Confessions of an Undercover Geek

Yesterday was my second day of class for the Winter Quarter 2005. I had my ballroom dancing class which is really fun. You can tell our instructor really loves ballroom dancing. We don’t get graded on technique. She just wants us to have fun. It makes the class really cool. We rocked the fox trot yesterday.

I had Effective Technical Communications. It’s a cool class. I really want to improve my oral and written communications skills.

Then I had my 4 hour Intro to XML class. This is a fun class. XML is a language about making languages to describe data. I will explain it more in further posts. In class we had excercises where we had to make an XML language for a scene from Julius Caesar and then the fairy tale Briar Rose.

It was an interesting day.

I was really happy to see that Firefox 1.5 was launched last night. I had been testing the different beta and release candidates they were developing of 1.5. Firefox 1.5 has a whole host of new features. As a web developer, I am very excited. SVG is native in the browser. It also supports JAWS. JAWS users aren’t stuck with using IE anymore. It seems faster. The feature that non-web developers will probably get the most excited about is that you can rearrange the tabs.

I am going to be taking a look at different extensions that you can get for Firefox 1.5 and write reviews about them here, so stay tuned.

So go download Firefox 1.5. Do not use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.0. It’s not a good web browser. If you do use Internet Explorer, email me and I will talk you out of it.

I have been using my Apple iPod more and more lately as my main way to move music around and I’m using the Apple iTunes Muisc Store as my main place to get music.

Lately, it seems like I have been getting more recommendations about bands from my friends. I usually head over to the Apple iTunes Music Store to check out what kind of album offering is available for purchase. I buy an album probably once every one and a half to two months. Most of the time, I think to myself that this band is awesome but I don’t feel like dropping $10 right now on the cd. I wished I could put it on a wish list and come back to it later.

Why doesn’t the Apple iTunes Music Store have a wishlist set up like Amazon.com does? Seems like it would be easy to setup and it would in the end help consumers by more music and movies for eachother. They just released the whole “gift it” feature in the iTunes Music Store.

One scary thing that I have been seeing more and more of is that secularists are turning the freedom of religion, in the First Ammendment of the Constitution, into the freedom from being offended. It is not what the framers intended. They wanted to prevent the start of a state church, like as it was in England.

David Limbaugh has a really great column this week, Feelings Trumping Rights. He says…

Church-state separation zealots have often selectively applied their wall of separation. They have consistently screamed bloody murder at any whiff of Christianity in the public square, especially when there is the remotest suggestion that government is merely countenancing Christianity (far from endorsing it). But they’ve sat idly by as the state has outright endorsed other religions or worldviews or their values.

Portable devices, such as pda’s and cell phones, have become such a predominant part of our culture. I was in the mall the other day and I saw what looked to be a 12 year old boy with Nextel. Moving the web in the direction of having it work just the same on mobile devices is exciting. It will connect people in ways we have never done before.

One activity of the World Wide Web Consortium that I have really enjoyed following is the Mobile Web Initiative. In the working group blog, one of the working members talked about their motivations. I thought it was really good.

I hope that we can manage to come up with some guidance for those who

a) simply want to offer content, if free or for payment is unimportant
b) want to consume that content

such that in the end, we can help all industries involved to focus on one thing only - the quality and usability of their products.

This can only happen when we make the Internet portable. A portable Internet, also represented by the “one web” concept in the W3C represents no less than the “disappearance” of the web from our lives. It will disappear as the telephone has disappeared, the TV, the car. These items are so common place they /*are*/ our regular life.

I just think this is really exciting.

My really good friend Lindsay and I saw the new Harry Potter movie tonight, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I had been hearing from a lot of my friends, including Lindsay, about how this movie was amazing. They all said that it was the best movie yet. These are all people that of course read the books; I haven’t read any of the books yet. Especially after reading that the movie grossed over $200 million dollars at the box office already, I was anxious to see the movie for myself.

I think the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was good. It was entertaining. If I had a 7 or 8 year old daughter, I probably would not take them to go see the film. I had a good time seeing it with Lindsay.

Now if I were to put my film critic hat on, especially with all my mad skillz that I picked up from my Film Arts class I took last quarter, I was kind of disappointed with the movie.

I didn’t feel like there was any one part of the story that I could hang my hat on. Usually there is some central conflict in a movie which you can’t wait to see how it ends and see how the conflict was resolved. This movie didn’t have that as much. I couldn’t really pull myself into any bigger themes. I definitely think that Harry Potter has some complexes over the loss of his parents and I think that is interesting and could lend itself to interesting areas for character development.

The pace of the movie also seemed kind of off. There was a lot of time dedicated in the movie to thing which didn’t have much relevance to the development of the plot. The editor could have probably cut the movie from 2 1/2 hours to 2 hours and been a lot better. They really hit home the fact that Harry Potter and the gang are growing up and that they have hormones. They are starting to grow crushes on the other little boys and girls that are at Hogwarts.

Keep in mind the fact that I am probably not the target audience of the director and producers of the Harry Potter series. The people that the producers are aiming at are going through same physical and psychological changes that Harry is and can probably relate to him more than I can.

Overall it was a good movie. I don’t know if I would see it again but it was good.

One exciting trend that I have been seeing is conferences, groups, and universities are podcasting their lectures and talks. They are taking recorded audio sessions and putting them up on the web as podcasts for people to easily download and listen to wherever they go.

Podcasting lectures has really taken hold in the web development industry. It is connecting popular speakers with audiences that they wouldn’t have been able to get to in the past. I am based in New York, USA. The Web Essentials Conference was something I wanted to attend but it was in Australia. I also really wanted to attend the d.construct conference, a web 2.0 conference, but that was in the United Kingdom. The great thing is that both conferences podcasted all of their sessions. The Web Standards Group has their meetings also in Australia. They bring in some great speakers, all of which they podcast.

This last week, Newsweek had a story about how universities are starting to podcast professor lectures. I think this is awesome. I know a lot of professors that wouldn’t want to do this because it might encourage people not to come to class. Just think if you wanted to go back and reference something from a lecture, you could just pull it up on your iPod. Harvard has also just made some lectures available via podcast. I just picked up a few of the lectures on iTunes.

I think the idea of podcasting is a huge revolution in the way that content is delivered to people. I think a lot of credit needs to be given to Apple and using iTunes as a mechnasim that people were familiar with to grab the podcast and video feeds.

The fun thing is that doing a podcast isn’t that hard. We are working on setting up a podcast of sermons and Sunday school lessons for my church back home, Our Savior Lutheran. The podcast feed is up right now but we aren’t going to announce it till we get some of the bugs of the process figured out.

I had my first classes of the winter quarter today. In my Technology Transfer class the professor talked about “people you have to interface with.” That made me laugh. You know you are a hardcore geek when you start referring to people as interfaces that you have to work with. :-p

I am going back to NY for the start of winter quater 2005 at RIT. If you want to know where I am, I’ll be in the car for the next 7 hours.

Tonite I rented, with my parents, the British film Millions, directed by Danny Boyle. I was looking for something that I knew that they would enjoy. Tonite is the last nite before I head back to RIT for a while. I had seen the movie with my ex-girlfriend Alex and had really enjoyed it the first time.

The movie follows a little boy who is trying to make a difference in the world and deal with the fact that he has recently lost his mother. The boy is very innocent and very imaginitive and that comes through in some of the more formalistic parts of the movie.

The little boy acts very well and you definitely have fallen in love with him by the end of the movie. If your looking for an all around good movie with out any sex or violence, i’d highly recommend this movie.

For more reviews of the movie, check out the Rotten Tomatoes page on Millions.