With all of this talk of economic meltdown, I thought I would share an article that a friend of mine told me about today.

It’s old, (April 2008) but I think it’s more relevent now. Our economy is broken. The country that goes green the quickest will be the next world leader.

Thomas Friedman: Dumb as We Wanna Be

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.  Read More

Designed in the early 1990s by Mark Rosheim, the Omni-Hand is dexterous, rugged and hand-powered by an electric gearbox in the palm. It also was the most life-like and reliable hand that NASA made in the ’90s. The space agency’s researchers even put a glove on it. Courtesy of Wired

UGA Connect is a conference on Social Media held by the Public Relations department inside UGA’s Grady College of Communication.

The conference is about social media and how to utalize it to create active involvement.

You can see pictures tagged with UGAconnect08 on Flickr.

Also, the UGAConnect twitter feed is quite active.

I’m home sick with a sore throat today. Trying to get some rest. I went to the doctor, and it looks like it’s just a virus that’s been going around.

I found this neat website that tests how well you can differentiate colors. I scored an 11/99 (lower is better).

Don’t take this test as truely scientific. There are so many things that could varry the color variation on your monitor from what operating system you use to what angle you’re looking at your at.

It was a fun little test.

I’m really ready to have a break with this WUOG Podcasting stuff. Traffic has gone up quite a bit in the past month since its launch. We’re fine tuning, tweaking, and writing documentation for the system now. Updates are trickling in now, but this next week will be the first test of the entire process.

It’s impossible to tell when these projects will be finished, but hopefully the last kinks are being worked out. Then I’ll get to rest. Until the next project =)

The video game industry is an $18 billion dollar juggernaut and Apple can’t resist a piece of that pie. Apple is taking serious strategic steps to dramatically increase market share in the coming years.

5) App Store. Real games on a real gaming device.

As of this writing, there are nearly 900 games currently available for the iPhone and iPod touch. These devices deliver a solid interface for an enjoyable casual gaming experience.

The Apple marketing machine is also touting the iPod Touch as “The Funnest iPod Ever.” While I think that’s the dumbest slogan ever, it’s a clear move on Apple’s part. Apple doesn’t take a step without thinking five years in the future.

iPod. Apple. Fun Games. That’s the connection they want you to make.

4) Converting the Masses

Beyond training the consumer to think of iPod Touches as fun gaming devices, Apple needs another group of individuals to be successful. Programmers.

It has been a historic lack of market share and minimal gaming interest on the OS X platform that has scared game developers away.

However, game developers are flocking to iPhone and iPod Touch (almost 900 games, remember?) because of the large market and System Developers Kit.

3) The SDK

The iPhone uses a stripped down version of OS X. Programers use a language called Cocoa Touch, a tweaked version of the language used to program on OS X (Cocoa).

iPhone game developers are one step away from being Mac OS X game developers.

2) The Merging of the CPU and GPU

Higher end Macs contain a dedicated GPU. OS X is a highly graphical interface, yet, games have always suffered. That’s because Mac hasn’t “pandered” to the gaming market. Further, lower end models use integrated graphics. This combination makes OS X a poor gaming platform.

Apple doesn’t need to solve either of these problems. The way games are being programed will be fundementally changing in the very near future.

Game developers will no longer have to relay on Direct X or other graphical frameworks. The processor is going to do everything. Graphics will be processed just like software.

1) Snow Leopard and Grand Central

In the very near future, the number of cores a processors have is going to skyrocket. Apple’s next iteration for OS X contains the ability to manage an unlimited number of cores effectively.

When CPUs and GPUs combine, Apple is going to be ready, one of the first adopters, and will leverage their large base of developers to catapult Mac OS X into the forefront of gaming technology.

Hey, maybe this first CPU/GPU computer will be a tablet too. Probably not.

Jerry Seinfield is teaming up with Bill Gates to help improve Microsoft’s vista image problem. They’ve recently launched their second ad (4:30s long). It’s clear that Seinfield had a lot to do with it, but there doesn’t seem to be much about what makes Vista better.

This may be good at lightening up PCs image, but Bill Gates is really old. And Jerry Seinfield was on a popular sitcom in the 90s. Hardly seems relevant to my computing experience.

This is two days in a row. Hopefully the blogging habit will continue. This will be quick, though.

I posted one of the first episodes on the new podcasting system today. It’s a Live in the Lobby of the Athens “Electric Bluegrass” band Splinterbelly.

Settling into the role as Webmaster at the radio station has gone well. I’ve started backing up the current site and will be working on organizing it more soon. The podcasting system took a big jump to 100% completion today. This was more of a back-end upgrade to make it easier for the people (including me) doing the podcasts.

That’s it for now. Just an FYI, I’m taking down most of the site for now and leaving just the blog. When the rest of my site comes back up, it will have the same structure/layout, but it will have a different design.

End Transmission.

There’s a new theme for the blog. This was created by Darren Hoyt from Smashing Magazine.

Again, it has been a while since I’ve updated! School is still plugging along. I’m now a month in. I’ve been having 12-hour days on campus.

There’s a Digital Media meeting at WUOG today. We’re still teaching Audacity and FTP, the requirements for creating a podcast.

Also, I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments. They don’t show up because they wait for my approval. As I was going through them, it seems a lot of them dissapared without me even seeing them. So, if your comment got lost, sorry. If you can remember it, post it again. If you haven’t commented, give it a try.

More real soon! I promise!

A quick update:

School has started and is going well. Today was Monday #2. I have been biking to campus, and I’m really falling in love with it. It’s a great workout. Classes are exciting. I’m looking forward to Graphic Communication, which I have tomorrow.

The WUOG Podcasting page which I have been working on for the summer launched this past weekend. It was a fairly big job. Podcast Generator made it a lot easier. Also, I made a screencast of the new system: It’s on YouTube.

A little bit of narcissism and this green search engine (write-up later?) led me to find someone that found my Time Machine article useful. That’s genuinely rewarding.

It looks like things are slowing down. Or that could be the dreariness and the rain. Regardless, I will continue blogging soon.

-Jason