I guess I needed Sleep...

Went to bed at 9:00 but didn't actually fall asleep until around midnight. Still, that meant that my 9:00 am alarm should have given me 9 hours sleep. Well I just was NOT able to drag myself out of bed until 11:30, and could have happily slept longer. Oh well, at least I haven't borked by schedule by sleeping in until 4:00 pm, and I do feel somewhat more rested, so that's good.

Now to read LJ and comics!

Tivo Accessory.

I have plans, for when I have enough of an income that I can have some spending money again, to build me a MythTV set (sort of a do-it-yourself TIVO). It just occured to me that one thing that I very much want is something that blocks particular commercials. Now, I don't mean ALL commercials (although that is not something I'm against). Most commercials don't bug me too much, but there are about a dozen commercials that I hate so much I will change the channel or turn off the TV rather than sit through. For those, I would like to have a 'This is obnoxious' button on my remote. By clicking that button, the TV box would derive a signature from the first few frames of each 15-second interval (because at least in North America, commericals slots are sold in 15-second increments). From then on, whenever the commercial was shown, after the first few frames, I would just get a gray screen with a countdown instead of the obnoxious commercial. Adding a feature that allowed you to fill in a questionaire about why you hated it and mail that to a clearing house for statistical aggregation and delivery to the media would be a bonus feature.

DualMode Road/Rail Transport.

Here's an interesting idea for a person/frieght transport system that is equally at home on highways or on railways.

Community Software.

Sometimes I mention here that _sps_  and I have a plan to transform the Web into something that works. We've given it a working name of NWO (New Web Order) because you have to call it something. Occasionally I try to explain to a friend what we are trying to do, and how we want it to work. This is an experience that I find very frustrating, because the design is BIG, the project is HUGE, and I can never remember the justifications for all of the design decisions that went into it, without consulting my notes. (It continually astonishes me how much of the design _sps_ has internalized).

Today, taxlady drew my attention to this article on the needs of collaborative software, and what needs to be done to make it successful. I've seen a bunch of these articles and they always perk up my spirits because darn it, our design DOES THAT. We've thought of all of the issues in the article, and a bunch more. We have solutions to most of the problems and some good ideas for dealing with others. Partly this is because we've been looking at related problems and trying to decide how to handle them for 20 years now, and partly because we're quite willing to look in the scientific, historic and cultural literature for ideas that have and haven't worked in the past. Its sad how many things on the web today are invented out of whole cloth by people who've never heard of the 20 failed attempts at similar things in the past, so they go right ahead and make the same mistakes everyone else made.

Anyway, read the article. I agree with most of what's in it, and I'm pleased to say I still think NWO will have the desired effect on the world.