Tuesday, August 22, 2000

Had dinner with my Grandmother last night. It was kinda sad, actually; she’s not doing well mentally, compared to the Grandmother that I know. Not that she’s anything approaching senile; she just has a bit of a hard time remembering things, and keeping a train of thought. :sigh:

It looks like I may be starting a local Be User’s Group, which would be cool. I got an e-mail from a local Be-er, who wanted to get involved. Since my local BUG has sorta petered out, I figure I might as well organize everyone.

I wonder if User’s Groups couldn’t be a very effective presence in the community, providing demos of BeOS to other local UG’s, talking about BeOS usage with businesses or non-profit organizations (since Be is free, non-profits might see some real benefit from it), organizing software development efforts, and so forth.

I’ve been trying to keep up with my About.com site; it’s hard for me to keep coming up with content every week. My recent series on Adamation‘s personalStudio has helped, but it’s still…well, not always fun.

Yeah yeah, I know, complain complain.

Just finished Brenda Laurel’s book, Computers as Theatre. Wow. Very interesting stuff. I’ll have to post more about it later. Basically, her idea is that our current viewpoint of software as tools is inappropriate, and that we should start to think about software as agents that help us to complete a task. Which sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s a fundamentally different point of view, that changes how software is designed.

I’ve added Computers as Theatre to my list of read books, along with Think Big, a very good book by Ben Carson, M.D. (a pioneer in the field of emergency brain surgery for critical cancer patients).

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