I’m thinking ….

Toyota has developed the wheelchair in collaboration with researchers in Japan. The system analyzes brain wave data using signal-processing technology and delivers neuro-feedback to the driver.

Several months back we became aware of a technology that is alleged to help people improve their brain patterns — to become more productive. I went to a seminar by Hope139.com and learned that you can monitor brain action and through neuro-feedback improve your ability to think. I was intrigued, but not intrigued enough to fork out the big bucks they desired.

In contacting “traditional” medical professionals and health insurance companies, I was informed that this technology is not widely recognized and getting any type of reimbursement would be difficult at best. This was in fact confirmed by the presenter at the seminar I attended. And yet the idea seemed logical to me and I wondered about it a fair amount since. The idea may be starting to gain some recognition however.

Last week when I learned from Mike Industries (a blog that used to be full of great things and thanks to twitter is now near useless … present story being a rare exception of late) that a company was now making a “toy” that allowed you to levitate a ping pong ball with EEG waives, I became even more intrigued. That videor story suggested that work was underway to do all sorts of things with brain waves, including flying jets. I really think there is something to all of this … you exercise your body to become better at a skill be it juggling, writing, typing, running, basketball … and on and on. Why not your mind? And I suppose we do exercise our mind on some level — we do multiplication tables, division problems, figure things out, do jigsaw puzzles, be we get no truly objective and simultaneous feedback (unless I suppose you are juggling knives … hmmm).

Now this week Toyota announces a wheelchair that responds to brain waves! Exactly! Now how can they tell you there is nothing to this technology on the one hand and then on the other use a wheelchair that uses the very concept?

I’m intrigued and thinking this will be the next big thing — much bigger than the Segway which was to revolutionize our world as we knew it.

I’d love to replace my computer mouse with an eeg … but not to strap on a helmet to do it …

According to Informationweek, IE8 has been out for only a very brief period, and yet many early adopters have already changed back to IE7. They also say that IE is now down around the 67% mark in overall popularity thanks to Firefox and Safari.

Makes for interesting reading and highlights again why you should never code your site in browser specific language.

It is the year 2009 when data is readily available and their on-line service does not offer a year end summary for download. Amazing. I’ve been doing this with my Discover Card for years. I call to ask how to do it and they tell me:
a) not available on-line
b) they’ll order me one and mail it (like that’s going to help me … I’d still have to key in the data)
c) it will take two weeks — I want to finish my taxes in the next day or two

Doubt I’ll still have the card at this time next year. What a bad job of providing something that they already have, my data.

So if you are considering a Bank of America Credit Card, I’d recommend against same because their customer service is poor — go somewhere else.

I had a machine go down in my home. It had on-board video and I was fairly sure it was the video card after a bit of testing, poking and prodding. They had a used card for the PCI Express slot, tested it in my machine, blew out the dust and cleaned up my memory cards for me (they had some accumulated dust), and I got out of there for well less than the cost of a new video card, $15. Pretty impressive. It’s good to know someone like them is right around the corner. So go try out Grand Prix Computer if you are in West Michigan.

This story was interesting. The US Department of Justice sets up phishing site apparently to test workers and see if they are practicing safe computing. Of course it was catch and release — no real data was released to the outside world, but I bet any employee who made the mistake of clicking through will regret having done so. Not a bad I idea I suppose, but if their system were set up correctly, their users shouldn’t be able to go phishing no matter what they do, should they?

When we do web design, many of our clients at first insist that hold on until we roll the finished project out the door. I often encourage them to put up a business card or brochure website immediately for one simple reason: it gets the search engine going faster. When they finally roll their brand new site off the disc and onto the server, they are surprised (even though we told them) that they cannot find their site in google. Don’t be surprised, it takes a few days to even a few weeks before you can start to see the site — and if you are in a jammed search term category, perhaps longer to see it do well on terms that are important.

Until you are on the web, they cannot find you, so get the brochure site up even if it is temporary. It will still help people find you. Do you need a temporary site to get you started? Give us an email and we’d be happy to help you. We can usually put up a placeholder site within a day or two using existing printed materials that you have.

Currently I am working on MicronMfg.net. They have an interesting business. I toured it the other day. They are big into lean manufacturing as a culture. Everything in the entire place had a place and a purpose — no wasted movement is one of their key things as I understand it. They make tiny tiny little metal and plastic parts and once they get a run set up, they are able to simply leave and run the project “lights out” as they called it. I was quite impressed. If you need something small manufactured, I would encourage you to call them. I reference them because we have in fact convinced them to do just that, put up the site with some limited content in the interim while we work on the finished product.

There has been a great deal of fuss regarding the Windows 7 beta release and how it may be everything Vista should have been. To see what all the fuss is about, I grabbed a copy and set about installing it in a virtualbox VM and having a play. Here are my observations.

It’s very polished for a beta. It looks more like Apple OSX than any previous version of Windows. It seems quite stable. It boots and shuts down reasonably quickly (about XP speed to my eyes) and uses an order of magnitude less system resources than Vista. However, all of the above points bring to mind one question: Vista was created after many many years of development, whereas Windows 7 was evolved from Vista in about a year I think. So why was/is it so hard to get Vista to perform like this? It almost looks like they released Vista as a buggy bloated waste of hard drive space on purpose just to make the next (much sooner) release look so much better.

When you think about it, Windows 7 has almost the speed and system resource usage of the 8 year old XP OS, it can still suffer from Viruses and Spyware, It doesn’t seem any more or less stable than XP (which was pretty good in my experiance), so I’m left wondering why people are singing the praises of an OS that manages to mostly match its much much older sibling? Don’t get me wrong, Windows 7 is a MASSIVE step up from Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s only a minor step up from XP. It looks better than XP or Vista, it seems easier to use and more intuitive than Vista as well. (I’m so used to and familiar with XP that my opinion is not valid as to its ease of use)

Conclusion: Well done Microsoft for fixing the problems with Vista, but why didn’t you do this the first time around? Also, XP has been a pretty good OS for Microsoft and for end users. Until something really revolutionary comes along, everything is going to just seem like an incremental upgrade of XP.

Windows 7 is a good looking, stable and solid OS, but I’ve not seen anything so far that would compel a tight fisted company bean counter to justify replacing XP as it doesn’t really do much extra for a corporate desktop. As with MS Office, Microsoft’s older OS products are going to become their biggest competitors, especially with the current financial crisis making everyone nervous.