Month: January 2006

The new AT&T logo is bad

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.

Tales of the Golden Monkey

Today at lunch some­one offhand­ed­ly men­tioned the island of Bora-Bora, and I had a vivid flash­back to Tales of the Gold­en Mon­key, a TV series from 1982, star­ring Stephen Collins. I saw it on TV in Spain, dubbed, some­time in the mid-eight­ies, and even though it only ran one sea­son, I loved it.

So I dug around the Inter­nets a lit­tle bit, and found a host of links. It seems that there is quite a rabid fan base out there (but isn’t there always, on the Inter­net) com­plete with anniver­sary mee­tups. It was a Bel­lis­ario pro­duc­tion (Black Sheep Squadron, Mag­num P.I., Quan­tum Leap, JAG), and has that feel to it. The theme song is very A‑Team though not as catchy.

So you can share my trip down mem­o­ry lane:

802.11n is real, film in 2007

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.

Work work work work

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.