Babblefish

Not much going on around here. I still have two reunions and our trip to Out of Africa sitting on the digital cameras on the floor next to me. I finally got a couple other computer-related tasks done, so I may tackle that tomorrow. Or not. Never put off until tomorrow what you can postpone indefinitely.

I applied for a job at a new coffee shop/restaurant place that I walk by every day on the way to work. I've been watching their progress since January as they gut and rebuild an old motel as the Rooster Cafe and office space. I was chatting up one of the guys on the work site Friday and asked if they were starting to hire yet. He told me to stop by yesterday. I did, but he hadn't gotten the application forms yet, so I stopped in today on the way to work and filled one out. While I was sitting out front doing that, a lady walked in to also put in an application. I gave her my best Southwestern "howdy ma'am" (or maybe it was my best Midwestern head-tip-and-grunt) and told her the guy she was looking for was inside. She came back out a few minutes later with an application and left. I finished up filling out the three-page application (Can anyone tell me why businesses insist on asking for a bunch of information they neither want nor need? Do you really need three pages of information to hire a dishwasher?), I went to turn it in. Turns out the lady that stopped by was a regular at the bakery and made of point of talking about what a great worker I am. For about two beats, I thought about making some comment about that five bucks being worth it, but I figured I'd just smile and do a "Huh. Cool." Let him hire me first, then let him find out I'm a natural-born smart aleck.

Work is getting just plain weird. Money problems, equipment problems, supply problems, bank problems, personnel problems, you name it. All in a business with six employees. Hardly seems possible. It's gotten to the point of being funny; we all stand around trying to guess what the next disaster will be.

Completely unrelated note: Answers.com has been around for a while, but one of Jerry Pournelle's readers sent a link to One-Click Answers. After you download and install the app, highlight any word or phrase in any document, web page, whatever, then Alt-click and a small box will pop up telling you about it with links to more information. It really comes in handy when you read people like Pournelle or Bob Thompson who like to make obscure references to literary or historical figures. Or those annoying bloggers that title their posts with nonsense words like "babblefish".

Like I said. It's been a slow week.

Work continues towards a 3-D computer interface. Most of the concepts in these videos have been around for some time. I recall seeing something similar to this in Byte Magazine in the 1980's. The problem up to now has been the lack of computing horsepower and high resolution displays. The fact that I am sitting in front of a 42" computer screen that doubles as my TV (at one-third the cost of my first 4.77 MHz 8088, 512KB-RAM, dual-360KB-floppy, 4-shades-of-green-CGA-screen computer, if you don't consider 20+ years of inflation) would seem to indicate that the second problem is already resolved. And with quad-core computers now becoming sweet-spot systems and 8-core systems already coming out, horsepower doesn't look to be an issue either. I'd expect to start seeing some of this show up in Apple's next version of OS-X after Snow Leopard. Linux will also jump on this early. Now that Gates is out of the picture, who knows if there will ever be another version of Windows after Vista? Ballmer just doesn't seem to have the drive and focus that Gates has.

OK, enough babbling. I'm going to bed.