Sophistry.org

Paris.

Jeff Durland — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:01:14 +0000

As I start writing in this space again, there are a lot of things to talk about, but one rather obvious category is travel. This photo is from my recent trip to Paris.

Christmas.

Jeff Durland — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:09:24 +0000

The iPhone and how I communicate.

Jeff Durland — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 04:29:19 +0000

Well, after about a month and a half with the iPhone, and the first real software update, and countless articles read, comments made, and people either asking for or just grabbing my iPhone just to play with it, I think I can make a considered judgement on this interesting little piece of technology.

I love it.

It hasn’t changed my life. But it’s made using the phone a pleasure, it’s changed some of my phone habits just slightly, and it’s made me think about how I use the devices around me to communicate. Before I had just a phone, and one I hated at that. Now I have something I like to use, and that I use in sometimes silly and sometimes smart ways. For instance I use text messaging a lot more than I used to.

I use the text messaging feature every day or two, where before I would have used it only if absolutely necessary, and then I would have used this text messaging widget on my computer instead of the phone keyboard. That’s because on my old phone, you had to navigate through several different screens even to get to the text feature, then it would have to activate, then you would have to use the regular phone keypad to attempt to type. It was absolutely hopeless for a feature that was supposed to save time. Now I can just touch the SMS icon. Then I see texts in the form of a conversation, a feature that really makes sense, and respond using a good if not perfect qwerty keyboard. It’s a pleasure to use.

But I’m not a different person. I still mostly dislike talking on the phone, even if the process is a lot easier. So I don’t really make more phone calls than I would have before. But the phone calls I do make, or answer, are much less painful, so I’m less likely to put them off. Just yesterday I was getting Thai food, soething I don’t normally do, but I was able to use the Google Maps feature to look up Thai places nearby, look at their Web pages, and call pretty easily. This would have been a painful process before (and I probably would have tried to get my girlfriend to do it for me).

Still, I notice I’m not really making more phone calls, just that I hate them less.

I love the email and Web functionality, though mostly as a toy, since I am so close to a computer for the majority of my day. It’s just fun to use the phone instead, and really useful at those rare times I’m away from my computer and really need to find something out or get in touch with somebody.

Four months ago the calendar would have been useless, but since I am 9-to-5 again it’s essential. Sometimes I have back to back meetings and the calendar lets me know where I need to be next rather than having to head back to my computer. So again, I still hate a lot of meetings, but this eliminates some of the annoying little side aspects of going to them.

Finally, the iPod stuff is really cool. I can’t do much more than I could do with my old nano, but it’s so much more fun with the iPhone interface.

Long story short: it doesn’t let me do stuff I couldn’t do before, but it makes a lot of tasks easier and a lot more fun.

A million ways to spell Viagra.

Jeff Durland — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:17:42 +0000

American Scientist has an interesting article about how spam has become the main practical focus of computational linguistics and computational learning theory. It turns out that there are about 6 X 10^23 possible theoretical spellings, but probably only about a million of them are actually comprehensible to a human (that is, “V1@6ra” is probably comprehensible while “\/1*aT9rU@” is not).

Interestingly correct shower controls.

Jeff Durland — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:19:40 +0000

With apologies to Dave Coustan, who is exploring the world of shower controls on his own blog, I offer this apparently well-designed approach to the world of the shower. You see, the inner ring controls the temperature, while the outer ring controls the flow. So you can set the shower at the right temperature at the beginning of your stay, and never have to change it. I think this might be a revolutionary development in hotel room shower controls.

View of St. Paul’s from the Millennium Bridge.

Jeff Durland — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:02:18 +0000

First impression of Basecamp.

Jeff Durland — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 04:52:02 +0000

A new set of video testimonials for 37signals and Basecamp is out. I recently started using Basecamp for a project (the first time I’ve officially used the product, and I didn’t even have to convince the client–someone else did). It has been a dream to use, simple, intuitive, and everything else you look for in a project tool, and yet I am not sure it will end up being effective. The only reason it might not be useful is if (drum roll please) people don’t use it. One of the great advantages of Microsoft products over the past couple of decades is that there hasn’t been any alternative for many functions, so people are forced to use their products; without competition, they evolve and grow with no effective criticism from users. Now that there’s something much, much better than SharePoint available for project work, I hope Microsoft will feel the pressure.

View from the Puck Building.

Jeff Durland — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:43:10 +0000

Your host gets a real job.

Jeff Durland — Wed, 30 May 2007 03:54:47 +0000

So, after hemming and hawing over my next career move, I’ve decided to head back to the nine-to-five world. I recently accepted a position as Content Strategist with IconNicholson here in New York. I certainly value the time I’ve spent as a freelancer, and I’ve learned a lot of things about how that world works, and I appreciate how my network of friends and clients has helped me to achieve at least a moderate success. I’m also glad to be able to start working with a smart new group of people and tackle projects I might not have gotten a crack at as a freelancer. And the regular paycheck doesn’t hurt.

So, how does this affect the blog?

IconNicholson actually has a very liberal blog policy; they encourage employees to maintain blogs. However, I cannot of course talk about our clients, or about anything that touches on Icon’s intellectual property. This strikes me as a pretty fair deal. I also need to let my readers know that my opinions are not necessarily those of my employers, and that they do not endorse this blog. I’ll be adding a more permanent statement to this effect soon.

But I’ll continue writing about the things that interest me: writing, editing, community, Web applications, the Mac. And hopefully I’ll be doing it more often now that this job thing is settled.

Interesting perspective on “technology.”

Jeff Durland — Tue, 15 May 2007 04:26:36 +0000

Last week’s New Yorker had an interesting article on technology, how we tend to forget that technology is not just the latest digital doodads in our lives, but also the things that became part of our lives a long time ago, such as teapots and wheels. Basically any device that we use to make our lives easier is a piece of technology. However, we seem to privilege the thing that’s new, even if the most important pieces of technology we use in our daily lives are rather simple and old, and even if the older technologies are more important to what we want to do, or more efficient, or simply more effective. Moreover, the article asks us to consider how we don’t think about how alternative technologies might have been able to do the job of the technologies we currently use (as an example, the pneumatic tube, widely adopted in New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century).