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Correct Overgeneralization
Definition - making universal judgments from limited observations and being right a lot of the time
Benefits - saves time
Deadly risk - addiction to instinct and indifference to data
Jenn and I spent a few days in the Upper Peninsula at and near the Pictured Rocks area. Really the most incredible weather and beautiful parks.
There's a new McDonalds in Grandville over by the Mall, in front of the Cabella's. In any case they have not one, but 5 of those really neat video menu boards.
They've been around for awhile now in onesie/twosies, but this is the first time I've noticed them replace the old physical boards entirely. I'm pretty fairly endlessly entertained by animations, pans and little description/price highlighting touches they do syncing those highlights with the video/image pans. They just feel like Blade Runner kindof stuff don't they?
The cyberpunk future I was promised was supposed to be filled with these things. And here they finally are advertising McSmoothies and McCafe Mochas in Retina screen quality no less.
Large TV Monitor
Been experimenting the past several days with having that 32" extra TV, I got last year, that I've used for various things (mentioned in past posts) as part of my desktop mix. I have to say it's been fairly entertaining. It certainly changes my desktop experience into more of a lean back deal.
In conjunction with the large TV monitor, I've also toyed around with some remote desktop: keyboard mouse control software on an older Android phone, mostly for leaning back and paging through some larger articles.
I spend a lot of time online and I find I bounce between phone/tablet and desktop fairly regularly to have a change of venue and often room location.
Outside
It's finally cooled down a bit today and the humidity has dropped. We took a nice walk in the afternoon and it was nice to finish it without feeling like I needed to grab a fresh T-shirt for a change.
TV and Movies
We're in that end of summer, not quite fall lull of entertainment. The Labor Day weekend always messes with my head a little. It feels like Sunday today, but it's just occurred to me that there was probably a new Newsroom last night that should be on the DVR. Plus, still need to watch last Saturday's Beware the Batman, assuming there was a new one of those too.
Haven't seen anything in the theater since Elysium a couple weeks back. Doesn't look like there is much else on the coming soon radar for a couple more weeks yet either.
Social Media
Twitter made a move last week to distance themselves from being so tightly tied to realtime communication. They introduced the fairly universally panned, by power users at least, blue line threaded conversation formatting, whereby they take replies out of your timeline and group them together with their later interactions.
I'm sure Twitter has all sorts of data that goes to show that most people aren't going to scroll back very far to look at past interactions on their Twitter list, and this change is an effort to increase interaction by casual users with the service, and that's cool and all, but it's an annoying thing that they don't allow older school users to switch off the feature with a preference setting. Facebook does a lot of this type of thing too. There's this drive to find a one sized fits all approach to using these services and that's too bad. Hopefully it's only a temporary phase these companies are going through as they swing from their open roots to a more closed approach. Hopefully they swing back in a year or two to a more open approach. I probably won't hold my breath though.
Devices
This past month, I've started using a Macbook SSD Laptop at work, part time at least. I still haven't fully weaned off my Windows PC, for what amounts more to a heavy bias of Windows Networking and Windows friendly corporate tools and services. The Macbook device itself is very nice though. It's been a very good long while since I've used a Mac with any regularity, and I suppose I can see the appeal. I don't really have a huge desire to switch at home yet though. The clunky truck like nature of Windows compared to the Mac's sleek stylish sedan suits me just fine most of the time.
I'm still digging the Pebble. If your the sortof person that checks your email/social networks or smartphone notifications with any level of obsessiveness, the Pebble will change your life. If you have an Android phone, go out to Best Buy right now and grab one. Of course if you are an iPhone user, hold your horses just a bit on the off chance that Apple announces a smartwatch of their own in a couple weeks, and if they don't, get yourself a Pebble. Smartwatches seems silly sure, but so did smartphones once upon a time, if you remember. Trust me, glancing at notifications on your watch really is a different animal than pulling your phone out of your pocket every 5 minutes.
And you tech savy Android users, might be thinking "Shouldn't I wait and check out the Samsung Gear?". I dunno, maybe, they are supposed to announce it in a couple days. The leaked information doesn't make it look very promising though. The Pebble can last a week or more on a charge, the 10 hours reported for the Samsung Gear doesn't sound very appealing to me, and things like it's built-in wrist camera make it even less so. As the owner of a primitive Casio camera watch 10 or more years ago, having a camera on your wrist is less useful than you'd think. And buying a small Fitbit to stick in your jean's fifth pocket is probably a better way to go as a pedometer. But hey, it mostly comes down to price, if they make it cheap enough, I still might bite, just to play with it (or more likely I'll just continue on with the lovely Pebble and wait and see what Google itself announces in the near future.)
I still don't have a 3D printer. That's a shame too, back in January 2012 I thought it would be likely that prices would have come down by now, and there'd be more of a mainstream offering. Doesn't look like much on the near horizon. Oh and that Makerbot Digitizer scanner turned out to be way way overpriced ($1500) as well, so unless the Kickstarter crowd can come up with a better/cheaper solution, the input side of 3D printing isn't going anywhere any time soon either.
Games
I watched a couple walk thrus demos of Disney Infinity, the Disney-fied Skylander type thing. There seemed to be enough fuss about it that I thought I'd break down and look into it, via Youtube at least. Dunno, maybe you have to play it to really get it, but it's sort of lost on me, but then again, I haven't fully got the Minecraft experience yet either. I'm sure that Skylander/Disney Infinity/Minecraft will likely be a generation of a certain age's equivalent to Magic the Gathering or D&D though.
Only game I continue to regularly play is Ingress.
Comics and Fandom
I've continued to pretty much stay checked out of the comics scene the last couple months. I've reread some old stuff (Green Arrow Long Bow Hunters, which held up well) and some recent stuff, the first trade and a half of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, but my longtime homebase of DC hasn't held much interest for me since their New 52 relaunch.
I can say, I have pretty much zero interest in reading about Avengers 2: Ultron Boogaloo at this point. It's 2 years away, yet there's a new article or two on it every day. Geeks are going, do we really need this long of a build-up? Relax the coverage a bit Fandom Press, thank you very much.
People Careers and Jobs
Not sure I have much more to contribute to this topic area beyond what I had to say in July 2013 . I suppose I could go more into what it's like to watch the shift to Generation X being in charge and the interestingness of Millennials or Generation Y (depending on what they what to call themselves) starting to flood into the office environment in large numbers. So far though, I probably have more observation than insight into that. Maybe a future post.
+ Jenn's Blog
+ Adam and Comfort
The Adventures and Illustrations of a Husband and Wife Comic Artist Duo.
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