Cell phones: Finally giving up on my old Motorola StarTac. It did well for me for a few years, but a year in MIT Sloan of running out of battery before 6 pm every day (even with frequent recharging) and of having no signal all the time made me decide there’s got to be a better way.
The Nokia 3360 it is, then. It comes with what should be an obvious feature to everyone–infrared and the capability to send and receive name and phone number information from my Palm. Does it have WAP? No, but I’ve not yet seen a convincing demonstration of why I would need to access the Internet from my cell phone (although my page does support WAP access).
Device proliferation. All these devices coming out–like the iPod. Single purpose devices can be pretty cool if done well. What constitutes “done well” for me? Well, not duplicating functionality with another device I have is a start. Playing nicely with my other equipment, sharing information…
About the title: browsing the OED today (sorry, subscription required), I came across prolusion: “A literary production intended as a preliminary dissertation on a subject which the author intends to treat more fully; a preliminary essay or article; a slight literary production.” As for the first definition, that describes a lot of my writing about technology, especially web services. As for the last definition: boy, that’s this weblog all over.
A note about this page for people who browse weblogs.com: normally I write the story offline then publish it (using my Applescript tool) to the weblog, then if it looks good I promote it to the home page. Apparently that isn’t enough to register that the front page of my web log has changed on weblogs.com. Time to talk to Dave…