Category Archives: Tablet PC Thoughts

Joe, Sam and the Tablet PC

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I brought home a Tablet PC over the weekend, and let my two boys play with it. There is a cool application called the Physics Illustrator from the Microsoft Tablet PC PowerToys
website that Joe was playing with, and he was having fun creating a
wide variety of physics experiments. It was cool to see just how
quickly he was able to assemble some working physics experiments.
Yeah … some were just experimenting with “gravity” and smashing
things into things … but that is the point!

It was also cool to see Sam playing with one of the painting/drawing
applications. I forget the name, but I got it running for him,
and he was quickly scribbling all over the screen. One of the
coolest things was to watch him when he “accidentally” opened the color
picker. He quickly figured out that he could tap on the color
wheel, and then draw in a different color! He had a blast with it.

So far, I am enjoying the Tablet PC … I found that I really like
reading .pdf files on it … the pen is well integrated to allow for
quick scrolling through the pages. More later!

Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast

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This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast
here in Utah.  I guess it’s kind of a variation on a Geek Dinner
that Scoble does.  I really have come to enjoy them … there is a
lot of good conversation and thinking.  It seems that we just
wander in conversation about technology and it’s social implications
… going from one tangent to the next … sharing the cool stuff that
we’ve stumbled on over the last weeks,

This morning we covered a lot of ground as usual … there were a couple of good things that I took away from the conversation.

  • Phil pointed out 43Things.com … a very cool site of collective visualization.  It displays the top things that people are saying
    they want to do with in their lives.  It’ll be interesting to see
    how the most popular ones change over time.  It might just be a
    good indicator of some fo the true aspects of human behavior.
  • I brought up my interest in the Windows Peer to Peer Networking
    project.  I heard about this recently, in depth, at the VSLive!
    conference that I attended, and I realize that Microsoft is serious
    about getting this out in volume with the next version of
    Windows.  The Windows Peer to Peer SDK
    is out there now to experiment with … and it only going get
    bigger.  I believe that this is going to revolutionize the way
    that people share and access information … it is going to drastically
    impact DNS.
  • We also talked about firewalls, and issues with installation and
    configuration of operating systems.  Someone commented that there
    were few simple tools to allow you to manage iptables … so that an
    average human could understand what they are doing.  One of the
    Ekstroms (Sorry … I remembered the joke about usually having more
    Ekstroms there, and I forgot the first name!) suggested looking at KMyFirewall … I’m going to grab a copy and take a look!
  • I also asked for suggestions on a GPL blogging application, as an
    alternative to MoveableType.  I really like MovableType, how I
    want “free as in beer.”  I think that Phill offered up WordPress,
    which is the old B2.  Wow … this really looks nice!  I
    downloaded it and am going to install in on one of my new servers.
  • I also told people about my new Utah Forums web site … http://UtahForums.org  I am slowly developing a place to aggregate many of the tech and entrepreneurial events going on in Utah.

I keep thinking that Phil is right … we’ve got to turn some of these into a podcast.  They are a pretty fun conversation.