imagine IT

Apple makes huge inroads in enterprise as corporate Mac sales surge 66%
http://goo.gl/SxTT7

Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?  However, a company called Livescribe plans to offer just that: “The Livescribe paper-based computing platform – a smartpen, paper, software applications, and development tools – will be available online beginning in Q1 2008.”  Imagine being able to take notes and have those notes linked to what you listened to.  I think this this will be a huge benefit to all students.  Watch the introductory presentations!

As a result of my frustration with the number of commercials on cable TV, we downgraded our service to just the very basic tier. To offset the loss of Turner Classic Movies, American Movie Classics and others, we joined Netflix. While we have been very happy with their service for the 2 years we’ve been members, recent events have moved Netflix to the top of my list of companies that simple ‘get it’:

1. Instead of raising rates (are you reading, Comcast?) they actually dropped our monthly rate by over 5%.
2. Full-screen streaming of selected films. For no extra charge, we can stream up to 17 hours per month.
3. Real person technical support. Forsaking email and other non-personal methods of providing customer support, Netflix recently opened a call center to respond to customer inquiries.

For the non-programmers out there, that just means I need at least one trip to any beach during the summer. The old hang-out for my family and me is Ocean City, NJ (a favorite of our esteemed webmaster, as well). This quiet, dry (as in no bars or alcohol for purchase), family-oriented beach town was the place my parents took their kids and where my wife and I took ours. Much of the older section of town looks just the way it did 30 years ago. But that doesn’t mean OCNJ is not on the technological cutting edge. An article at NetworkWorld describes the way in which Ocean City plans to turn their famous beaches into high-tech hot spots.

It has been said that we all have a double; a person who shares sufficiently similar facial features with yourself that causes people to do a double-take. I stumbled onto a web site this weekend that actually aids in finding your celebrity double: MyHeritage.com. Using their Face Recognition feature (free registration is required to use this feature), simply upload a photo of yourself and you will be presented with a selection of people that the site matches your face with. You can then create a montage of your look-alikes to share with others. My results:

Ok, so it’s a bit odd that Scarlett Johansson is there, but Donald Rumsfeld? I think my glasses skewed the technology a bit. I have Scandinavian (Norwegian) roots so It is very interesting that it picked Kristen Nygaard, a Norwegian computer scientist who co-invented object-oriented programming.

I don’t know why, but I enjoy old things. Perhaps looking into the past at the way things were and how things where done differently gives me a new perspective for the way things are now. One of my new favorite films is Cars which tells the story of a town on Route 66 that was forgotten when the interstate system’s Route 40 bypassed it. Someday, it’s my dream to drive the length of old Route 66 (which is now known by many different route numbers) from Chicago to Santa Monica, CA and visit some of these forgotten places.
It’s also a trip to look back at what websites looked like a few years ago. Using The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it’s possible to view web sites from almost the start of the web. For example, here is Messiah’s site as it was 8 years ago today:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990423093756/www.messiah.edu/index.htm.
(Give the page a chance to load; some images will be broken)

We’ve come a long way, baby.

On Monday, Linden Lab annouced that the client software (the viewer) for Second Life will be released as open source and that the server software may also be opened. Opening their software to outside developers will most likely make the product more robust and less buggy. Several successful and well-known open source project include OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and the ubiquitous web server Apache. If Linden Labs follows through with releasing the server to the open source community, organizations could provide virtual representations of their worlds. For example, a propective student would be able to tour Messiah’s campus (including building) and chat with admissions counselors or students in the virtual world.

Read the full press release.

Here’s my first attempt at cloning myself using Photoshop. Using a tripod, I took four photos of myself in different positions in the frame. Then I imported each shot into Photoshop. Using one of the shots for the background, I used the lasso tool to select the other ‘me’ from each of the remaining photos pasting them as new layers with the background image. I feathered the selection edge quite a bit so they would blend with the main background image well.

Is it possible to keep eight college friends together for over 20 years? Even through marriage and kids, the answer is yes.

For more than 21 years “the gang” has been gathering for fellowship, food and fun. We started out as core members of a Bible study group on the Messiah College campus– after graduations, four weddings and the births of twelve children, we all live within an hour and a half radius and get together a few times each year.

The first photo was taken in 1988, the year before the babies started coming. The second was taken in December of 2003. 15 years and some things never change. Some things, as you can see, do!

On the left: Tim and Karen (Brubaker) Haldeman
Center back: Jesse and Laura (Heitzman) Wolgemuth
Center front: Bob and Susan (Kreider) Getty
On the right: Dave and Becky (Gehret) Gochenaur