randomosity

So in my quest to push the envel­ope and also save the world ;-) I ran the United Way 5K at Mac today. It is my second year run­ning. Last year I ran it after hav­ing run the Terry Fox 10K and very fool­ishly reasoned that 5K would be a cake­walk if I could run 10K. It’s simply half the dis­tance and there­fore quite eas­ily accom­plished. Yeah. 5K means you run a bloody sprint. So armed with this fore­know­ledge I paced myself well and was quite com­fort­able with it. It also gave me an oppor­tun­ity to get a nice long run’s data recor­ded via my <a href=“http://www.nike.com/nikeplus/” target=_blank” >Nike + pedometer. I have been using this abso­lutely cool device for the past few weeks and find the abil­ity to track my work outs a won­der­ful motiv­ator. However.….……

I star­ted off run­ning the 5K and in kicked my music. Great. I could hear it let me know as I was passing through km milestones…all seemed good. Run­ners star­ted off before walk­ers and were run­ning a longer course. After loop­ing back and the fol­low­ing the com­plete course I was approach­ing a big digital time sign at about 3.2km into the course. felt like I have been run­ning for longer, but I glanced at the iPod and Nike+ told me it was just over 3Km, so ran on by and star­ted to do another loop. Found it curi­ous that there were no longer race mar­shals on corners and was a little unclear as to how much of the course I had left to go. I knew that it was cer­tainly not a full course again, but was con­fused. So, after run­ning along the pre­vi­ous course I did some men­tal cal­cu­la­tions and figured I would make a drop over to the return course and it should be about 5K. So…ran for another 7 or eight minutes and was approach­ing the big digital board again. Decided to actu­ally ask the people there what was up. Here I dis­cover that the first time around I had done 5Km, but was prob­ably well between 7 and 8 km by this point. The iPod showed about 4.5km. When I read the instruc­tion on the Nike+ its sug­ges­ted that you *could* cal­ib­rate it, but it was not neces­sary. Let me tell you, it is clearly neces­sary. I got good exer­cise and a story out of it, and imme­di­ately after­wards went to the 400m track and did the cal­ib­ra­tion. I only wish I could not alter the pre­vi­ously stored inform­a­tion to reflect the fact that I had been pre­vi­ously run­ning much greater dis­tances than I realized ;-)

Moral of this story: tech­no­logy has its limits…I guess we (I) do need to be reminded of that every now and then.

The iPod remains a per­vas­ive example of a viral epi­demic adop­tion. When did it hit the tip­ping point? I’ve still got my 1G pod although the bat­tery gave up the ghost a long time ago. It cer­tainly wasn’t in 2001. The unit was a lux­ury item and rather expens­ive. I think I paid close to $800 for mine in that first month after intro­duc­tion. A couple iPod’s later, the fas­cin­a­tion still remains, but my atti­tude has moved more towards the util­it­arian value. I picked up a Shuffle for use as a USB key with extras. It con­tin­ues to per­form exem­plary. As nice as the stain­less steel back is from the 1G, the Shuffle makes much more sense and doesn’t mar when treated roughly. It’s there when you need it and holds a charge for ages. My Nano, bought after Apple intro’d the 2G Nano for a song, is the dock that holds my little Nike jog­ging device. Now, that is a cool use. So I have paid Apple my share to sup­port the trend.

This art­icle from wired is a brief nar­rat­ive out­lining the pro­cess at Apple that led to its release in 2001. I recall being aware as many were that the soft­ware on the pod was licensed from Portal­Player, how­ever, this shares some of the other ways in which Apple was able to get a product to mar­ket quickly. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it cer­tainly was the best. My little 64Mb Sony pen­cil player (I can’t remem­ber the product name) had the util­it­arian value of the Shuffle in 2000. As the author notes, Apple iden­ti­fied as need, a mar­ket full of products that demon­strated lim­ited innov­a­tion — and offered Apple an oppor­tun­ity to reach a whole new sec­tor. They did this very well. Licens­ing where neces­sary, sub­ject­ing the product to an effect­ive refine­ment strategy and com­bin­ing it cru­cially with a desktop soft­ware. Has any­one tried the crap Sony stuff. DRM is the debate, but Sony tends to rub your face in it, where Apple has hid­den most of it and framed the reminder of its pres­ence in tongue-in-cheek cheeki­ness — ‘Remem­ber, Don’t Steal Music’.

Build­ing a little index of some of my maps over time today reminded me of one of my longest pro­jects. Back in the mid 90s, I star­ted design­ing a map (a mov­ing map, ooh­hhh) of the chan­ging bound­ar­ies of Habs­burg ter­rit­orial domains. I star­ted with a series of HTML pages with maps gen­er­ated by Adobe Illus­trator. I then got the bright idea to actu­ally turn it into some­thing inter­act­ive by using Author­ware. Turn­ing it into a flash-based map was the even­tual goal. To be hon­est, it never quite made it into a fully func­tion­ing flash map. The HTML was good, Author­ware even bet­ter, but it has sat unre­fined as I got dis­trac­ted by other things.

Today when I was brow­ing about I came across Maps of War. They are fea­tur­ing a map called ‘Imper­ial — His­tory’ which is a beau­ti­ful work. There are a num­ber of other won­der­ful maps, all of which are the mov­ing map of my mach­in­a­tions. A small timeline scrolls across the bot­tom of the screen as the large, col­our­ful map is panned about to show ‘who has con­trolled the Middle East’ from 3000 BCE to today. It is won­der­fully executed, even let­ting you jump from date to date on the timeline. The changes in imper­ial ter­rit­or­ies are gradual and smooth. Bril­liant execution.