semantics. Just as Burger King doesn't serve small drinks. They only have medium, large and extra large. The medium is still the small, only the names are changed.
A Mac in the Middle
Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 5:08pm 2 comments
My PowerMac G4 is nearly four years old now. It still does everything I need it do, and at a pretty good clip too. It can even hold it's own against the latest Intel powered Mac Mini, but as my photo and music libraries grow, the applications I use add more processor intensive features, it's starting to show it's age.
The introduction of the Mac Pro this week won't be changing that any time soon though. And for having four Xeon cores and as much else as it does, $2500 is a really good value. It's just too much for me.
This does leave a pretty big gap between the Mac Mini's lack of expansion and worse it's underpowered graphics chip built-in and the other extreme in the Mac Pro that offers more than I'd ever need.
I don't expect Apple to be releasing a Mac between the Mini and the Pro (at least not anytime soon) because it hasn't worked out well in the past (remember the G4 Cube?) and would likely just cannibalize sales of other macs.
Maybe once they've been on the market for a while and prices on the parts come down or there is a market share to be had, Apple will introduce a lower cost Mac Pro. Or maybe as newer models come out I can find one of these cheep.
Insignificant Others
Friday, August 4, 2006 at 10:08am 0 comments
A few weeks ago a friend invited me to see a musical he was involved with, Insignificant Others. I was a little hesitant about going to see it since I usually don't like Musicals.
I really enjoyed it. Part of that was just because the characters where new arrivals to San Francisco and falling in love with the City (the story, and the name, were inspired by Tales of the City), though that alone doesn't make the show.
There was a running joke about Starbucks that had me laughing so hard it hurt while the story line of one character hit a little to close to home and had me in tears.
I did feel a little wanting from the ending. It seemed to abrupt and not enough of a conclusion. There could have easily been another few scenes wrapping up some of the story lines and it wouldn't have felt tacked on.
It's running for another two weeks if you are interested in checking it out.
