Occasional Thoughts

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

Dear David Fincher, Director of The Social Network,

yesterday evening I saw your great movie and I must say that I enjoyed it very much.

Besides the very interesting plot I was very happy that you have chosen KDE as Desktop environment for Marks computer (that does not prove that Mark is using KDE in real-life, of course - but as Mark is a smart guy, I would not wonder). At least you haven't followed the rest of Hollywood and gave him an Apple or made him use Windows.

I was very delighted that you did your homework and showed us the magic of wget and perl and no unrealistic Hollywood typical computer voodoo. People that did not know how to fetch a bunch of images from a website really learned something. Thank you very much for that.

But... really... was it necessary to ruin this good impression with the close up of the terminal session, where Mark had typed

> ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.031 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.036 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
^C
--- localhost.localdomain ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3996ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.031/0.040/0.047/0.005 ms

I guess Mark knows that his computer is up and running, while he sits in front of it surfing Facebook.

I have a new toy. Last week I bought an iPod touch. My primary use case is remote controlling media in my home. I already have a HTPC in my living room with access to satellite TV, videos, photos and music. However, I always found it stupid to switch on my TV in order to choose music. I checked choices like Squeezebox Duet or the TEAC WAP-4500. Pretty nice toys starting around 250 EURO. But if you already have a PC, the iPod is about 200+ EURO extra. And it's a nice gadget too. So I ordered one and tried to run the free Remote app from Apple.