First, read this fun essay by just-announced CONVergence 2011 guest of honor Catherynne Valente: “How SF Prepared Me For The Future“! It’s fun! Second, CONVergence 2010 was made of awesome and win on several levels. I particularly enjoyed getting to sit on panels with entertaining folks. There was a panel on the evolution of the …
Author Archives: Uncle Mikey
“Keyboard? How Quaint!”…well, maybe not?
I have several post ideas queued up waiting for my brain to reorganize itself after several very stressful weeks, but today I came across an article thanks to Slashdot that I feel a need to comment upon. The article is entitled, “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition“, by a fellow named Robert …
Treadmill Review: The Trouble with Tribbles
From an episode that wanted to be taken seriously but kinda failed to make the grade, we shift to an episode that was always intended to be silly, one of Star Trek‘s few deliberate stabs at comedy: David Gerrold’s “The Trouble with Tribbles”.
Treadmill Review: Star Trek: “Day of the Dove”
A couple of times a week, not really often enough, I walk a three-mile course on the treadmill. This is not very exciting by itself, so I generally use the time to watch or rewatch something. Tonight, it was the last significant Klingon episode of Classic Trek, Jerome Bixby’s “Day of the Dove”. This is …
iPad: The Other Side of the Coin
Since my friend Richard was kind enough to refer people my way before writing his well-thought out refutation of my iPad/Star Trek article, it’s only fair that I refer you back to said refutation.
Followup: iPad: The Star Trek Use Case
[Original article] Several of you have pointed out to me that I’m not the only one who has noticed the resemblance between Apple’s impending device and Star Trek‘s ubiquitous portable data thingummies. Gizmodo points out there will be an app for that…
iPad: The Star Trek Use Case
Star Trek is, of course, a world full of ubiquitous computing, although it’s rarely portrayed in those terms exactly. We see communicators, tricorders, flat-panel displays everywhere…and, for portable information access and messaging, the PADD. Of course, these are really all just non-functional props. But the ideas behind them have long-since fired the imagination of real-world …
Doctor Who: The Davies Era
Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure …
Google Buzz First Impressions
For those of you who have been living in a Google-proof shelter this week, Google introduced its latest toy, Buzz, this week. Superficially, Buzz operates a lot like Twitter, or like Facebook’s status page, in that you’re encouraged to share your fleeting thoughts with your crowd. However, in my opinion, it so far has several …