:: jenny chowdhury says, “put that in your pipe and smoke it” ::

get ready to aim your phone

Shawn Van Every made an app to which anyone can post camera phone movies. I posted a couple 5 second flix already. One of pecan jackson and one of a bulldog i saw on the street:
http://openvlog.mobvcasting.com/

latest teenage addcition?
You guessed it: texting

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4342326.stm

Dan Albritton and I were talking yesterday about a text message game he’s working on for ubicomputing. Dan explained that the user of his game makes the choice to get one text at a time after texting the system, or one every 5 minutes without prompt. I thought about the second option. “How do you turn the system off then?” I asked. “Just send a message that says ‘off’ to the system,” he answered. But I thought about it. What if the user forgets how to turn the system off and doesn’t want to get messages anymore? A friend once tried to turn dodgeball off, but instead he ended up broadcasted a message the said “Off” to everyone in his first degree network. And he’s the most savvy dodgeball user i know. So I began to think about incoming text messages in the broader picture.

Say I’ve purchased a pack of 250 text messages per month. Now when I pay for the 250 messages, I pay for both incoming and outgoing texts. Now why is it, that when i’ve exceded my monthly allowance, I can’t easily turn off my text service until my next billing period? This contrasts with the situation where when we’ve exceded our monthy airtime, we can elect not to answer our phone so as not to incur any additional charges. We also have the opportunity to accept phone calls based on caller ID. Thus, when a telemarketer dials, and we don’t recognize the number, we simply don’t answer the call, in turn saving the valuable minutes. Perhaps we should have the opportunity to see the sender’s name before we choose to accept a text message.

It only seems fair. I mean we’ve all gotten a text similar to this one: “Trina XXX wants to … you.” Sorry Trina, but i really don’t want to pay 10cents for every mesage you send me. With email, at least i don’t pay when Trina sends me mail. I can only imagine that i will get more and more spam, and have to pay for more and more spam as time goes on. Or until i pay for unlimited text messaging.

convergence convergence everywhere. The cell phone may absorb the standalone digicam:

http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1401579

But really, If we’re talking about great ideas in convervence, I think David Schulman’s idea to have a portable pizza maker in your shirt is the best idea yet.

Recall Drunk-Dialed SMS Text Messages Samsung

A couple of years ago, Virgin Mobile began allowing users to lock certain phone numbers at night to prevent themselves from drunk dialing (http://www.engadget.com/2004/11/30/virgin-mobile-wants-to-help-stop-you-from-drunk-dialing/). That’s a great idea, but it still left the opportunity for drunk dialers to get their message across via text’ing with equally awkward and embarrasing results. Yes ladies and gentlemen, the drunk text message, the slack-jawed cousin of the drunk dial, has matured into a fairly regular casualty of drinking. Those who text regularly have most certainly received one or worse, have been guilty of sending one. Not they’d even remember.

Now, Samusng has been developed a technology that will allow a user to delete a text message that hasn’t been read.
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Now that school is back in session, I will resume using my blog for posting school assignments. I know you readers (hi mom and joel) were getting weary with the posts about purchasing toiletries, so here goes: my first post for UbiComputing
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link to what’s going on UbiComp class:

http://itp.nyu.edu/ubicompmobile/wiki/index.php