2007
Just got back from watching Casino Royale
New Baby Monitor
We have been perpetually frustrated with the baby monitor that we got when Mazie was born. We got the Sony NTM-910 because it had good reviews, brand reputation and specifically since it was 900MHz and wouldn’t collide with our wireless network at 2.4GHz and our wireless phones at 5.8Ghz. However, they just don’t work very well at all. The range was horrible and we started to go slowly insane with the random injection of it’s “out of range” beeps at various times.
We decided to upgrade to the Rolls-Royce of monitors, the new Philips Digital SCD-589. This is the first baby monitor to use the new DECT technology that guarantees completely noise-free operation. We started it up today after giving it a thorough charge overnight and initial tests are great. Tammy was able to walk to the top of our cul-de-sac and back without losing any signal. The audio is crystal clear. On top of that you have nice features like knowing the temperature in the kids room, you can talk to them and even start music or lights in the room from the handset. The parent unit is also significantly smaller and lighter, but not as loud at maximum volume as the Sony was.
Have you played with Twitter? If not, try it. Be a friend. Tell me what you think. It’s pretty crazy. You can even link Wordpress with Twitter.
Article in Twin Cities Business Journal
Excuse me for a moment of self-promotion. 🙂 I was featured in an article published last Friday in the Twin Cities Business Journal about what Dow Jones is doing here in Minneapolis, specifically some of the R&D; work that we’ve been focused on.
While the article suffers from some inaccuracies, for example, the entire office is not about Dow Jones Online but is instead many different divisions of Dow Jones. It seems I can never get through an interview for an article without something like that happening.
I’m happy to get the word out. I’ve been trying to get more publicity for what we are doing in Minneapolis since far too few people understand what we are doing, and we need all the best talent we can get.
Must Have Thunderbird Add-Ons
I’m not one of these folks that scours the internet for Firefox extensions only to make my web browser slower and crash more often. However, I’ve recently been really frustrated by some shortcomings in Thunderbird (email client) and thought I would share some findings.
I use Thunderbird on five different computers popping in and out all the time. My mail server is IMAP-based so that is fine, the same messages are there no matter what computer I use. However, not the address book! This has been driving me nuts. Addressbook Synchronizer has come to the rescue however! This great extension allows you to copy your address book to a network location (including an IMAP folder which is great!) and get the updated one on startup. I now have 5 different address books and they are completely in sync, including the two built-in to Thunderbird. If you use Thunderbird on multiple machines, you need this extension.
There are two other extensions that are immensely useful. Contacts Sidebar restores a feature that Outlook Express had but Thunderbird lacked. It shows your address book in a pane on the left side of your message window. Nice to drop notes to people in your address book. Also look into Duplicate Contact Manager, it does a great job of chugging through your address book and culling out “dups” for you.
Also, in case you are interested I did setup an LDAP server using OpenLDAP and try to just have all my mail clients use the LDAP repository. I got the LDAP server setup, but there were huge problems. A little hidden secret of most personal mail clients, including Thunderbird, is that it can read an LDAP repository but cannot modify or add to it. This is a non-starter.
Death by Metadata
My software needs to start doing more work for me. Really. Either that or I need to get a digital librarian. What for you ask? I feel like I’m dying under the weight of metadata, data about data.
The vast archive of 33,000 digital photos that I have, the 400GB of music I’ve ripped from my CD collection and the hours of digital video are all great. It’s awesome, and I wouldn’t go back for anything. However, all this digital data has metadata as well, and that metadata doesn’t just magically exist. It has to be placed there somehow.
For example, I’ve recently moved all of my photos into Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is awesome and is lightyears (no pun intended) ahead of the file-system approach I used to manage my photos with. One of the great things it can do is tag photos (bill, bob, cat, dog, house, etc) and put them in collections (Wedding Photos, France Vacation, etc). After tagging, finding those pictures of Bill, Bob and a cat is as easy as a simple query. No more digging through hundreds or thousands of files. Want a picture of a squirrel? One click will do.
The rub though is that those tags have to be created, and who’s going to do that? I want my software to get smarter and start doing this for me. Facial recognition isn’t easy but it is possible. My Mac Pro sits on for hours at night. Let’s burn some CPU cycles identifying faces in photos. I’m happy to train it.
Music has a similar problem. ID3 tags are a must for a large music collection. If you don’t have them, or if they are wrong, forget it. Luckily here software has done some work for me already and it’s pretty easy to tag things off of big central databases on the net. However, now I have the harsh reality that 70% of my music by volume is tagged as “Rock”. Why? Because a music catalog would call it all Rock, even though I think it’s totally different. And here there is a big problem, because no group of people will all agree what genre AC/DC is – Rock, Metal, Classic Rock, Garbage.
I want to leverage all this great power of the digital world, and the promise is amazing, but software needs to make it simple, easy and quick ways to allow people to start associating metadata. The photography example is obvious to me. I don’t care if it takes a year to do 30,000 pictures – just as long as it does it. And I’m fine sitting down for a few minutes and identifying people and things for it as it trains. This stuff exists, it just needs to be integrated in the right way.
Hopefully that will happen soon.