Dylan Greene dot com

Over the weekend I launched the preview of the new TeacherReviews.com. It shows off the new look designed by foO. Many of the new features I've been working onaren't part of the preview yet. I figure something is better than nothing. As I finish features I'll beadding them to the site.

Also in TeacherReviews news, John Hicks of Hicks Design, whocreated theFirefox logo and Thunderbird logofor theMozilla-based browser and email tools, will be creating the new logo for TeacherReviews. He's extremely busy with other projects right now so we wont see his design until August, but the wait should be worth it.

Jon Stewart (of Daily Show fame)returned to his alma mater, William & Mary, this past Sunday to deliver the commencement address for the class of 2004.

His commencement address is pretty funny. (Link goes to the full transcript.)

Here's quote:

I know there were some parents that were concerned about my speech here tonight, and I want to assure you that you will not hear any language that is not common at, say, a dock workers union meeting, or Tourretts convention, or profanity seminar. Rest assured.

I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I cant help but wonder what has happened to this place. Seriously, it saddens me. As a person, I am honored to get it; as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better. And I believe we should. But it has always been a dream of mine to receive a doctorate and to know that today, without putting in any effort, I will. Its incredibly gratifying. Thank you. Thats very nice of you, I appreciate it.

I found this on NewYorkish.com.

I just got back from a flashlight hike in my backyard, which backs to an Arlington county park/forest. At first I didn't see anything particular. Just your normal spiders, inch worms, and other woodland insects. Then I bent down and looked under the leaves. And I saw them.... they were everywhere!

My backyard (and yours maybe too) in less than a few hours has become heavily populated with tenerals, the cicada form when they first come out of the ground after 17 wonderful years of digging tunnels and sucking on tree root sap. In their current form they are brown, wingless, and kinda ugly. After they have molted, they'll have wings, big red eyes, and are really ugly. Males become incredibly annoying horny noise makers and females become super-selective egg layers. They don't eat and they don't sleep. All they do is look for that special cicada to come their way. Then they do the nasty, lay a bazillion eggs, and die.

National Public Radio has a recipe for cicada tacos that looks great. I'm definitely going to fry up some of these things. Think about fine wine, cheese, rum, and other fine foods - anything that takes 17 years to mature must be good!

Some great XBOX announcements today, including EA finally adding support for XBOX Live across all of their popular sports and action games, a new digital camera peripheral for multiple-person video chat (and hopefully in-game support as well), and Doom III will be an XBOX exclusive.

However, the most anticipated news is about Halo II. Halo II now has an official release date of November 9, 2004.

And for your viewing pleasure, here is a video of a demonstration of some of the new features in Halo II. All videos are WMV and may require Windows Media Player 9.

These videos require you to right click on the link andchoose Save Target As...

• Halo2 E3 2004 Video Part 1
• Halo2 E3 2004 Video Part 2
• Halo2 E3 2004 Video Part 3
• Halo2 E3 2004 Video Part 4
  
  If those video links don't work, try this TeamXBOX pageinstead.

That's not all, here are some more cool E3videos:

These videos require you to right click on the link and choose Save Target As...

• The Novice - A funny Apprentice spoof putting the XBOX senior management team against the Playstation senior management team. Some funny cameos you wouldn't normally expect in a spoof like this. A must see for any Apprentice fan.
• Doom 3 - You know what this is about.
• XNA Crash Demo - XNA is the new framework MS released for building XBOX games. This demo shows off what can be done with two detailed Saleen car models smashing into each other at high speeds. It's an impressive technology demo but will the games really look that good? It might be done using XBOX 2 technology.
• EA announces Live support - EA brings out the big guns for this announcement!

I got all these video links from TeamXBOX.com's E3 2004 web site. If any of the video links stop working, just go there and you'll find those videos, screenshots, and more.

All geeks, especially in software development, will appreciate the humor in this great parody:

Real World meets Microsoft (Media Player 9 required)

So many great lines...

"Hey, how many days until we're live? Great, 5 then."

"If you can show beyond a shadow of a doubt it was my bug, then maybe I'd believe you."

"I don't know, maybe our developers are busy blogging, or playing XBOX."

Too bad Microsoft doesn't show their humorous side in their software. Thanks to Brian Goldfarb for this the link. He also smaller versions of the video if you're on a slow connection.

