FLY Fusion Virtual Pen

I saw a commercial for this really cool device called the FLY Fusion the other day. This link will send you to the website, but YouTube also has a pretty cool demo of what it's capable of here. Essentially what it does is digitally captures anything you write inside the pen (as long as you write on the FLY paper) and allows you to upload it to your computer in seconds. Of course there are a whole slew of other cool things you can do with the FLY Fusion but that is the basic idea. I could waste more time explaining it to you, but its much easier to understand if you just check out the clip.

Once you grasp how the device works, you can really see how useful it can be in terms of education. All that time spent scanning hand-written documents and screwing around with Adobe Reader is gone. It has its own text conversion software that will turn your handwriting into digital text. The only concern I have is with how easily it recognizes the handwriting. I know I have fairly messy handwriting, so the program would have to be really smart to differentiate between not just my "U's" and my "V's" but even my "R's" and my "M's". One interesting note about the FLY Fusion is that it is aimed primarily toward kids (I saw the commercial on YTV). I wonder how it would make standard lecture note-taking more efficient?

SEMA 2007

Another SEMA show has passed which means there are a number of pictures of both really cool and ridiculous looking cars circulating the internet. I've been through quite a few of them and have found a lot that fall in both categories. One trend I noticed with trucks is still gigantic wheels but new this year was a growing interest in American Force big rig style rims like you see on this Ford F-350. I think it really works! It's slammed to the ground, which consequently deems it useless as a traditional workhorse truck, but it really does look badass.



On the same domestic car theme is the Richard Petty paint theme on this Dodge Charger. What I like about this car is the door handles are shaved which makes it look like a two door (what it should have been in the first place). Although, chances are it is still an automatic...

On the other hand, I discovered pictures of this Trans Am. It really just speaks for itself...

Buy the new Radiohead album!...for free?

The band Radiohead has undergone some major changes fairly recently. Their record contract with EMI Records expired in 2004 and since have been working independently without rules and restraints of any sort but their own. Their last record release was with EMI, called "Hail to the Thief", and just released their newest entitled "In Rainbows".

There are a number of cool things that came along with this album. For one, the band's site design is entirely based around the album. The background is this sort of psychedelic moving tie-dye design with a sans-serif block text outlining (very few) details about the album. Really neat; grabs and keeps the users attention quickly.

Secondly, and most importantly (...and shockingly), the album has no set price tag. You choose what you want to pay for it. You can download it or order a CD copy on the spot for whatever price you like. I wanted to discover if there was a catch, so I chose to pay 0 pounds for the download.

While I am waiting for my free download, I get a message telling me "We value your custom. You are currently in a queue." This message was up for about 2 minutes, and really made me think about things. I started asking myself a number of questions. For one, how hard did these guys work to produce something for me to listen to and hopefully enjoy? To answer this question, I did what a large number of people do when they seek information about something they don't know a lot about; I turned to Wikipedia to see what they had on the subject. I discovered it took them just over two years to produce. That's a lot of sweat and blood for some music. In between songwriting and recording, they contributed a song to the official War Child charity album: Help - A Day in the Life. I started to wonder, am I a bad person for paying nothing even if the band clearly gave me the option? This message seemed like an obvious guilt trip at the time, but in a good way.

This post is by no means meant to preach to you in any way, but if you've ever listened to any Radiohead and like what you hear, I encourage you to check out their site. Download or order a copy of the album. Decide for yourself what to pay for it. While you do this, think about the massive decline in album sales in the past decade. What I believe Radiohead is trying to do with this is almost like their own form of quantitative and qualitative research. Everybody in the music world is talking about In Rainbows in blogs, comment posts, newspapers and more. There's your basis for qualitative analysis. The band also has the records of how much people have paid for it. Here we have the quantitative.

Before you go ahead and buy the album, think about these things. Ask yourself what you think a reasonable price for any full-length album would be. What would you like to see as a standard sticker price on CD shelves in HMV?

171 foot gap...in a rally car

You've got to be kidding me. I was speechless when I saw the first backflip in motocross in 2000 by Carey Hart, and then a double backflip last year by Travis Pastrana, but this is out of control. A 171 foot gap in a Subaru? What's next? Backflips in racecars?

Nano saves Dj

Well here it is. My first blog post unrelated to Computers and Education.

Anyhow, I can't particularly remember how I came across this blog post but, nonetheless I found it really neat. This is the link, but if you don't want to read the whole story, I'll give you a brief summary right here.

Lupe Fiasco, a fairly well known rapper discovered by Jay-Z was playing a show in LA with a 300+ audience when his DJ messed up the set by playing a scratched CD. During his biggest single, Kick Push, the track skipped back to the beginning of the verse over and over again until a proclaimed fan saved the day.

The DJ discovered that someone carrying their iPod Nano happened to have the instrumental versions of not only this particular song, but the entire album (yes that's right, just the beats), to at which point it was brought up on stage, plugged into the system and played for the remainder of the set. I never would have thought an iPod could actually have such a profound effect on the outcome of an evening, but there you have it.