brainscat.com

Recently, I’ve considered adding cigar, whiskey, beer, and wine reviews to this site. So many times I’m tempted to write any and every interesting thing here on brainscat and more often than not my first reaction is, “No.” I’m realizing more and more where that instinct is coming from…

Most of my favorite bloggers, (Robert Scoble, Joel Spolsky, Mark Cuban, Gabe and Tycho, Tim Bray, Iggy, and Tracy and Trev) besides being authoritative, all share a focus and consistency of content that makes their respective sites worthwhile. Their adherance to a topic is one of the key qualities that makes their respective sites valuable.

I’m sure Scoble is a well rounded individual and is interested in many things besides Microsoft and related technology, but I don’t care. I don’t read Ongoing because I think Tim Bray is a good person and I don’t read his site expecting to hear about his newest hobby. I read their blogs because they give me focused info on topics I’m interested in and I don’t have to wade through crap.

So many bloggers would do well to remember their audience when they are searching for what to make of their webspace. I’ll do my best to keep this from turning into this.

Update: Forget this. I may not read “shotgun” blogs that jump around from topic to topic, but I realize that shouldn’t have anything to do with how and why I blog. I write for my own sanity, to keep a record of interesting bits, and to hopefully help someone else out.

Update 2: Don’t forget this, just forgive me for being to rash in both previous revisions. I just don’t think strict adherance is what’s going to make my blog good. More accurately, I have a need to stray every now and then from regular technological writings to keep my own sanity. To be a useful resource though, I have to stay on target. The best place for myself and brainscat is somewhere in the middle. End of navel-gazing. I promise…. for now.

Lifehacker gives pilers a voice. I don’t understand the whole purpose of filing emails with an elaborate system of filters and folders. I don’t even understand tagging them with metadata by hand. As long as the search functionality is quick, I’m happy.

Get gmail invites at isnoop.net. I was sick at looking at all my available invites so I donated them over there. isnoop harvests the invites for other random people, and gives them to you upon request. Basically, I’m done with invite contests since demand is low.

I’ve had my Tablet PC for about three days now, and have been using it heavily to get a good handle on it and I thought it would be a good idea to pass along my impressions. Later in the week, I’ll write about specific software packages.

On Form Factor

First off, I’m happy to report that the form factor for taking notes is just as inobtrusive as I hoped it would be. In the past few days, I’ve taken notes in classes and jotted thoughts, and each time the tablet has felt plenty comfortable.

I can’t say the same though, for extended periods of reading. The tablet is inferior to most books, because it’s heavier. It also loses out to reading off a laptop because you can always rest the laptop on your legs and adjust the angle of your screen accordingly. With the tablet, you have to hold it with your hands and it gets heavy, or tilt your neck down, which leads to cramping.

Web Browsing

The tablet feels most natural in portrait mode, but I’m finding that a lot of websites don’t like the fact my browser width is less than 800 pixels wide. The inaccessibility of some sites, combined with the fact that writing recognition doesn’t handle urls well can make browsing take longer than normal. Let’s just say, “bookmarks are your friend.”

Handwriting Recognition

It’s great when writing English words, otherwise, it sucks and you have to use the character by character handwriting editor. Like urls, shorthand for note-taking is quickly mangled if you try to convert it to text. I suspect this is because writing recognition works much in the same way that predictive text for phones does, selecting known words from a dictionary based upon the combination of “probable” letters. Notes are best left in ink, in my opinion. It’s better to have partially working send over ink you can read than to have converted text that makes no sense at all.

I’d still buy the Wendy’s dollar menu. Earlier this week, Ryan and I purchased the entire dollar menu from Wendy’s for lunch. Yes, I did tell the cashier, “I would like the entire dollar menu, please.”

Judging by the smile on Ryan’s face, it was well worth it.

It blows my mind that one of the ways the windows security team chose to beef up sp2 was by nagging users repeatedly to restart their computers. I swear, next time windows update tells me I need to restart every ten minutes,I’m going to do something drastic. I don’t know what, but it’ll be ugly.

Just implement a “remind me in x amount of time” control like the notifier uses!

I’ve temporarily turned on comment moderation. Either SpamKarma is broken, turned off, or suddenly inffective. A bunch of bestiality and incest spam has gotten through the filters in the past few days, so I’m locking things down.

Update: Oops, it looks like I deleted a bunch of comments by accident. Doh.

Scoble, you won, and don’t worry the Tablet PC’s not invisible, at least not to me. You see, I’m the new proud owner of my first TabletPC. Well, my employer owns it… but close enough. This whole post, actually, was written by hand and then converted to text in Firefox. Neat stuff, neat stuff… Stay tuned for more of my first impressions working with a tablet.