Author and blogger Fred Zimmerman is quoting my lengthy blog entry "10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time" in his upcoming book "RSS/XML News Feed Fun: Tools, Tips and Tricks for Information Maniacs."

Back in January 2004 when I posted this entry it caused all kinds of uproar - both people agreeing and disagreeing. Many popular bloggers linked to it, TypePad/Movable Type's Anil Dash, Microsoft's Scoble, RSS author Dave Winer, and many others. For several days it was one of the most frequently linked-to blog entries in the world (according to the Daypop's Top 40 index).

Zimmerman has posted the the table of contents, and book goes to press June 30th, 2004. He has also written books about Microsoft OneNote and the TabletPC.

I love my Roomba (see Roomba Wars Part 1), but i may finally have to retire the one year old cleaning machine if this monster from Dyson can do a better job and is affordable:

The Dyson DC 06 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner

It has some cool features, such as:

Hose accessory
An attachable hose is included as an accessory for tasks such as manually cleaning the stairs, other surfaces and less accessible spots.

It also has some interesting features, such as:

Mood indicator light
A mood indicator light tells you how DCO6 is feeling about its environment.

I wonder if the performance goes down when it's not feeling well.

More info: Dyson DC 06 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner.

Also in today's robot-related news: Is your Roomba a boy or a girl? and Uber-gadget geek Phillip Torrone's Guide to the Roomba Hardware Check Mode.

Saw this complaint sent to the FCC on foO's site:

The Oprah show described with graphic detail a sexual term known as "tossing salad." It was so offensive that my child's head literally exploded. Please ban free speech so this never happens again.

FoO also linked to an interesting article about the repercussions from the craziness at the FCC: Some CBS Affils Could Drop Live News, and the drastic changes that they've had to make "for fear of government penalty."

For instance, stations have deleted language from "Prime Suspect" on Masterpiece Theater (and been criticized for the deletions by viewers) and even had to consider whether to edit our a nude lithograph from Antiques Roadshow, even though the show had aired months before with no complaint

Ultra-violent movies like Braveheart can be shown practically unedited on broadcast television (only the two love scenes were cut down), but art of a nude woman is questionable.

Welcome to America, where violence makes big bucks and nudity is repulsive.

I'm sure you know which paper clip I'm talking about.

Chris Pratley worked on Microsoft Word when Clippy, the paper clip office assistant was introduced. He wrote up a very interesting history of the infamous paper clip.

His other blog entries are fascinating as well. The history of Word, and why it beat WordPefectis a must read. I haven't hada chance to read his follow ups to all the comments his post generated:Word Myths and Feedback, More Word Feedback, and More Responses to comments on Word post.

Scott Weston has granted me a coveted gmail account. I'm not sure how much I'll use it because I prefer to use Outlook 2003, but it's cool to see their latest technology and some very cool features:

• When you are building a filter, you can "Test" it, which shows the resulting matches from your current email.
• No folders, but there are "labels" and you can filter by label. Email can have more than one label, which is like storing an email message in multiple folders at once. This is exactly what I asked for in my blog entry Storing a single item in multiple places.
• Lots of subtle DHTML effects to prevent page reloading. For example, when you are reading an email, there is a small text box where you can type a reply. As soon as you click on the reply box, it turns into a full-sized reply text box.
• Very nice inline spell-check by making the whole email read-only and giving misspelled words a drop down with the choices I don't use it though because you can't add words to the dictionary that are spelled right but it doesn't know about. I use ieSpell, a free IE plug-in that gives all text input boxes in IE a Word-like spell checker.

Some things I don't like:

• The list of labels (which are like folders), can't be sorted or nested.
• The list of labels don't show how many messages or new messages are in each one.
• Email is bunched into "Conversations" - like Outlook's conversation view. This is a nice attempt to organize email, but can make it harder to find something by date instead of what the email subject happened to be.
• Lots of actions are enabled even when they don't do anything. For example, you can't use Delete if nothing is selected, but it's still enabled when nothing is selected. If you click it, some text goes on the screen that says "No conversations selected."
• Since both frames and DHTML are used, the back button sometimes works and sometimes takes you back to the sign in screen. I wish this was consistent.
• No way to see when you have new email besides having the window open. MSN Messenger tells me when I have new email in any POP-enabled account. I'd like to use it for gmail too. I'm guessing the next Google Toolbar will have this feature, but I don't use the toolbar.
• My personal opinion: It looks ugly. I'm sure Yahoo fans will like it, it has the same colors and generic boring style, but I prefer something a with a little more personality. I'm not asking for more graphics (like hotmail), I like that it downloads fast, just a nicer CSS style sheet could really spruce it up, for example check out foO's work. Maybe they should hire him.

