so, i went down to macarthur park today (alvarado and wilshire, history). it’s only about 3 miles away from usc, but i had never gone there. i took the 200 line to get down there. the macarthur monument was covered in grafiti. the boating dock was locked up, it had a large lapd rampart sign on it. there didn’t seem to be many tourists there.

by chance, i met this guy cody, tyrone atkins, who is actually the writer of this recently made movie called macarthur park. the movie premiered at this year’s sundance festival, and apparently has been getting good writeups. hopefully they’ll be screening the movie in town sometime soon.

so, all in all, worth the $2.60 in bus fare

Palm, Handspring lose ground to Microsoft – this is the title of the news article that reports that combined, palm and handspring have 90% of the pda sales in january. palm only had 60.5% vs 65% in dec, while handspring dropped from 27% to 26%. that’s a huge win for m$. haha. “Baker added that the new figures probably don’t signify a long-term change in market share.”

cnet has an article yesterday on the new palms/visors.

oh, while i’m doing the pda kick (instead of work), there are new pocketpc ads after ms got in hot water w/ the ftc and false advertising (yeah, what else is new?). pdabuzz has what seems to be a picture of handspring’s new visor edge. also, brighthand has an omnisky vs yadayada. i was about to make a purchase of an omnisky for my palmv last year, but their 3 page online order form was coded poorly and refused to work, so i ended up giving up in disgust.

more fun palm stuff:

• PalmInfocenter: Rumor: m505 Appears at Palm SD Seminar
• Waterworld Palm PluggedIn Event report

also, it seems that there is an anonymous informer lurking on the boards (he was dead on with the details of the m105 launch, so it seems to me that he’s on the inside track):

The enhancements of these units are many. The alarm system will now have a flashing

power button and a vibrator for a silent alarm. The will be a much smaller expansion

pack on the back of the unit in which many things will fit, ranging for a digital camera

to a 256k back memory card to a number of Sega gaming cards. These cards will be

about ¼ the size of the ones used on the Handspring. The left had rail will be smaller

than that of the V and Vx. Palm has also built a feature to dial phone numbers out of

the address book and beam the command to you cellular phone. After a “hard reset”

you will have the option to restart the palm in a number of languages. The Battery

power claims to be longer and the weight lighter. On the m505 the screen will be

65k color just like its competitor the Prism, and on the m505 it will be a regular

plasma screen. The price on the m505 is $449us and $399us on the m500,

i’m assuming w/ the cell phone beaming he’s talking about the bluetooth add-on, although perhaps the ir-port will work w/ those new nokias out of the box.

so, i’ve been outta the loop on the pda front, but there’s supposedly a new palm, the m505 coming out as soon as the end of this month. what’s special about it? well, looks like a palmv w/ color screen and goodies, among them, sd devices. those of you who noice details, will note that the sd02.jpg confirms the form factor of the new palm.

unfortunately, while there’ll be a bluetooth addon (nice), and a modem, there doesn’t seem to be a cellular/wireless add-on built in. while, the new palm looks interesting and i’d like it to be a palm (palmv form factor rocks, have lotsa palm software) my next pda is going to have to have wireless internet, and paging (voice might be nice, but isn’t a dealbreaker).

listening to wheatus makes me sappy. perfect for re-reading “dismantling modernism…”

so i’m listening to some wheatus, and i must say that “punk assed bitch” is definitely my second favorite song. “teenage dirtbag” edges it out slightly because the video manages to make mena suvari look really hot. yeah, not many deep thoughts going on at 5:40am…

Single G4/733 slower than single G4/533?? – you can tell my brain has shut down right around now. some pretty damning benchmarks.

voodoo extreme has some unreal ii info. i find this quote most interesting:

“The path from here to photo-realism is now incremental,” says Sweeney. “It’s still five or ten years away, though, because it needs huge processing power. We need more speed, more precision in color components to let us move up from 32-bit to 64- and 128-bit, but there are no major improvements to be done.

we’ll see…

i’ve been thinking about this for a while, but i sort of crystallized while i was sitting in religions class this morning. i was thinking about e-paper, and how one day we’ll never know how we lived w/o it.

granted, i don’t doubt that the traditional book form will be with us for a long time, it’s cheap and easy to make, but if you have an intuitive, high resolution, tactile interface (epaper we’re talking about remember, not this ebook crap), you have something that’s as easy to read as paper, but with the advantage of, being able to create annotations w/ full and random access, as well as creates all sorts of connections, to other books (that can be loaded dynamically, etc. so, you can be carrying around your whole library (on media or w/ wireless access), which can be organized by as many views as you can think of (which can include timestamps of every action you’ve performed if you wanted it), with dynamic hyperlinking, annotation, and notes storage.

nothing particularly new about this thought (ted nelson‘s been thinking about it for the past 40 years), but i’m pretty sure that this idea of the epaper-ebook will come into its own in the next 10yrs. xanadu will still be vaporware 😛

back to work now. why the hell do i need to memorize 67 slides for art history? is this really the best use i have for my braincells?