soapbox

I’ll preface this by saying that the HP touch-screen ads look pretty sweet, and I actually had a brief moment of “I WANT!” … No need for a mouse, you just reach up and grab stuff on the screen, move it where you want, etc… what’s better than that? Well, nothing, at least for the first minute or two – after a little while though your arms are going to get tired and you’ll be frustrated by the slowness of the 1-to-1 movement ratio (as compared to the acceleration algorithm of a mouse/touchpad/trackball).

If you don’t believe me, use FluidTunes for 10 minutes and see how that goes. I’d put this in the category of “really cool but not like I’d use it every day” – you use your Mac’s iSight camera to detect hand gestures you make in front of it and flip/swipe through your iTunes library. Once you’ve selected a song or album (in Cover Flow mode), you then swipe at a ‘button’ to play a selected album. The program shows what you look like on your camera behind your album covers, so you can center your hand over buttons to press them – while looking pretty goofy to the outside observer.

I have tried to restrain myself from ranting too much about the economy, but in light of the second round of congressional bootlicking by the Big Three (for the love of God don’t give them any $$ without serious restructuring), I had to say something.

(1) $700 billion is too small. When Japan had their crash 10 years ago, their bank bailout was a little more than $500 billion, while their dollar GDP was ~25% of ours today.

(2) Dubya managed to rack up a HUGE deficit while destroying the national infrastructure:

(3) That said, Obama REALLY needs to have the vision to spend our way out of this, and the GOP needs to get out of the way. Amity Shlaes is full of it – what we need is another New Deal; if we are half-assed in fixing this, it won’t get fixed.

okay, I’m done now. sorry guys. read Krugman for more, or this summary since I’m too tired to write our my own take right now.