a potential GPS app – glasses or some other display to tell you what you’re flying over when you’re in a plane, eliminating “is that ____ mountain?” or “what town is that over there?” questions, and opening up opportunities for fun and learning and sunshine and daisies.

what if things like “this team will break if they get up against a strong defense” or “these guys are only two shooters deep” could be visualized, so in plotting a bracket you could calculate odds based on the matchups of the particular strengths and weaknesses of the teams in each game, which is probably more reliable than their seed.

what are the pros and cons?

the other day i had a really simple idea about how to potentially make reply all easier, which is a problem i’ve been mulling on the back burner for a while.
i was reminded of it today because gmail ate one of my messages when i switched between reply and reply all!!
aarrghh!!
so i wanted to make a little mockup.

the basic idea is to get rid of reply all as a separate button, and just incorporate an awareness of who you’re replying to into the send button.

this could also handle the problem of replying to a list AND replying to the last person who wrote to the list, which leads to annoying duplication.

i’ve been cleaning my house some tonight, which is GOOD, and i am struck by something that always strikes me when i am cleaning: i keep too much sentimental crap, but even admitting that doesn’t make it easy for me to throw it away.
the thing is, even as i look at something and go “whoa! i do NOT need that.” it makes me think about whatever it was that i was doing when i got it, and so its purpose as a memento is fulfilled, and keeping it in the first place is somehow justified, so keeping it for the future? well…
so i have decided that i need to take more forceful action on an idea that i had this summer. this summer it was specifically about vacations. when i go on vacation i tend to keep stupid stuff for at least a little while – maps, flyers, rocks… whatever detritus happens to accumulate that has some unique connection to the trip. at the end of a trip i tend to have a little pile of stuff in the car, or my bag, or my pocket, or wherever, that i’m not ready to part with yet, so i keep it, and it ends up somewhere when i get home. since i’ve learned that i really don’t do anything with this stuff, i’ve started to get harder on myself about keeping it, but this summer i decided i should do something different. i told myself that i could keep whatever i want, but then i had to make a collage out of whatever i kept within a month, or i had to throw it away. i really like making collages, you see, and over the past few years i’ve seen enough really creative ones in the art world that i’ve had to admit to myself that it doesn’t just Have to be a throwback to my childhood that i save for the times when i have a three year old to humor. i’ve tried to tell myself that i should indulge the interest and play with it a bit more to see whether i do anything cool. but i never find the time.
so this seemed like a perfect plan. it would give me an incentive to do some artistic exploration, provide an outlet for my strange desire to accumulate receipts, and possibly generate items of some artistic interest, which are much more useful than shoeboxes full of crap, and which would actually probably lead to me encountering the items themselves more often, because they would be fun to look at. so it’s win-win-win.
it didn’t work, though.
i got sidetracked and missed my deadline.
but i still think i am going to keep trying, because i really like the idea.

what i decided today, though, was that i shouldn’t stop with trips. i should just consider All my old trinkets and slips of paper to be art supplies, and start making stuff out of them as a means of preserving the memorabilia by actually putting it to use.
this sounds fun, but i also admit that, artistic aspirations aside, i had flashes of new piles of crappy junk collages that all kind of look the same, but that i don’t want to throw away because they contain bazooka wrappers in hebrew or something. the one good thing about piles of junk is that it’s easy to stow into boxes and shove under the bed. so if i start making mediocre art out of it (and by mediocre i mean that i’ll go “ok, that was fun,” but then want to put it in a closet so that people won’t see it), will it actually become More of a hassle?! i mean, i don’t want to turn into that guy on npr whose entire house was decorated with homemade bob dylan memorabilia. that would be weird.

so there are risks involved, but i’ve decided that i should embark upon the experiment anyway and see what happens. if you have any clever ideas for things that i might make (not all of the objects are 2-dimensional, so some measure of sculpting will be involved), or surfaces that i might cover, you should let me know.

and if i succeed, i will post pictures, even if afterwards i ask you not to speak of them ever again.
:)

“this post made me:
:) :| :( X( [starstruck] [crushed out] [sleepy]

