The new AT&T logo, the one created for SBC's transformation back into AT&T, a process that rumors say might also swallow up Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless), that new logo is, well, awful.

Admittedly, the old AT&T logo has a bit of a PAN-AM feel to it, I can see that it certainly needed some updating, but this? The new logo is ugly. The font is ugly. The "3D" see-through nature of the logo is ugly. The differing widths of the lines, especially compared to the original, are clunky and... ugly.

The whole thing is a travesty.

That's just what I think.

These people are sort of middle of the road in their opinions. Businessweek says "your new blue 'beach ball' is full of hot air." Design Observer has a reflection on the old logo, written a little before the new one came out, and the comments are rife with hatred of the new thing.

Of course, it is nothing compared to the world's worst logo.

It looks like the next generation wireless specification has finally made it out of committee. 802.11n promises up to 600 Mbps wireless data transfers (compared to 54 Mbps for 802.11g, the current specification). There were some politics preventing it, and some politics in the approval, and apparently some politics in the implementation, but the gist of it is, we can expect to see devices in 2007. Of course, don't expect 600 Mbps right away, but even 100 Mbps would be a vast improvement.

With Apple playing nice with Intel these days, maybe we'll see an Airport Ultimate-Extreme-Party-People 802.11n base station before 2008?

Minor updates have been made to the Home Computing Master Plan based on this information.

I have paused my blogging to work. Today, I spent eleven and one half hours at work. About eleven of which were actually working. Oh woe is me. But really, it has been pretty intense since a couple of weeks before Christmas. Unfortunately, the end product (the end is Friday the 13th, upcoming) is nothing I am proud of. I'm re-making the web site for the IT organization here at my institution of higher education. I'm being vague so you won't go look it up and deride me.

I have done this solo. Planning, designing, gathering content, writing content, etc. Why? Isn't there a team dedicated to making web sites here, you ask? Why yes, there is, but they are horribly swamped, down one member (he quit) and I said "Sure" when asked if I would do this. Now it has eaten my life (and my toddler's Daddy) and I am ready to be done.

As a result, it's just a bit crappy. All the cool things I thought I'd do, the AJAXy stuff, the dynamic menus, the Photoshop glitz, has all been put off until sometime next month, when I surface from under the content. Once I get to do that (after the windows streaming project and the podcasting project, and the Wordpress-based, campus-wide blogging project) I'll be proud(er) of the result.

Until then. I don't think I've ever worked this hard and liked a project less. (Yes, this is my tiny violin...)

I'll show you all someday.