The Goliathon 83 Infinity Beam Projector

A few months ago I came across these ‘steampunk’ rayguns from Weta Collectibles (an offshoot of the digital effects company behind LOTR, King Kong, etc.) and haven’t been able to get them out of my head. So, earlier today I finally pulled the trigger and ordered one, namely the Goliathon 83 Infinity Beam Projector. I think I’m going to keep it on my desk at work — I figure it’ll make for a pretty neat conversation piece.

My girlfriend’s reaction: “you are kidding right? please tell me you are kidding… you bought a $700 fake raygun???” I obviously wanted a real raygun, but unfortunately I’m neither a military man nor an alien. Come on Sarah, think.  :)

I’m smitten with Lightroom

Let me just go on the record as saying that Lightroom is an absolute joy to use. Well done guys, well done. Yes, this little two-sentence post probably should have been relegated to Twitter, but, well, sue me.

Live Ink

Earlier this week I came across a product/concept called Live Ink, which purported to increase both your reading speed and comprehension. I was obviously a bit skeptical, but my interest was piqued enough to give it a shot, and, after having enjoyed using it for the last few days, I thought I’d mention it here.

From copy the company sent me:

In simple terms, by focusing our reading attention, Live Ink helps people read with greater comprehension and retention, with more efficiency and less effort. Live Ink does three things that improve our ability to visually process text: 1) displays text in shorter lines; 2) breaks text in grammatically meaningful segments; and 3) indents text to cue the brain to the relative importance of phrases within a sentence.

The concept really resonated with me, especially in light of my disdain for ‘wide’ sentences (see Death to liquid layouts).

If you’ve checked out the Live Ink site and are interested, but are using Linux or Mac OS X, you may have noticed that they don’t yet offer a Mac/Linux client (I’m told it will be months before such a client is available). However, there does exist a [very] beta Firefox extension, which is what I’ve been using for the past week. While the extension really isn’t “public,” you can e-mail Adam, their VP of marketing, to request an account.

I should caution you, as he I, that the extension is beta, beta, beta and has been in development only a few weeks. When it works, it works well, but it will definitely break when the markup or characters it receives deviate from what it’s expecting. There’s also currently a 6000-character limitation, which means that any highlighted text beyond 6000 characters does not get parsed (i.e., if the article is long enough, you may have to parse it in chunks); this will be fixed.

Remember, if you’re a Windows user (I’m sorry) you can simply download the actual client, which I’m told does not suffer from the ailments found in its newborn, OS-agnostic progeny.

Wasted words

There’s nothing like losing a few hours of your life to writing about a solution for something you later realize is a non-issue. I’m referring to my documenting the recent move I made from iView MediaPro to Aperture¹ (I was putting together something similar to From iPhoto to iView MediaPro), and the hoops I jumped through to make it happen.

Turns out that all of my effort was ultimately for naught (or, more accurately, just wasn’t needed), because limitations that I thought were inherent in Annoture, were, in fact, non-existent. And just like that, a 2500-word post decayed into this admonishment. Had I read the readme file I wouldn’t have wasted half a day preparing my collection for the move; I could have simply run the app and walked away. Moreover, I wouldn’t have wasted the other half of the day coming up with a solution and drafting a post explaining both how it worked and why I thought it was needed.

Lesson: don’t always assume so much.

Son, I’m actually an idiot

I wonder how long it’s going to take my future kid to figure out that I don’t know everything, and that every time I say, “we’ll talk about it later,” I’m actually just buying time to Google the question. I predict not long.

Full transparency

When I start falling woefully behind all of my public-facing ‘responsibilities’ (i.e., this site, responding to e-mail help, etc.), I feel somewhat compelled to pull a justint.tv and share with the world my day-to-day. Part of me feels like that would help to shoulder the guilt I sometimes suffer for not posting here as often as I would like.

Just thinking out loud. As you were.