What were you doing 20 year’s ago… and where will you be 20 years from now… and how is what you’re doing today going to get you there?
It’s not often you can see a direct line between aspects of your past with aspects of your present, and if you can, it’s not usually a direct “golden path”, more a meandering curve perturbed by major random events of one’s life. Looking at the ‘biographies’ of great people it’s also rare to find such direct callings. But recently I’ve seen video of such a journey.
So it was with some interest that I watched a video of a TED talk from 1984, by the the guy who would later create the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). The OLPC project has recently become mired in infighting and bickering, but they’ve also recently unveiled plans for version 2.0. The goal is to produce a small computer for children, that can replace Text books in remote and developing countries, as well as connect to the Internet so people from around the world can self teach… all for a budget of at or under $100 USD… Considering that countries like China and Brazil now spend on the order of ~$50 per child for text books for children, this meta text book would be not that unfeasible. Think of a hitchhiker’s guide but for school children.
Think about what’s being shown in this video, and when it was created. In 1984 Steve Jobs introduced the world to the Macintosh. A revolutionary computer that showed the world how to use a mouse, and the beginnings of digital video on a computer (the Mac’s famous Welcome screen), and really- it was most people’s introduction to a computer that could fit inside your house, let alone one that could fit on your desk. The Internet, world wide web, and wikipedia weren’t even conceived of yet, but looking at that video we can see the start of hyer-linking, interactive learning, and touch based computing. Don’t forget the touch based surface that that Microsoft Surface is based on was shown at TED in 2006… Yet here its shown in a video from 25 years ago!
I blame my addiction interest in photography on my parents.
It’s as good an excuse as any, and fits into the standard blame game stereotypically associated with therapists. Though there is some reason behind my fascinations.
My mom had a SLR of some glorious make (I don’t know the model, it got stolen when I was about 13) and all I remember about it was “Cameron, Don’t Touch!”. That being said it was a wondrously heavy piece of glass and metal, that was so much more interesting than using binoculars. You could twist the huge barrel tele-zoom lens and see things (usually birds) that were almost too small to see with the naked eye. “Oh look at the XXXXXX” with a finger pointed at some spec in a tree somewhere… only to be shown a huge difference though the camera. Add the Flash with that stereotypical sound of the flash and subsequent capacitor charging, or the mechanical click of the shutter release on an old analogue SLR and it was quite the experience using it.
Apparently the camera also had a somewhat storied history behind it… Purchased for $100 with the trade in of my mother’s existing camera at Expo ‘67 on a cross country road trip by my mother, and her sister.
My dad (the Zoologist) however had something that was just as incriminating. Every year my grandmother would give my father a yearly subscription to National Geographic for Christmas. It would seem that the stack of National Geographic’s my dad had stacked throughout the house would always be taller than I was. But within were amazing photos from around the world. Pictures of Africa, or the Outback (along with stories my dad told of his childhood in the Australia), or amazing shots from the bottom of the oceans.
I still distinctly remember shots of lightning on the African plains on the glossy pages of National Geographic. (It’s something I’ve tried to replicate before.. at least the prairie version).
So firefox 3 beta 5 was released today, supposedly the last beta, and it only scores 71/100 on Acid 3. Granted now isn’t probably the time to add new features to the final release, but the Acid tests are starting to draw more and more attention.
The thing is that firefox 3 also doesn’t work with many plugins/extensions. I’ve come to depend on the Web developer toolbar. Google Gears, though not a requirement, is something I used with gmail/Google reader, and now seem like it could really be useful with Google docs. And don’t even get me started on how Silverlight is listed as a valid plugin in the plugins list in Firefox 3, but doesn’t work (it constantly prompts you to install the already installed plugin).
We’ll just have to hope someone get’s busy before June.
(PS. Yes I know these are the perils of Beta products, and the responsibility for these issues rests with the plugin/extension developers but with the coming of web 2.0, beta == functional — I avoided the alphas for this very reason. If the G*d damned adobe craptastic plugin still works why can’t yours?)
