Grazing Press=

I just watched the series of vimeo demos of Mozilla’s Aurora interface.

Very clever and very complicated.  It’s shown as an interaction twixt what appears to be a Yuppie farmer and someone who predicts profits in agriculture based on loosely gather data on the Internet.

The strangest part to me was the graphic of usage icons diminishing in size to the horizon according to there place on the “Z” time line.  It has the feel of a galactic cloud of cosmic dust, only not as inspiring.

What was most interesting about the demo was the space station mouse the woman was using.  It looked like a globular wheel combined with an inter-lever joy-stick.

I have a feeling this woman runs a high tech winery.  If you have read the news lately, they are growing a lot more than grapes in some of these northern California boutique wineries.

Perhaps with hands-on experience I would be better able to critique the interface itself.  This is more a comment on the demonstration itself.  I felt no connection with the characters used to represent the end-user.

Mr. Jobs does a better job of clearly showing how we may use a product in our day to day lives.  This demo did not.

In reading the news of late, there seems to have been many stories of groups of people conducting themselves in an unsafe manner.  Has common sense left the collective intelligence of the human race?

In a previous life I witnessed a woman clinging to a tree at a ball field get killed by a strike.  She was told by those around her not to hide under the tree during a thunderstorm.  She brushed them off with a comment about the low risk of getting hit. 

If you want to waste an hour and half, listen to the inane conversation at the new Vinecast. 

This experience was similar to my recent read of the latest David Sedaris book. 

I unfortunately had just reread The Innocents Abroad.  Expecting to follow this with more wit and humor mixed with bitter irony, I was instead given the mediocre revelations of a mediocre life, the highlight of which was to go to Tokyo with the express purpose of ending a decades long smoking habit.

Twain wrote about quitting the awful habit several times.  Each time was with a combination of irony and humor that was totally missing from the Sedaris book.

I will compare TWiT with Vinecast.  On the TWiT podcast, intelligent and well informed people discuss issues surrounding their chosen topic.  With the exception of a fascination with Twitter, the talk mostly stays focused to the issue at hand.  It is moderated by Leo Laporte.

It would be correct to identify the moderator of the Vinecast here, but there really wasn’t one.  It wasn’t until the broadcast was several minutes old before the speakers were even identified.

It would be the right thing to say that I listened to the entire podcast.  It would be the right thing, but it would be a lie.  My email icon popped up and I decided to read SPAM instead of continuing with the podcast. 

That about says it all.

This is a first blog entry using the new off-line editor Zoundry Raven.

In the set up, it seemed to bring the settings for Trounce Ally in the VOX server with no problem. Considering the difficulty we have had getting a VOX based blog working in an off-line editor we will be very surprised if this works.

No bells and whistles with this entry, with the exception of the -30- HTML code.