Phil online

8 years ago I was working for a company in the computer telephony business. I was the CT/Voice-guru-designate for the company, so I got to go to conferences and see what the dreamers were dreaming of in the future. The dreams were all over their demos and promos. They didn’t work all that well, and they were expensive as hell.

The holy grail of the industry was a sort of turing test for IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. This is where you could call a customer support line and talk to a computer without realizing it was a computer. It would almost be as good as talking to a real human. They’ve been doing this (more…)

Well, I’ll tell you why not: Money and Time

Don’t get me wrong. I love the carputer (more…)

I’ve had bad luck in the past with epoxy resins. You know, the kind where you mix the epoxy with the hardener in equal amounts, and it turns to plastic. It always turns to mush on me for some reason.

But I started making the mounting box for my DVD-ROM drive, USB ports and power switch. I got some epoxy, mixed it up, slapped it on the edges, and 10 minutes later it turned to plastic. It’s super cool. I must have had a bad batch before.

So I started the housing. I’ll have some photos up later. Now I need to put some parts-mounts in there and make it look all pretty.

Something else I saw on Bill Maher’s show (transcript) was this exchange with Barney Frank. Now, I love Barney Frank because he has the guts to get out and proclaim he’s gay and make it a political point of his campaigns. But he’s a liberal tool in every other way, and I can’t make sense of him half the time. Like this bit on “Real Time with Bill Maher” where he says that capitalism requires inequity to function. Huh?

Here’s my summary version:

• Bankruptcy laws are good because they let people break promises they make to rich people.
• Capitalism requires inequality to function.
• Bush was re-elected by murderers.
• Allowing people to work together is called “government”.
• All Bush has ever done to get votes is to be president on 9/11.

FRANK: …not all people with money are bad people. Sometimes it’s nice to help them. … We have an economic system, capitalism, which is based on inequality And inequality is necessary for it to work. We’re supposed to have a political system that doesn’t wipe out the inequality but puts some limits on it.

Yikes! I haven’t seen an episode of Bill Maher’s HBO-show, “Real Time” in a while. But someone mentioned to me that he was supporting the war in Iraq recently, so I went to find a transcript.

According to Maher, Iraq is turning into a success story. But it’s only because of Bush’s stupidity that it happened. Or maybe it was his plan from the start, but he lied to us about WMD to achieve all this democratic goodness. But in the end, the Iraq war was a Good Thing, saved countless lives, and will possibly lead to peace in the Middle East… according to Bill Maher. (more…)

In Atlas Shrugged one of the main characters invents a fabulous new metal. He calls it Reardon Metal. It is stronger and lighter than steel. It will revolutionize industry, but it will also compete “unfairly” with existing steel producers. The State Science Institute, a fictional government agency which lately focuses more on socialistic concerns than science, issues an official statement condemning (more…)

I bought a slim-line slot-load DVDROM drive from this guy. I bought it sort of on a whim: I knew I needed one, I hadn’t gotten around to getting it yet, and a friend dropped by to ask about them. I said, “Oh sure you can get those. Here’s one for… um, $95 shipped, with the IDE adapter. I think I’ll buy it.” And I did.
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In the continuing saga of my Tivo transfer speeds:

I have now doubled my Tivo download speed to about 750KBytes per second. I acheived this by connecting (more…)

Yes, it’s time for a new carputer. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one. It’s only 6 months old and it’s working beautifully. But it’s permanently attached to the minivan, my wife’s car.

This new carputer will be installed in my car, a 1992 Mazda Protege. And since I plan to replace this car soon-ish, I’ll make this carputer portable enough to move to my new car.

Requirements:

MP3 playback through stock head unit
Color GPS navigation
Touchscreen would be ideal

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I had a single computer programming class in high school in the 80’s. On the first day, the teacher handed out a badly xeroxed version of this image. Welcome to software development! (more…)

Excerpt from an interview I gave recently:

When I was a kid in school, computers were rare. The first personal computers came out in the late 70’s. Cheap calculators have more power than those original boxes. In the 6th grade I was in an experiments class in school that had a computer. Most of the time it sat at a “Ready>” prompt or running games that other kids loaded from cassette tape.

One day when I walked in, it was busy flashing a message onscreen. It said “Brent Pristas is a programming god” or something like that, and it had (more…)