Tony’s Place

Although I work in technology I consider myself a technology laggard (see Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”.  It’s a great book for anyone in the technology field)  . I like to think that my education as a software and electrical engineer has taught me that it’s just plain wasteful to live on the bleeding edge. Its fun to build things on the bleeding edge but I have little desire to consume products on this edge (I do have exceptions).

One technology area that I plan on waiting a long time before adopting is high definition television.

The HD-DVD and BLU-RAY format war means that someone is paying $500 today for a Betamax that is just going to be collecting dust in a few years when the other format wins the war. There aren’t many titles yet and the fact that most studios are picking sides means that EVERYONE is going to lose in the near term. This is just bad news.

As far as HD television goes they are still too expensive and HD programming is NOT pervasive. Also, because the technology is overly complicated at the moment, a large percentage of people who shelled out 1000s of dollars on HD TVs are watching them with standard definition. People just have too much disposable income I guess. Of course not all these people have disposable income… they just want to live on the edge even if they don’t understand it. Or perhaps they didn’t understand that the cable company was going to charge them extra to receive HD television.

Friends of mine who have HD have all started putting antennas on their houses. After all the BEST HD content is over the airwaves because the cable company hasn’t compressed it. It seems like we are going backwards. In the 70s everyone got cable television to avoid those silly antennas.

Don’t even get me started on these HD fanatics who also watch shows on their video IPod. I can’t live without a large screen HD TV but I’ll shell out $2 to watch shows on a tiny video screen with poor quality encoding.

My Conclusion, Some people just want the latest technology regardless of whether it makes sense. While some people can afford to live on the bleeding edge for most people it just means credit card debt they can never seem to shake because they are slaves to the edge.

I have 3 modules on AimPages now. I added 2 last Sunday and they are getting adopted pretty quickly. My Fortune module has been out for a month but since most of the quotes are pretty nerdy I didn’t think it would be that popular.

But my Eyes and Visitors modules are already generating more traffic than the Fortune module. It’ll be interesting to see if I can keep up with the traffic once AOL starts promoting AimPages.

Details on the services can be found on my wiki

I always think of great things to blog about while driving home but by the time I’m home I usually have forgotten about them.   I think its time to put a notepad in the car so I stop talking about wind chill and freezing water.

While I have cold weather on my mind lets talk about wind chill.

Question:  if the wind chill is 25 degrees Fahrenheit will water freeze?
Answer: There isn’t enough information to decide.

At 35 degrees with 15 MPH winds the wind chill is 25 degrees.  Water isn’t going to freeze.

If there is no wind it is 25 degrees and water will freeze.

Wind Chill is about how cold it feels.  Not how cold it is.

Debunking stupid stuff. entry 1.

Hot water freezes faster than cold water. yeah whatever. I have heard this from many people over the years. I think they confused cooling speed with time to actually freeze.

Put 1 gallon of 90 degree water outside when it is 20 degrees out and 1 gallon of water that is at 60 degrees.

The 90 degree bucket is going to drop 10 degrees much faster than the 60 degree bucket but the fact of the matter is that the 60 degree bucket has a 30 degree head start and when the 90 degree bucket is at 60 it will have slowed down to the same speed that the 60 degree bucket was at at the start of the race. But its well below 60 now.
Maybe someone will google this and be enlightened.

Of course there is the Mpemba effect but that is a special case and it probably not going to occur when you put hot tap water into your ice cube trays.