Coevolving Innovations

I know youngsters (i.e. the under-30 crowd) who “live on the web”. When I say “live on the web”, I mean that that they really use the browser as their primary computer interface. Key indicators for this behaviour are the use of webmail and online RSS readers. They prefer to use a browser interface to read and send e-mail (e.g. through Gmail/Googlemail or Yahoo Mail) and read news and blogs (e.g. with My Yahoo, Google Reader or Bloglines).

I come from a different generation. A decade ago, when connections speeds of 56kbps were considered fast, the mindset was distributed computing. This meant working primarily through a PC interface, while downloads were managed invisibly in the background. In my personal life, this means that I prefer Thunderbird for reading and sending e-mail offline; and Feedreader for quickly checking news and blog headlines, and browsing only the content that I find interesting. I’m impatient with the slightest delay on the Internet (although delays at home are usually a family issue on router bandwidth, with my sons becoming hogs with P2P traffic). I prefer the immediacy of PC-based applications (with an eye on Traymeter to see when Windows XP has a runaway thread). For maximum productivity in my corporate work, the ultimate fat client luxury is Lotus Notes client, with Lotus Domino servers scattered around the world.

For most people, the obvious answer would have been: “get an iPod”.
I’ve been an advocate of Sony minidisc recorders for some time. The introduction of the technology in the early-1990s was a digital jump from the compact cassette. Through the early 2000s, I maintained that minidisc was a technology of the present. The recorder has been popular in professional use, such as news recording. The removable minidisc media is rugged, the battery life is great, and sound quality is high. Unfortunately, Sony maintained its proprietary ATRAC format a bit too long, so it was only since 2004 that digital-to-digital transfers from the Hi-MD format have been possible (at least on originally-recorded content, since other transfers were copy-protected).

I’m continuing to use minidisc technology for recording¹, but recording and listening to prerecorded content are really two different activities.

I like Google Maps, because they provide a lot of context around the location that I’m searching. With the amount of travel that I do, it’s always nice to know what’s near the hotel — particularly restaurants, hotels, and shopping.

I’m setting up a new CiviCRM web site, and it has the feature of asking about the longitude and latitude of locations (e.g. home address) when filling in the user profile. It’s easy enough to find the place using Google Maps, but decoding the URL is pretty tricky.

In an entry on Google Maps Help Group, someone asking that exact question got a response: