Tech thoughts from a heavily medicated techie

During my severe asthma attack last weekend (yes, I'm asthmatic), I was under all kinds of medication and it kind of altered my mind for a moment (at least that's what I'd like to think, otherwise I'd have to believe that I really don't have a normal mind).

It was in this altered state that a realization hit me: we should combine a touch screen film, a scanner, and a glove. Yes, a glove. The touch screen film goes on the monitor, and the scanner goes into the tip of the glove's index finger. That way, if we want to copy a phrase or a word out of paper, or whatever surface for that matter, We can simply run our finger across the surface and touch the screen, and voila! The scanned words would then be pasted on the screen where we touched.

It's amazing what an overdose will do to the human mind. Imagine if I had a heart attack, the kind of technologies I could invent. =)

Ice Rocket : digital, medication, scanner, technology, touch screen, weird

How I Crashed, and Lived to Tell About It

The persistent glitches on start-up should have sent warning bells ringing in my head, but that day I missed them completely. I was too preoccupied with trying to finish the project that I lost my common sense to stop, take a look around, and only move on when everything was absolutely safe. There was nothing that could distract me. Not the cold, not my aching eyes, and certainly not a few hurdles at the beginning. I was determined to smooth out my project and get it ready for presentation.

The whole thing happened so quickly and was over in less than a minute. I rebooted to finish installing an update, waited, waited ... and waited.

The blank screen stared back at me silently.

The truth began to painfully sink into my gut like a dull knife: I had suffered a crash.

Dreaded, unwelcome thoughts of losing ELEVEN GigaBytes of my porfolio - every document, every graphic, everything I had worked so hard at - began playing through my mind. I had no other copies of my files, ALL my files, since high school, except those on my PC. And now it just sat there, mocking me. I began to panic. I instinctively pressed the reset button and restarted the PC several times, with the same gloomy results. The BIOS setup indicated that my hard drives were intact, but since the operating system could not start, I had no way of knowing whether or not I was ever going to see my beloved files again.

Then a ray of light struck me and made me slap my head in "stupid-feelingness." I had just moved all my documents to another hard drive, the second one, by moving the "My Documents" pointer. My OS was on the first and that had crashed. That should have (hopefully) left my storage drive intact. With a little bit of luck, I should be able to reformat the primary hard drive, reinstall Windows, and repoint "My Documents" to my other hard drive. It should work, theoretically.

The next two hours were the longest I have ever had to endure. My fingers were crossed beyond recognition and I had probably four cups of coffee to calm my nerves (I was so nervous I forgot coffee works the opposite way, I ended up getting more and more tense).

Finally the time for first boot-up came and I had the chance to examine the storage drive. The files were there! I had never been more relieved, except for the time when I finally got home after a four-hour nonstop bus trip and I had diarrhea.

The moral lesson? Move your "My Documents" folder to another hard drive if you have one, or to another partition if you only have a single drive. In the event of a crash, you'll have a much better chance of only having to reinstall your OS and not starting from scratch with your entire portfolio.

A Brief History of Cell Phone Photography (a common man’s perspective)

The onslaught of modern cellular phone technology has brought with it a new breed of hobbyist photographers armed with nothing more than camera phones. Ever since the first camera phones came out, we've been seeing blogs and even entire web communities popping up on the internet built around photos taken using mobile phones.

First generation camera phones produced pictures that were of very low resolution by today's standards (320 pixels x 240 pixels, or even smaller), but they had one characteristic that made them perfect for the old internet's limited bandwidth: small file sizes. Back then if a person had a 128-Kbps internet connection at home his friends would move in with him.

As the internet evolved, so did camera phone technology, and megapixel cameras on mobile phones were fast becoming commonplace. This meant that it was now possible to take better-quality, higher-resolution pictures. Camera phones now provided an alternative to dedicated digital cameras. Although they were far from posing a threat to true digital cameras, people were choosing them for the simple fact that camera phones were very portable, being integrated into cell phones.

As more and more people started to publish an increasing variety of photos online, it became apparent that some form of control would need to be implemented soon, because some, no, make that a lot of photos were being posted that were clearly not what the cell phone designers had in mind when they first created the camera phones.

Phone manufactures came up with different methods to deter the improper use of the gadgets, and perverts kept coming up with ways to defeat them. The cycle continues to this day.

Fortunately, as camera phones went up in class, so did the users. They began to see their phones as true digital cameras, using them for more than snapshots. There are even many extraordinary cell phone photographers in existence today.

Today, the highest resolution for a camera phone is 5 megapixels, the same as the average digital camera. With a creative eye, and perhaps a little Photoshop skill, the average camera phone – wielding Joe can bring out the artist in him.