Josh Zapin’s Musings

It seems like I spend more time in my kitchen than any other room in the house.  (Technically, I should say “waking” time.)

Why Are You Spending So Much Time In the Kitchen?

About three years ago, Marni and I renovated the kitchen in our 1960s split-level ranch house in Boulder.  Where our “old” kitchen was walled off the living room/dining room and isolated from the rest of the house, our “new” kitchen is completely open.  To say that it is the kitchen is really a misnomer.  It is really just one large space that flows into a modern, open living area.

While this architectural change alone has made the space more livable, what has made us spend more time in our kitchen is the expansion of our family.  With a 3-year old, a 4-month old, and a dog, we spend a lot of time, making food, eating food, and hanging around before and after we’ve eaten the food.   To boot,  Marni and I work.  This means the time that we actually spend in our house centers around what we do in the kitchen.  It’s just the area of the house that we spend the most time these days.

Why Do We Need a Kitchen Computer?

If we’re going to spend so much time in our kitchen, then we will need a computer to live with us.  The 21st century family lives as much in the digitial world as in the physical world.  From pictures to  music to Facebook to Skyping with the grandparents thousands of miles away, we use a computer constantly.

Just like the kitchen is the hub of our home, our kitchen computer is the digital hub.  While we also have an office and an entertainment center, we do much much more on virtual living on our kitchen computer.

What Should the Kitchen Computer Do?

Right now the kitchen computer function is shared between my and Marni’s work laptop.  We set them up on our countertop and use them as our digital hub.  While both are workhorses and handle the digital needs of our family, there are some limitations:

• Their hard drives are too small to fit our digital “life” – We take a zillion of pictures and videos (now in High Definition), listen to tons of digital music and podcasts.  A 40 or even 100 GB hard drive is too small store all that stuff.  Our kitchen computer needs at least 500 GB to handle all the media that we generate and consume.
• Only my laptop has an integrated web camera – Skype is today’s modern telephone.  Not only are the calls free, it does video chat.  With  our families still back in the New York tri-state area, Skype is simply the best way to stay in touch with them.  Our kitchen computer needs an integrated web camera.
• The laptop speakers are crap and are barely audible – With all the traffic and activity that takes place in our kitchen, the small tinny speakers of our laptops just can’t be heard.  Our kitchen computer needs good speakers to be heard.
• Laptop computers have one, and only one, keyboard. If it gets messed up, the whole computer is a gonner – Kitchens, by their nature, are dirty.  It is completely expected that they keyboard and trackpad of the laptop will get grit and grime in them.  While a little dirt won’t make a keyboard inoperable, a bad spill might hose the system.  The best kitchen computers should have keyboards that aren’t integrated into the machine.  Even better, you should be able to use the computer wtihout a keyboard!
• To add all of our devices requires tons of cables which adds clutter in an already cluttered place – Wires are the residue of the modern digital hub.  If you want to attach a mouse, a camera, and a phone to a laptop, you need three separate wires.  A kitchen computer should minimize the need for wires.
• The laptops are not ours! The companies we work for are very liberal with our use of our computers.  We can put anything we want on them and use them pretty much as freely as we want.  Still, they can change policies or, worse, ask for them back.  We should have the stuff of our lives on our own machine

So the time has come to buy a new kitchen computer and this blog post starts the quest.  We’re trying to find that near perfect balance of features and price that will  become the digital hub of our life.

What I have realized is that there aren’t a lot of good references out there.  Sure, there a desktop buying guides or laptop buying guides, but none that focuses on what I believe is the next frontier: the kitchen computer.

So,  I’m going to detail my quest for the world to read and share.  As the title of this post suggests this is the first in a series where I detail all the decisions I’m making to find that perfect kitchen computer.  What I learn, you’ll learn.  The mistakes I make will not be yours.

So, please follow along and share your experiences.  Let’s see where we take it.

Next Up:  Desktop vs. Laptop vs. All-In-One

I (along with my team) won an Internet Advertising Competition Award!!! I couldn't be happier!!!

It was for the Westin Snowmass website I produced at texturemedia for my client Playground.

The award was for best Real Estate Microsite. 

 Very Cool!

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Have you heard of Digg.com ?  If you want to improve traffic to your website, you should.

