This is so cool. I'm playing with Tellme Studio, the developer portion of Tellme. For those who haven't used Tellme before, call 1-800-555-TELL and give it a try. It's a completely voice-driven information portal that lets you get driving directions, telephone numbers (and it will connect you for free, even long distance), stock quotes, weather info, horoscopes and all the rest.

Tellme Studio lets people who can write vxml (or who, for the chance to do really geeky cool stuff, will learn to!) create their own Tellme extension. I've been learning a bit of vxml and it's really cool how flexible the system is (and how good their voice-recognition engine is, over the phone no less)! Anyhow, I know some people (Osil8 and others) are making voiceBlogs using the technology, but it's really suited for interactive applications. I'm wowed, and I'll see what cool stuff I can make with it as soon as clases let up. I will, of course, share.

I'm gradually folding in some changes to the main screen, and overall architecture of the site. Tonight's changes are the time-sensitive coloring of the subject bars and corresponding legend, and the introduction of the three-column layout.

Any opinions? I'm curious to hear what you think. Please let me know if you have any feeling about it either way at hello@fury.com.

Thanks, and have a happy Monday!

I know a lot of people want to eliminate the Electoral College, and I'll admit that most of the time I'm one of them, but I had a frightening thought today: If we had a presidential election based on the popular vote, and it was a dead heat over the whole country (instead of just Florida) how many more lawsuits would there be nationwide, with individuals in each and every county in the country suing to protest an injustice of 5 or 10 votes? If you think this election is bad, that one would be far, far worse.

Of course, the multiple to which it would be worse is exactly the inverse of the probability that a nationwide tally would be as close as the Florida tally, so it comes out in the wash I suppose.

I take my digital camera everywhere and have been buildingup a library to start a Berkeley Photo of the Day, to include in the weblog. I intend to take a picture each day and put it up the next, but just in case things get slow I have a buffer of good pics I've taken over the last couple months to intersperse. With my newfound few hours of free time, I'll try to make it happen in the next few days.

After last week's scholastic hell, I finally have a small chance for a break before my Neuroscience final on Wednesday, Cog Sci final paper on Friday, mandatory guinea pigging for a psych study (a psych department requirement for all classes that end on '0'). I also have to present my group's final incarnation of our UI project on Wednesday, and turn in our final write-up on Friday.

Ordinarily, that would seem like a really heavy load for one week, but after last week, it's a walk in the park. Of course, not having the flu this coming week will also make things a lot easier. (A whole week!? What kind of bug is this?)

Isn't it ironic that the day after the 'day without weblogs' is the day I get laryngitis? Hey, at least I don't use a voice-recognition system.

Everyone's talking about building Palm pilots into cellphones, adding MP3 players into PDAs, digital do-everything cameras that will pick up your dry-cleaning and order concert tickets. I think we need to start a little simpler.

Maybe instead of joining two new-tech devices together we need to work more on establishing the links between new-tech and old-tech devices. The example of the web-enabled refrigerator is cliche, but 20 years ago we put so much effort into automating devices like coffee machines, VCRs, and alarm clocks, that it seems a shame to discount these efforts now, when they're still being used every day.

I've heard countless people yearn for a VCR (or ReplayTV, or TiVo, etc) that could be programmed remotely, ideally via the web, and yet other than a few hacks, nobody's done it. People joke about not being able to set the clock on their VCR because it's funnier than admitting they don't know how to program it to record a show in advance, or at least find it too troublesome.

But I digress. The reason I started this post is because I want an alarm clock with a Palm docking cradle. When I go to bed at night my palm, and consequently my alarm clock, would know when I need to wake up the next day (with a user-adjustable time buffer for showering, changing, getting breakfast and all that). That way I wouldn't have to worry about if it's Tuesday and I have an 8:00 class or if it's President's Day and I can sleep in. Pie in the sky is a net hookup that knows how much traffic there is on my commute route that day and can adjust accordingly. I don't know of a single traditional alarm clock that even knows the difference between a weekend and a weekday. Heck, my Zen Alarm Clock (which, by the way, I can't recommend highly enough as the only alarm I've ever seen that will wake you up gently) doesn't even know the difference between AM and PM. And yes, the palm has its own alarm clock built in, but that doesn't cut it, partly because it's tinny and tone-based, instead of music or whatever you like waking up to, and partly because, by design, it should be in its docking cradle at night, being recharged (okay, for those of us who have Palm Vs, Vxs, or other ones with reghargable batteries). Of course, this also brings up the issue of interface standardization. There are so many palm cradles out there that aren't interchangable with different Palm devices, and that would have to be addressed. as well.

Anyhow, half insight, half rant. It seems like when it comes to tech, we like to think that our everyday appliances aren't worthy of the new cool stuff like convergence and intercommunication, but we still use them every day, and would like to use them better, so aren't we only holding ourselves back?

Of course, maybe my ulterior motive in this is just to get AOLiza talking to my microwave oven...

I got a thing in the mail from IKEA yesterday, but I can't tell if it's a magalog or a catazine.

I guess it's a magalog because it's glossy and more mag-like. On the other side, Emigre's periodicals feel much more 'zine-like (and are very cool (and free!)), and are probably catazines.

If you could send a message back to yourself when you were 16 years old, what would you send? What if the message could only be 20 words long?

Share with the rest of us, and be sure to say how old you are now and, if you want to, what you hope sending the message would accomplish.

Congrats to Jenni's cat Clover, who had four kittens today! She's got a kittycam up. Very, very cute. (I guess I'm a cat person...)