I love Plaxo. Mainly because there is no other decent way to sync contacts and calendars between a Mac, Windows Mobile and Vista box. But it seems as though Plaxo, while keeping the Windows and Plaxo site correct, made my mac contact’s with a birthday get a day younger. (it shifted to a day later)
This actually happened a while ago, but I’ve been too lazy to post about it till now. Has anyone else had this problem? This started around the time of moving from NZDT to NZST, could this do it?
Pop! Now, there’s only one person (actually maybe a few…. Hi!) who actually understands why I started this week’s column with a Pop instead of a Bang, but for those not gifted with fine mouth control, lets say this article spawns from the event that recently occurred in my flat’s kitchen. A light bulb blew. Now instead of simply marching down to the local light bulb dispenser, I used this as an excuse to purchase some 12 compact fluorescent bulbs and proceeded to refit my flat.
I can’t help it; everyone eventually becomes all environmentally-conscious these days for one reason or another. Its a great time to be a greenie too, what with electricity prices rising, and a prediction that there’s a 5% chance we’ll have blackouts. I’m currently pricing up new servers at work, and their electricity usage is a major factor of my decision. Unfortunately, it seems the most-efficient (not to mention the one that gets my inner geek’s freak on) solution, a blade server system, adds $15k to that of the exact same setup with rack-mount servers. Not at surprising, the same went for those bulbs; an initially higher cost that will repay itself several times over in the course of its life.
The same goes for modern laptops as well; they’re made with less material, use much less power, still provide enough grunt for most users, not to mention are much more convenient, but as they are so much more expensive most people opt for either cheaper, older laptops or big power-sucking desktops, which can use 30w while completely off. Seriously, you’re paying ~$30/year just to have your desktop plugged in while you’re not using it. Would somebody please think of the environment!
On closing comments, for those of you who prefer your web-based word processor of choice to have a Adobe Lightroom-esque interface, as well as niceties such as proper fonts and a flash-animated pulsating cursor, instead of actual functionality like copy+paste (I’m just sour it doesn’t work with my mac), should check out Adobe Labs’ buzzword. Before you get your hopes up though, you can’t save directly to PDF. Yes, I was also very disappointed and Adobe should be ashamed with themselves. Also, I’ve decided as I can’t come up with actual content for it, I’ll be carbon-copy posting these articles on my blog, (hmmm, I think you’re here now…) for you to enjoy a day early. Maybe I’ll throw in a couple extra words for you die-hards, like Good Night San Diego, and thanks for stopping by.
Now that my head has stopped spinning and I can’t sleep, I have an apology to make. My 19th was the best birthday I’ve had. Beverley is an absolutely amazing girl, and I had the best 36 hours I can ever recall (apart from a slight snag called a COMP219 test). Not to mention, she really went to a lot of effort with this incredible cake!
Ok… Peppermint tea gone, let’s try sleeping again…
(I cheated. I’m falling asleep, so I posted this when I was still 18 and just added 3600 to the epoch)
19 is just such an unimportant year. Think about it; 15, 16, 17, 18, 20 and 21 are all landmark years, while 19 is just kinda… there. Well, thats enough database/algebra test study for one night.
As will be revealed in the near future (next week’s Nexus), I’m going to start posting my column here as well to try and attract feedback. For those not in the know, Nexus is Waikato’s student magazine, and The Nerdery is the name of a long-running column that I revived. I had previously called it static void Main(), but with new editor came the idea to rename my column to keep with Nexus’ tradition.
Don’t you just hate those days, just after you’ve had an absolutely awesome weekend, when something just starts to go wrong and creates a problem that you’re up till 1am trying to solve? I had one of those last night. I’ll give you a hint; it had something to do with Vista and how uncivilised and unprepared we really are for the 64-bit era. And thats my excuse to the editor as to why this week’s entry is late, and so if you’re reading this in Issue 9 its because Josh feels really sorry for me, in which case you should pat him on the back next time you see him. Anyway, on with the article.
My friend Daniel (congrats, you get the second-ever Nerdery plug!) recently spammed Facebook asking for ideas on how a particular website that we’ve all come to love or hate needs refinement. In true human style, instead of sending directly to him, everyone decided to reply to the entire group (strong deja-vu, after a certain incident with the student e-news mailing list), and so I also got a little inspiration and insight into what web designers love to neglect; consistency.
Now, consistency is one of these things that is often talked about but never really put into practice in the software world, and really has two parts, the first being the most but least important, design consistency. Despite all the common templates and HCI research, it seems people love to set their own standards in the hopes that others will follow it, which often leads to disastrous results. A good example of this is the ‘Brushed metal’ theme of pre-Leopard Mac OS X. Although Apple had set strict guidelines of how it was to be used, mostly for hardware-interacting parts of applications, Apple often broke these guidelines themselves because they thought applications with this theme looked better.
But there is an issue that can be solved today; identity consistency. Open ID and Live ID are two great ways to ensure a common and consistent profile on the interwebs, but they still are yet to really be used properly. Live ID is probably the better example; everyone has MSN Live Messenger, so why can’t we use that profile for Facebook and Bebo? Not only would it be convienent, but it would actually encourage users to change passwords more often, as they’d only have one password to remember. Not to mention, all that contact list harvesting would be much smoother. Maybe I’m just dreaming though…
So, now that I finally have time to post about this…
3rd. Loosing is always something you expect, but it still doesn’t make it any easier. That feeling you get when you realise it could be you, but then just slips away. Still, congrats to Canterbury, you’ll have a lot of fun in Paris. I’ll always have Seoul.
So, many people on the day and afterwards asked, where do we go from here?
We don’t have official plans yet, but I speak for the entire team when I say we don’t plan on sitting idly by. We’ve done a lot of work on our project, and strongly believe it can make a huge difference. The finals in Auckland made us realise how close we really are to making a difference, all we really have to do is keep going. Its even easier now that we don’t have the same time constraints and stressful nights.
We’ve already had a couple emails regarding our project, and Hamilton really is a small place with big potential. While I’ll be dropping the Imagine Cup tag, watch this space, we’re not done yet.
Yay for EvDO!
