Technologists Notes

The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium is “a global consortium of companies dedicated to the advancement of open standards and multi media communications through our Activity Group initiatives and annual events that include interoperability forums and workshops.” I was a vice-president of IMTC in 1995-6, after the merger of IMTC and the Personal Conferencing Work Group.

In 1996 I, when I was last active in IMTC, I participated in board meetings in Munich and London and the annual meeting in Boston. This time I participated in the IMTC annual meeting mostly from my home office, but also while driving, running errands.

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I’ve had the privilege of playing music with a few famous musicians, mostly before they achieved their full public prominence, e.g., playing bass with Jimmie Vaughan a couple of times in small clubs in Austin. Perhaps the most notable of these opportunities was impromptu playing harmonica with Pete Seeger, sitting in the grass at a Clearwater Festival in 1976, a time of his full prominence. Seeger’s most famous composition, Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, ends each chorus with the refrain “When will they ever learn?”

Though the song is about more substantive issues than interoperability of video calling solutions, that refrain comes to mind when thinking about all of the isolated islands of video calling solutions that seem to be proliferating instead of reconciling.

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It’s been almost 5 weeks now. It’s been a good experience, even better than I anticipated. Having a real computer that fits in my pocket is what I wanted, and the Evo meets that desire well. My wife thinks I enjoy the Evo more than any acquisition in recent memory.

The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

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My father considers 13 to be his lucky number. He and my mother married on September 13. He was born June 13. Last month he celebrated his 100^th birthday, so that sounds lucky to me.

For whatever reasons, I’ve favored the odd-numbered Fedora releases (and the odd-numbered Red Hat releases before Fedora), so I was predisposed to like Fedora 13. And I do like Fedora 13.

I’m not sure what else to say. (I gave up on VMWare hosted on Fedora — trying to accomplish that wasted much of my time with Fedora 11 and 12.) I’ve now, as of Sunday, got Fedora 13 in all of my production Linux environments plus several others.  I can’t remember any noticeable problems migrating from Fedora 12, so 13 must be lucky.

In the 3+ years since I pontificated about simplistic spam strategies, my methods have changed incrementally but not fundamentally. However, the uptick in undesired mail traffic has made me step back a little from old iron.

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