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How awesome is this? This is how I see our schools going if they would just accept the future:

A school in Arizona will be the first school in the state to go completely wireless and use laptops in class. On-line texts and white papers will make up their reading material.

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Don’t know much, just switched on the TV, London tube system as apprently been shut down.Two tubes have crashed, A Bomb has blown up a bus, thats about all i know. Link goes to BBC. I don’t know if it was a terrorist attack, but we’ll see.

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Recently I have found myself drawn into what seems to be the latest craze in technology; the ability to retrieve audio and video content straight from the internet. While this sounds like something that we have had for a while now I am referring to two specific aspects of this, Podcasts and IPTV.

Podcast is just a tech term for basically radio shows (though most are just normal people recording shows on their computers, think pirate radio) that can be subscribed to and a program on your PC retrieves them for you as new programs you subscribe to are released. The term itself is a reference to the Apple iPod MP3 player but any mp3 player will work. You can also burn the files to CD and listen in a regular CD player which is the method I am using until I can get some problems with the input into my car radio worked out. Some of the shows I listen to are This Week in Tech (http://twit.tv), a technology discussion show, and Dragonpage (http://www.dragonpage.com), a fantasy literature discussion show. The best way to subscribe to podcasts is to use a program such as ipodder though Apple has just released a new version of their itunes program that may be more user friendly for nontechnical users (http://www.itunes.com). I also want to mention another awesome type of podcast; audio books. These audio books are audio books that you can subscribe to and every week a the next chapter of the book is pulled down to your PC. You can find some of these books at http://podiobooks.com. Hopefully more content will be made available in this format.

IPTV is an even cooler technology in my opinion. Basically you have people recording shows and making them available for download on the internet. Some great examples of this are Systm (http://systm.org), CommandN (http://www.commandn.tv), and From the Shadows (http://fromtheshadows.tv). While all of these shows are technology related I believe that there is a lot of potential in this technology for other types of shows to be made available in the future. This is especially true for shows that major networks seem to be avoiding (I will avoid the inevitable rant on “reality TV”… Anyway, check out both of these technologies, I am sure you will find something that you like.

Wow! Three months with no posts. I will get better I promise. Work has been insanely busy along with everything else I have going on. One day I will be able to actually write some of the technology articles that I think up but do not seem to have the time to actually write.

Montana View
Originally uploaded by taltoz.

Just thought I would share another Montana pic while I am finishing up a real post. Enoy…

Boy am I bad at this. As honorable as my intentions are I just never
get a round to writing here. Don’t give up hope though I have an
writeup I want to do on podcasting and it’s implications for media
devices such as PocketPCs in addition to some product reviews I need
to get to. Stick around.

Montana Sunset
Originally uploaded by taltoz.

I wanted to test out the new flickr setup so here is a picture from our families spot in Montana. I have not seen it in person yet but hope to one day soon.

As sincere as my intentions are it seems that every time I promise to be more consistent with this site it does not happen. While my reasons excuses are good it still annoys me that this site falls through the cracks. So here I am once again looking at ways to keep this site up. I have signed up for with a flickr account so I now have a place to store my pictures and can insert them into this site. We’ll see what else I can come with the liven this place up…

It is amazing how much the weather affects us. I spend the majority of my day lost inside a dungeon the maze of corridors that include my office (not that I am complaining, at least I have real walls and not a cube farm) without even a single window to the outside (the subject of windows that look out into a bland hallway is post in itself). For the most part the only time I see the outdoors is when I leave for lunch or leave for the day. Yet here we are on our second major hurricane (third if Bonnie had not fizzled out) and like everyone else around me I find myself glued to the weather channel and online reports of the storm. Which segways into the topic of how much technology has affected our reaction to weather (saw that one coming huh?). Think about it; one hundred years ago a persons concept of the weather was limited to their general area, what was affecting them. Sure there were exceptions such as the military which were concerned with weather on a larger scale but for your average person it did not matter what the weather was like in a different state, much less a different country. Now here we are watching these storms as they form on the far side of an ocean and tracking their movements for days. For myself the ability to perform this monitoring from my PC instead of being forced to watch the weather channel on TV is huge since I cannot stand to watch the weather on TV. I can pull everything up on my PC and have immediate access to the information that I want. The end result of all of this is a society of information addicted individuals. Isn’t it great?

It is funny how computer people get attached to certain programs and services. Anyway, no other service provides such a clear example of this as Google. The Google search service is the mainstay of many (if not most) technical computer users. As a search service it is so effective and simple that most (habitual) users would tell you they could not live without it. This has allowed Google to branch their services out to other areas (building on the search engine) such as news, shopping, and now (the current tech’s golden fleece) a Google email account; Gmail. And as usual Google made sure they did it right. They giving out a gigabyte of storage for each email account. This is roughly a little over a cd and a half worth of data, which is unheard of for free online storage. The combination of this amount of storage plus the lure of having an email account with the Google name on it has people lining up to get their hands on an account, myself included. What has made this even more interesting is the way that Google has gone about giving out accounts. Since the service is still in a closed “beta” status you cannot simply sign up for an account. Instead you have to receive an invitation from a current Gmail user. The original accounts were issued only to select individuals so they were able to invite their friends and so on with each wave of invitations that Google allowed the users to send. The demand for these invitations was so great that websites have been developed based entirely on obtaining a Gmail account. By using this invitation only system Google has been able to take the already high level of demand that existed for their email service and spin it into an all out gold rush. Even now, several months after they first started the process, people are still searching the net begging for an invitation. These invitations are already so numerous that if you want one you will more than likely be able find one online without having to resort to buying one off of Ebay. The good news is that the Gmail system actually lives up the hype and I have found it to be an excellent email system (though i wish that Google provided POP/SMTP support for it so that I could use Outlook). There really is gold out there so the rush will continue.