January 2004 Entries
After using OneNote for about a month straight every day, here are some observations. This program is hands down, the best tool I have used since, well, since I bought a laptop and stopped taking notes on paper...
Typing is a real pain in the butt for notetaking, I seemed to miss alot of the discussion while I was trying to type in the dark. PDAs were a joke, way too small to be practical for real notetaking.
Handwriting is so much easier to deal with in this respect, but the real key here is to use the voice recorder (which I really had my doubts about) I can record a whole meeting and the notes follow along in the recording, brilliant. I am still getting used to how OneNote groups things together, it could use some improvement, but as a programmer I really see how difficult this will be to "get right" for every individual's desires.
When making sketches, it has become important for me to remember to change the drawing to a drawing instead of a handwriting block. Though I don't like how it shifts the graphic around a little and adding to the same drawing can be tricky. Before I did this, I had alot of trouble with things lining up, and once it even turned the whole page of notes into a jumbled mess, is this the fault of the program? maybe, but I attribute it alot more to my unfamiliarity with how to use the tool correctly. I really think it would be nice to autoalign everything in some form of an outline and be able to set the coordinates.
I saw the demo for MathPad at PDC, adding this functionality into OneNote (even without the graphing) would be wonderful! I do alot of equation writing and it tends to be wierd to do in OneNote to keep the whole function together in one block. I like the way I can drag and drop from web pages and Onscreen objects, I use this constantly.
I have to say, I rarely used to take notes because it was painful, I would transcribe my recolection into some semblance of notes afterwards, and I frequently missed things, now I can take notes on th spot with better clarity and accuracy, then go clean things up later (like text conversion).
My conclusions are that I am going to use OneNote all the time, It was the driving application that led me to buy a Tablet PC. Would I like improvements, you bet, but for a 1.0 application (from Microsoft no less), this is truly amazing and astounding. As things improve on the Tablet front I expect to see really useful apps start to appear for ink enabled machines.
Streaming media was probably the first useable webservice when you think about it. I started looking into NetRadio again with the release of WinAmp 5. My first experience with internet radio was about 5 years ago when shoutcast first hit the net, I thought it was cool, but the bandwidth pretty much sucked at the time. Radio was plagued by broken pipes, low bps stations or low listener numbers.
No More! Now you can get 128 and 256kbps feeds supporting thousands of listeners, which if you aren't aware, that's basically CD Quality rates that are now for the most part unbroken streams if you have a decent broadband connection. Hopefully the RIAA and CARP doesn't scare the pants of these shoutcasters any more and we will be able to enjoy the genre's like trip-hop, lounge, space, lo-fi and and down tempo ambient that never ever get any airplay on traditional radio.
One great place to check out that I have been really enjoying since they returned to the air is SomaFM. This tiny outfit in San Francicso is a very bright spot on my internet map, It has feeds aptly named "Groove Salad", "Secret Agent" and "Drone Zone" that are a joy to listen to. In the NPR fashion, these "stations" are commercial-free, listener supported, but without the annoying pledge drives, at least so far ;-)
Tune in without dropping out and while your at it, whip out that Paypal account :-)
I certainly look forward to the day when we all have rediculous amounts of free or nominally charged bandwidth available anywhere on the planet and the internet really does replace all other means of communication.
This new year made me want NEW WALLPAPER.
I have a Dual Screen on my development machines (1280x1024 each). There is a big shortage of decent layouts suitable for Dual monitor Wallpaper.
If you want spanned wallpaper, set the image to TILE and it will span the monitors on XP and W2K3 Server without added software (took me over a year to discover that...)
All these images came from Nasa's GRIN which has some great high res images (nice to see my tax dollars at work) you can chop up to fit dual monitors without expanding them and getting fuzz outs.
So here's a dozen you can feel free to use.
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Copyright © 2003-2009 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.