Digg is the Web 2.0 version of a newspaper/newsource.  Here is how it works:

• Users submit stories to Digg.com.  This includes a headline, a brief paragraph and a link to the article
• The story gets posted on Digg.com where users can "vote" (called a "digg") on the story.  Presumably, people will vote on it if the story is relevant, interesting, and/or accurate.  The higher the "digg" the more prominently it gets displayed on the site.

So, in essence, the users of Digg are the writers, publishers and the editorial staff of the Digg newspaper.  It's pretty neat.

It's also a great way to increase traffic to your own site.

A few weeks ago, I  wrote an article on this website on how a Microsoft Internet Explorer Hotfix actually breaks Internet Explorer.   For days, I received little or no traffic to my site about it.  While I wouldn't call myself the greatest journalist in the world, I thought it was a pretty good article and seemingly interesting to some folks out there in Techie-land.

On Wednesday, I decided to post it on Digg.com.  Nearly instantly, I received a huge spike in visits to my website:

{mosimage} 

 If you go to the page on Digg.com, I even have people commenting on the article.   Pretty cool.

While I wouldn't say that this is a way to make tons of cash off this discovery, it certainly is a good strategy to increasing traffic on your site.  Best of all, it's totally free.  Check it out.

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Microsoft is about to release a HotFix that will break Internet Explorer.

Huh?  If that is true, why is it called a "fix?" 

Because it "fixes" a patent infringement that Microsoft has with a little known company called Eolas, Inc. 

Internet Explorer Hotfix 912945 works around a patent 

Eolas owns a patent that allows objects to be embedded within a web browser (not just Internet Explorer).  For example, if you go to a site that has a little "movie player" on it, the movie player is an object being initiated up by your web browser. 

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer accomplishes this through ActiveX components.  In the movie player example, an ActiveX component wraps your media player allowing the browser and the media player to communicate.

Based on recent judgments (Microsoft has been battling this in the courts for years), Eolas owns the patent around that communication.  In other words, if the browser tells the movie to "play," it’s Eolas’ intellectual property that is doing it.

(Apparently all browsers do this, but Eolas is only going after the 800-pound gorilla in the browser space, Microsoft Internet Explorer.  They’re trying to get some money (actually about $500M worth).)

Internet Explorer Hotfix 912945 affects anything embedded in Internet Explorer

Not a big deal, you say?  Think again!  Media players are just the start.  Other commonly used objects that will be affected by this ruling include:

• Flash
• Any Java application
• Acrobat Reader

Even Microsoft’s own Windows Update, http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/, will be affected by this too!

Degrading the user experience one click at a time

Microsoft Internet Explorer Hotfix 912945 will break this communication and will force users to click on the object to activate it.  Here is a screen shot of what it will look like with a flash movie in a sidebar:

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The "fix" forces you to click once to first activate the component then do whatever clicking you need to do with that component.  If you go to another page on the site with the same component, you will go through the same process all over again.  Websites that are Flash based will find this "fix" especially problematic.

While it is only a minor annoyance, it will definitely piss off enough luddites to hopefully make Microsoft cringe.  Then, hopefully, they will make a deal with Eolas and make things work the way they used to.

If not, you can always use Mozilla FireFox.  It won’t be affected by this change at all. 

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I’ve had some ideas swirling in my head for some businesses of late.  I won’t go into details as to what they are (right now), but I’ve been searching for some names for them.  Why would I need a name for a business that doesn’t exist right now?  Because it makes it more tangible for me.

Of course, I lack a creative bone in my body, so I’ve been struggling with names.   I want it to be something cool, something hip, something that would resonate but doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Think of some of the names of the most successful businesses today.  Google, Microsoft, eBay.  Were any of them household names before their success?  Nope.  Not at all. 

What’s my solution?  The Internet of course!  I found a few random name generators:

Noemata and New Media Company Generator.  Both come up with some interesting names for companies.  

Noemata comes up with "gibberish" like names Leonet, Napson, and Manvan.  (What would Manvan be selling?).  It even has button to search google to see what comes up with that name (you definietly don’t want a domain

 
New Media Comapny Generator is even cooler.  Not only does it find some cool combiations, they apply a random logo, color, and a tagline to boot! 

Try them out.  Maybe they’ll spark an idea for you?

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