i was reading this blog post this morning, which talks about the potential strengths that subscription-based music services have over ‘piecemeal’ song collection for a lot of people, and in the comments people talk about how two big downsides of subscription services are that the artist doesn’t get money directly and you don’t get to keep the music (so if the site goes down for some reason and you’ve invested hundreds of dollars over the years, you’re left SOL with only the sounds of silence (in non-musical form, of course)).
so first off, i wonder why the artist can’t get money directly – they can keep track of what people download, right? can’t they apportion the money relative to popularity? i thought they did that already anyway…
what i really wonder, however, is about something more like a rent-to-own service.
say you pay $30/month or whatever for your subscription service, but then in addition to your unlimited downloading rights you get a certain number of vouchers for “permanent” downloads. i don’t know how many you would really get. 5? 10? whatever, this is just hypothetical right now.
so you get these vouchers every month and they roll over like bonus points in a book club or something, and you can use them at any time to get your favorite songs in some more permanent (and potentially higher-quality) form.
so you get the benefits of the versatility and openness of the subscription service but you also get the chance to build up a library of the songs you actually listen to in case you have to go underground for a while. because this is the other point everyone makes – sure, it’s Nice to be able to access everything, but when it comes down to what you really Need, it’s not so much for most people. so a fraction of what you download every month would probably be sufficient over time. it would take a while to build up, but that would be something the companies would like because it would reward loyalty.
and it would take care of the whole paying the artists directly bit, too.

shrug

how bout it?

i was just piddling around online and reading about social software (there is no one link to give… would it be cool if i could give a link to a list of links? how would that work? it would be annoying if it opened a bunch of windows, but cool if it generated one window and populated it with all of the links in the list… hmm…), and i signed up at 43things.com, which is kind of interesting.
but i’m not really here to talk about the site itself right now, i’m just here because that link up there, at the time that i posted this, goes to a page that says “kynthia is doing 2 things and going 0 places” and man, even writing that now to tell you the story makes me laugh Really Really hard…
i can’t even finish this post intelligibly…
it’s difficult to breathe…

update – 12/25: this post strikes me as a pretty good marker of right before i crossed over and grokked delicious. it’s kind of amazing, and potentially historic, so there ya go. today, if you want to see things that i classify as social software (which i actually kind of stopped doing… i’m giving a bit of a moratorium on buzzwords until i decide how to deal with them in my tags), you can just look here. just like what i asked for, and even better because it will evolve.

so i’m trying to whittle away at my work email inbox, which i have been managing with labels and not really filing as a sort of experiment, but now there are over 1500 messages in it, and some have just got to go. i figure if i just spend 20 minutes or so at a time i will conquer it eventually.

anyway this is interesting for other reasons because i’m thinking a lot about email categorization for my capstone.

so i just found this message that is an autoreply that says : “sorry, i don’t work in the bursar’s office anymore. please write someone else from now on.”
what is the best way to handle a message like that?
a lot of my job is actually about remembering who to contact about different things, and the “right” person changes all the time, so this isn’t that rare. but i’m thinking “where can this go where i would actually see it when it is relevant?” the way it usually goes is i remember some conversation i had with someone and figure that’s the person i should talk to, so i search for things about that conversation until i find the person, and i write them. but i don’t always find ALL of the messages from that person, so the odds that i’m going to find this one, telling me to write someone else, are slim. in fact, since i got that message, i Have written this person about something else, but i only just realized it now, and that’s because my inbox is so frickin full that they show up next to each other when i sort by sender. if i had filed the other message away somewhere based on what it was about, rather than who it was from, that couldn’t happen, and even if it could, it makes no sense to think that i would scan All the messages from Every person just in case there’s something like this there.

so what if i was able to attach a note to the address itself? something so that, if i tried to type it again, it gave me a little warning? that could be useful for other kinds of messages, too – i wish i could attach all messages with contact info to the address of the person, so that if i’m wondering what their latest address or their id number is i could just look to see if any of those sorts of messages are attached to the name rather than scouring for them in contact info dumping grounds or gambling on whether i updated the info somewhere else.
that would be great.

but would a better solution to this particular problem be to use more aliases for official stuff like this? i’ve often thought of a scheme wherein iu maintains some kind of central lookup for employees that matches common questions to aliases and then you just always write to that alias no matter who has the job. they have things like bursar@indiana.edu and imuhotel@indiana.edu, but you still end up talking to more specific people most of the time and then that person gets email forever from everyone who ever talked to them, even if they change jobs. or maybe you could make your own aliases, like guytoaskaboutjohn’scontract@indiana.edu, and you would only have to tell it once.

dunno.
there are three real problems here, i guess – the job shifting problem, the not knowing who to ask problem, and then the classification problem that originally got me thinking – how should we handle it when a message isn’t really related to another collection of messages, but to an address?
or a date?
would that be the same?
i’ve struggled with how to file things that were something like “look at me again next thursday”, and that could be addressed by being able to attach the email to the date

or you could just use jminder for that one, i guess (you can pay me royalties, later, josh ;)

so whatever, just thinkin aloud
the question i’m left with is something like: if there are a lot of ways to approach a problem, how do you know which are bandaids and which are getting at the root of the matter? if bandaids are easy do they still have a place? can’t they point to the root in ways that trying to dig it out by just puzzling about it can’t? is there a rule to help tell when they are doing that vs. when they are just holding something together that really should be sold for scrap and started anew?