The reality of this is starting to sink in. Took awhile.

I've been playing with Dragon Dictation for the iPhone the past several days. While the reco quality is higher than I was expecting (things have gotten a lot better since my last use over a decade ago), the impact it had on the content (words) I created was surprising. Typing this blog comment gives me parallel processing abilities and context that I don't have with speech (serial). The content I create when speaking is interestingly different from the stuff that comes out of my fingers on a keyboard. Keyboard is more concise and structured... voice is more verbose and loose. I've been trained over the decades, via email, to produce one way on the keyboard, and another w/ my voice.

My latest gripe about modern HCI is display (you touch on one dimension of it in this post). Right now, my wife and I are sitting in front of a large TV screen (passively watching a show), each w/ laptops in our laps, and iphones at our sides. If something pops up on my iphone that I want her to see, I have to hand her the phone (despite the fact she has a better screen sitting right on her lap). If I want to talk to her about our schedules tomorrow, we have to share a laptop screen, as opposed to just looking at the big screen 10' from us and having a communal experience around shared content. Display is horribly broken (as is input (keyboard/mouse)). Need a fix. Unfortunately, while we can all dream up solutions, some replete with technical architecture within today's state of the art, I fear the deployment of said solutions is going to be akin to auto-industry investment. So much capital is required to change the physical interaction world around us (as opposed to software alone) that relatively few swings at bat can be made.

Longing for highly iterative hardware I suppose.

definitely one of our favorite restaurants these days.

Bike parking in downtown Boulder is a mess. When the parking kiosks went in, the parking meter were torn out, and those meters provided all the parking places for bikes. Would be great if we brought bike parking back.

The number of times I've gone out to bash and age-old unix cmd line tools has surprised me. Bottom like is that the toolset has been optimized by great developers for decades, and the tools do very simple things, very well!
I regularly fall back to flat file (or stdin) processing with awk, sed, sort, uniq, cat, and cut. '|' (pipe) let's you chain to your heart's content. Amazing how these things have stood the test of time.

Having to deal with large data sets, with no time for offline processing, at Gnip, I/o has always been in our conscious. If you know you're going to be doing sequential reading on large files, spend the dough and buy 15kRPM spindle disks (they crush SSD drives any day). If you need to play random, use SSD (they crush spindles anyday).

I like your point about browser penetration ratios. You either want that specific 10% demo, or you don't.

END!

it was great working with you as well. very well said around "clichés taking on substantial meaning .... only when experiencing first-hand;" so true.

modal windows will be our demise! ;-)

good point. backwards compat is always the killer, and adding yet another dimension to the browser compatibility matrix is going to be a mess for awhile. iphone (mobeile browsers) do change the game though.

your comment should be its own post; well put.

I too realized relationships are dynamic in that sense, and the founder/employee scenario is something I didn't believe a long time ago, but came to fully understand the reality around.

thanks for reading/commenting.

my hope is that at least some folks can extract some value from it. all of this is so circumstantial and relative though... I'm sure plenty of folks who read it will just blow it off as irrelevant, but if it catches at least one person who's in that zone... I'd be happy.