Mind Architecture Happenings

One of the things I’ve always liked about what I do is meeting the people and learning what they do. I’ve gotten a great and varied bit of knowledge about many things. This all through just learning about the business for which I am working on a site. A little about manufacturing, horse breeding, apartment building, Classic Wing motorcycles, and more. It’s like being a Renaissance man.

One site that I worked on about a year ago was for Cooking Thyme. This is one of those places you sign up for a session and choose some meals. Then when you go they help you prepare the food. Afterwards, you take it home, freeze it and then is ready to cook at some later time. Always sounded like fun and that’s what this site was for.

It was a good site to work on. A good mixture of things that we’ve done and can do easily like members only area with login, calendar, content management, etc. Added to that there was some good new programming like connecting the calendar to sessions and a menu and keeping track of sessions and how many people were signed up.

The site, as I mentioned, has been done for about a year. We’ve added and changed a few things, but all in all it has been running great. So recently I signed up for a session.

My wife and I went and had a great time. We met Kathy and Nancy, the owners, whom I’ve emailed but never met before. They were great. The place is just big enough for what you need to do and is very clean and comfy. Everything was laid out and waiting for us. And this wasn’t just a rack of spices sitting there. Everything was fresh and hand cut. Very few things were spices from a jar. The recipes looked wonderful and once we got going, smelled great and looked even better.

Now I’m not the best cook in the world. This past Christmas I burnt up a mixer making cookies with my daughter. I even need to use the recipe still to make Cream of Wheat. That is particularly bad because we have Cream of Wheat 3 or 4 times a month. Even with my cooking definciencies, this was easy and fun. Bobbi and I went through each one and had a good time. It was like being a kid again and goofing around instead of what you were supposed to be doing.

A couple hours later we had six very scrumptious looking meals ready to go. We haven’t tried them yet since we are saving them for one of those rush times when we know we’ll need it. The whole experience was so fun that we started wondering who we could go with the next time.

So, all in all, a very good experience. Like my Tivo thinking, this is the same thing. The cost is only slightly higher than buying everything yourself. But there was no long preparing which I hate. There was no cleaning up after preparing. And now we have 6 meals ready to go. I’ve never sat down and in 2 hours prepared 6 meals to freeze and eat. This is well worth my time and money considering my busy life with work and kids and a wife in school. For everyone reading, please take some time and sign up for a session to see how it goes. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how great it is.

John Kerry announced his bid for presidency on YouTube. Wow. This just gives a nice slice of the Internet impact on life.

A little less than 100 years ago we had a president that was in a wheelchair. Later it was said that he wouldn’t be president today because the American people wouldn’t like seeing someone in a wheelchair and wouldn’t vote for them. It seemed becoming president had as much to do with how you looked and talked on TV as it did for your views and if you would actually be good.

That has now expanded to the Internet. John Kerry is using the site YouTube to give his announcement and is putting videos on his own site. So now you can go on the web at anytime and see the candidates. Just another indication of the pervasiveness of the web in recent times.

I’m sure everyone has seen and probably used an iPod? I have one myself and (mostly) love it. The scroll wheel is very handy to use and usually makes things simpler. It has been proclaimed as great new technology and the thing that sets the iPod apart from everyone else.

I have to question the innovation though. This is partly a dig because of all the ‘Microsoft can’t create anything new, they alway steal it’ talk that I’ve had to endure. Now it’s my turn.

I seem to remember back 30 years ago. I remember sitting in a friends basement. We were playing his new game system. He, unfortunately, didn’t have an Atari. He had an Intellivision. Totally different and different games. One of the different things was that he didn’t have a normal joystick like I did. He had this weird hand held remote control looking things. Instead of a joystick, it had this wheel on it. You could spin it (sound familiar) to move the cursor online to select things and control your guys. Hmmm. Seems that this technology has come back around and is being used for something else now. Let me see, what do I have that is using a wheel like this. Hm…. I’ll have to think on that one as I revisit my friend to play his old school Intellivision……

Yes, I am getting a Macintosh. Before I start hearing from either side, let me give some more details.

First off, I essentially traded an old pc to get a mac. The guy I am getting it from has a new mac and doesn’t need the old one and wants a pc for some of the games his kids play. So it’s a very equitable trade, we each get a secondary computer that isn’t our main knowledge or focus.

No, I am not switching to Mac as my main machine - well, maybe/kinda. Switching to a completely new and different system wouldn’t be new for me. For those of you that don’t know, I started with a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga back in the day. (Yes, I did programming clear back then on those machines.) Those 2 OS’s weren’t compatible, so to go to Amiga was going to a completely different system with different programs. I then got a 486 PC. Again, complete switch. I am happy with Windows and know how to use it quite well. I am not getting the Mac because I think it’s better and want to switch to it. I am getting it for a more practical reason. More people have Mac’s which more people with Safari and Mac Firefox are looking at our website. I need to test for that. Can’t do it without having a Mac (at least not easily). That’s why we are getting it, for in the office. It is essentially a really expensive browser box.

That being said, I see an interesting possibility of using VM software to run Windows and Linux on the Mac. All 3 OS’s I might need in one box. I’ve always been more of a kind to have 1 machine do everything than having 3 different machines. That may be something I will look into more. I just worry about a few little things like synching with my ipaq PDA and my Palm. (Why I have both is another story.) This would also easily allow me to run several VM’s for testing. One VM could have windows with IE6 and another with windows and IE7. Same with Firefox 1.5, 1.7, and 2.0.

So, we’ll see how it goes after I get it and get it set up.

We get several scientific magazines, like Discover and Science Week. I don’t get a chance to read everything in them, but have noticed more and more sci-fi like articles. There are things that are being done in the lab that rival what we see on shows like Star Trek. I don’t remember all the issues these items were in. Dig up some science magazines and you may even find some things I missed.

Lasers - Who would have thought 40 years ago that the laser that were seen on Star Trek would be reality now. Or that you could carry a blaster like Han Solo? We all know lasers are a reality. Not necessarily in our handheld weapons yet, but still they exist.

Lightsabers - Who wouldn’t want to swing a lightsaber like Luke or Obi-Wan? We can’t quite do that yet, but according to the recent Star Wars display at COSI in Columbus, we have the technology to create a lightsaber. The only catch is the machine to generate it would be as big as the old ENIAC machines and would take a ton of power. Again, that’s closer than we were in 1977.
Hovercraft speeders - well, we’ve probably all seen these type of machines. They aren’t parked in our garage for us to take to Toschi station yet, but we can rent them in certain places.

Spaceships - Space Shuttle, internation space station, talks of public space trips, plan to form a moon base, plans on manned trip to Mars. OK, there we go.

Transporter - This one seems outlandish, but is kind of true. Scientists were able, in a lab under controlled conditions, to actually transport a 1 celled microbe from one spot in the room to another. It was a close distance, like an inch or something, but they said it worked. Like McCoy, I don’t really trust it.

Cloaking Device - This is another one that they can actually do in the lab under controlled conditions. They had a ring in a tube and when the cloak was activated, particles sent through the tube came through as if there was nothing in their path. Pretty cool.

Universal Translator - Not really a universal translator yet, but the Army has a field device that does translate phrases into 16 different languages. The person with the device chooses a language and then can say phrases using certain words. The translator then spits it out in the correct language, but also a longer enhanced message. They say it is a godsend even with the limited capabilities.

So, some technologies to keep an eye on. It is like a Star Trek or Star Wars world.