Thanks to Craig for the info Scott's account offerings and of course Scott for the account.

To answer a lot of the questions being posted on my blog, I've put up a TeacherReviews FAQ.

Got more questions? Post 'em here.

A couple years ago I went to London with my dad and brother (the photos). For a constantly connected geek like me it's hard to be offline for a particularly lengthy amount of time (even now I'm writing this using the free WiFi at Panera Bread while eating lunch). After about seven days without Internet, my brother and I finally found ourselves drawn into an easyInternetCaf, which were then called EasyEverything.

The concept is vastly different from the Internet caf's I've seen in Seattle, San Francisco, Israel, and elsewhere. To me, a typical Internet caf servesvarious espresso drinksand happens to have a small computer lab in the corner. The easyInternetCaf concept is just the opposite: a computer lab that happens to have a a small espresso-serving caf in the corner. At the location I visited there were probably about 400 computers, each sporting anLCD flat screen, web cam, headphone jack, and a telephone headset (for Internet calling I suppose, or maybe tech support, I didn't try it). The computers are cleverly hidden inside the attractive wooddesk.As you can see from this photo,you aren't given any room for privacy,but nobody seems to mind the intimacy.

The way the payment worked is my favorite part. You pay for your access from a machine near the entrance that takes bills, coins, and credit cards. The machine spits out a randomly generated user name and password. You can buy a user name for various lengths of time between a few minutes to a full month. I just put pound or two on the account. This is whatI love:Before you sign in,it shows you the price on the screen. Thecost depends on how busy that location happens to be at that particular moment. That means the best deals are in the middle of the night, and you'll often find a bunch of of late-night web surfers and online gamers at that time.

The other cool thing is that you have full control over your machine. Need software not on the machine? Go ahead and install it. I saw a lot young-looking guys playing Warcraft II (a popular game at the time). The company doesn't mind because when you sign off, the machine automatically erases the hard drive and copies pristine copy of Windows back on to it, along with all the basics (Microsoft Office,the popular instant messengers, etc). That means no worries about viruses from previous users, messed up configurations, or unexpected files on the hard drive. I believe you can also purchase permanent storage for storing your own files, and those files are accessible to you from any location.

You could also purchase use of software not included in the basics. Need Photoshop for an hour? Don't buy or steal it, just go to EasyInternetCaf and "rent" it for the time you need. An amazingly simple up-sell.

Besides keeping the place clean and replacing keyboards that have had an accidental run-in with a cup of Joe, there's no need for a support person to be there. In fact, I've been told that many locations no longer have printers because the printer was the only reason somebody had to be there - to put in more paper or replace the toner.

Why I think EasyInternetCaf Works (in London)

Since I know nothing about British economics, or the science of running a public Internet access service, the following are just my assumptions (or guesses) as to why easyInternetCaf works in London:

1. Travelers (like me) like to stay in touch.
2. Local residentswithout broadband Internet at home come to use the fast connection.
3. Local employees use it because they can't browse the web or check personal email at work, or they are looking for another job and don't want their boss to find out.
4. Locals use it by to look online for something interesting to do, such as movie times, or restaurant suggestions.

Will EasyInternetCaf work in the US?

EasyInternetCaf has opened6 locations in and aroundNew York City, and plan on opening6 more soon. Many of these locations are collections of 10 machines in a corner of a McDonald's. This saves a huge amount on renting space, and has a guarantee of people walking by. The largest location in the world happens to be in Times Square, with over 600 computers.

I think that easyInternetCaf will work in the US for the same reason that gyms are successful even even though much of the equipment can be bought for home use. It's convenient and social. While computers are getting cheaper, they are still out of the financial reach for many Americans, and just because somebody can afford one doesn't mean they can figure out how to get it to work right.

So what do you think? What have your easyInternetCaf experiences been like? Do you thinkthe easyInternetCaf concept will work in the US?