Digital Dad

The Latest Thing

Thought this was a pretty good comic from Penny Arcade:

Works with the shelves I have at home!

What if your kid ran for President and won?

Here’s a cool link with a worksheet for your child to fill out. It has questions on it like:

 

Pretend that you were running for the presidency. Prepare a campaign speech and highlight the important things that you would wish to accomplish if elected.

• If elected, list the responsibilities and powers of your presidency.
• Tell what leadership characteristics you will need to be effective and to succeed as president.
• What will be your legacy?

Our teachers are on strike here in Bellevue, WA so we are on the lookout for things like this to do during the day!

Digital Dad at CES

I am en route to CES 2008 for just a few days - a meeting or two and see a few things, including Bill Gates' last keynote there. A couple of themes emerging pre-show:

 

• smaller/thinner
• content everywhere
• wireless (like wireless HD)
• more focus on industrial design

Otherwise it seems like there's a bunch of stuff that is just mainstream that used to be hot topics like HD, DVRs, in-car video and console gaming.

Let's see who has solutions looking for problems!

Digital Dad's Best of CES Awards

I'm fully recovered from my trip to Vegas (and in the process of recovering from all of this snow)  so here goes the first annual Best of CES Awards, Digital Dad style. My criteria was innovation, coolness, and appllication of technology to the family.

Oregon Scientific's Wireless Talking Meat Thermometer

"Why wait by the grill to find out when dinner is ready? The AW131 Talking Wireless BBQ/Oven Thermometer verbally alerts you when your entree has reached the perfect temperature."

And note the little picture of the cow. Cool.

LED Lantern plus Weather Radio

This looks pretty cool. The LED lantern is a cylinder that also folds out into wings to shine downward. Unfortunately I forgot to write down the manufacturer - any ideas?

Microsoft Windows Home Server

This one looks promising - all your music and pictures, remote access, auto-backup, headless console control. It's a home server OS that ships on a new HP box that looks pretty tiny. I'll give it some hands-on at work and see how it goes,

Car with twelve video screens

Not sure what the deal was here - just caught my eye.

A few other items of note - refrigerators with built-in LCDs, but no WiFi connectivity? Bummer. It also looks like TVs are getting thinner bezels - Samsung was down to almost only half an inch of plastic around the big screen.

CES - The Moronic Inferno

Last year I met Bill Gates, hung out backstage during the keynote and was on stage at the Microsoft booth. This year it's a bit lower profile - good partner meetings and taking in the show floor.

I brought my Gigabeat but left my headphones at home (doh!). I did bring my Bluetooth headset so at least I'll fit in with the masses.

General impressions so far match Michael Gartenberg's take - evolutionary. It looks like people are starting to get the fact that if these things are not easy to use, no one will use them. The tolerance out there for complexity is really zero beyond the core geek factor (there are about 150,000 people here - I think the basicaly defines the market).

Also, it looks the industrial design of these items is getting cooler, including the materials themselves.

More to come including the first Digital Dad Best of CES awards. Woo hoo!

Spam filtering - how difficult can it be?

I've been using the Windows Live Mail beta for a while. Loyal readers will note my earlier efforts with Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc. I'm a big fan of web based email on a PC, but only if it's done with smarts, minimal clicks, little or no latency, and minimal ads.

The old "hotmail" failed on pretty much everyone of those. When we moved up here to Microsoft I switched my wife over to Hotmail from Yahoo just to be a good citizen and she was bombarded with giant banner ads at the top of the screen, screaming about toothpaste or something.

So when I saw the demo of the new mail service back in May, I jumped on the opportunity to get on the beta. It's a quantum leap over hotmail and it has the responsiveness and "cleanliness" I am looking for. The drag and drop and multiple selection of items is great, too, better than Gmail.

But here's my dig - is it so difficult to tell what spam is? Here's an email I received this evening - "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: bums fucck'ng video". Can you tell if it's spam from that title? Unless you are a complete idiot, the answer is yes. However, Mail cannot, in spite of me telling it so doxens of times by hitting "Report and Delete."

Have spammers become so crafty that the mail filter is fooled by "fucck'ng". Or maybe it's the crafty use of "Sexually-Explicit". Or "bums".

How crafty, indeed.