John Lamansky

I did a Google search for stith syndrome and — tada! — JohnLamansky.com was the number one result.

But I noticed another interesting search result. This result no longer appears on the Google search results because the news story about Stith syndrome was “pushed” off of the page, but I was able to find the article again here. It was a news article about the Future Problem Solving State Bowl. It didn’t say which state specifically, but it was about FPS.

Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the whole article, but we can still read the excerpt. And according to the website on which the article is located, I’m not allowed to republish anything without permission. I’m assuming that means the excerpt too, so you’ll have to go to their site to read it go to their site, click on the Search tab, and then search for “stith fps”.

Is it just me, or did they, uh, have some trouble understanding “pressurized treatment”?

Okay, I thought this would be something really dumb when I first saw “Microsoft” and “dance-dance email” in the same headline, but it’s actually kind of cool. Users of this email program developed by Microsoft Research can “dance-dance” to quickly sort their email. Sounds like it could even make sorting through a full inbox fun for once.

From an Arstechnia.com article:

The Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) pad on the floor [...] turned out to be the centerpiece of the event. Dr. AJ Brush, PhD, jumped on the pad and showed us how the team had used the off-the-shelf gaming interface to demonstrate a new method of human-computer interaction.

Firing up a custom-built e-mail application, she used her feet on the up and down arrows to scroll through messages, and hit another pad to open and close them for viewing. E-mails could be flagged using the left and right arrows. Deleting was the most fun, as it involved jumping and hitting a specific combo (right arrow and the diagonal between up and left) together. Dr. Brush said that test subjects had gotten quite excited about deleting e-mails and became a bit too carried away in cleaning out their Inbox.

Dr. Stephen Drucker then demonstrated a second possible application for the pad, a smooth-scrolling photo management application in the vein of iPhoto or “Microsoft Codename Max.” The user could quickly run through photos and sort them into different folders using the DDR pad, although Dr. Brush did admit that in testing it was found that one’s right leg could get tired while constantly scrolling to the next photo.

The floor was then opened up to questions. First off the bat was the obvious one: it looks like fun, but when the fun wears off, how practical is such a system? Schofield admitted that there have to be specific, measurable increases in productivity for a new system like this to take off, but that there were some cases where people might welcome a change of pace in the way they interact with their computer. The opportunity to stand up, stretch, and get a small bit of exercise while simultaneously sorting through your Inbox might appeal to busy workers who are hunched over their keyboards all day long. Besides, he concluded, “there is no law that says work can’t be fun.”

CyberNet has a useful list of extensions that can slow down your Firefox browsing. This list, surprisingly, includes some of the most popular Firefox extensions, including some versions of IE Tab, ForecastFox, and SessionSaver.

For me this was really unexpected: Dell bought Alienware! Here are some sections from PCWorld’s article on the acquisition. The article makes some interesting points that AMD now has “a foothold in Dell.”

Dell has agreed to purchase high-performance PC vendor Alienware, the two companies announced Wednesday.

The acquisition will “complement Dell’s own line of high-performance computers,” while giving the Alienware products the benefits of Dell’s “supply chain and operational efficiencies,” the companies said in a statement.

The purchase, which was rumored for weeks, is expected to clear regulatory requirements in 30 to 60 days. Ultimately, the acquisition will shorten the time it takes for customers to get their hands on Alienware’s sleek gaming workstations and laptops.

[...]

One interesting side-effect of this structure is that it will give microprocessor vendor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) a foothold in Dell, which has to date resisted selling systems based on AMD’s chips. A number of Alienware’s PCs, including its Aurora and ALX series systems, are built with AMD processors.

[...]

Industry observers have speculated that Dell’s tight relationship with AMD rival Intel has kept the PC maker from selling AMD’s chips. But according to a Dell spokesman, Alienware will be free to continue to sell whichever processors it chooses. “That’s the kind of decision that they make on their own,” the spokesman said.

Wow. Apple did it. They created a beta program called Boot Camp that lets you dual-boot Windows XP on a Mac. And according to the SuperSite for Windows review, published just today, it works quite well.

Paul Thurrott (author of SuperSite for Windows articles) gave an interesting an opinion on why Apple would do this:

One might wonder why Apple would create such a thing. After all, with barely 2 percent of the market for computer operating systems, should Apple be trying to win market share for Mac OS X and not offer a way for Mac users to run Windows? Not exactly. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn’t actually make a lot of money directly from sales of its OS. Instead, Apple makes most of its money–even now, in the heady days of iPod supremacy–by selling computer hardware. So one might think of Boot Camp as a win-win. Apple wins because a much wider audience of users can now consider its Mac systems, secure in the knowledge that they can run Windows if they want to. Microsoft wins because these users will still be using–and paying for–Windows. And best of all, we as users win, too, because now we can have the best of both worlds: the elegance of Apple hardware coupled with Windows, the operating system that runs all those applications we want to run.

Some Mac users don’t see it that way. They’d like you to believe that Mac OS X is all anyone would ever need, and they’re actually quite a bit distressed that anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac. Get a life: This software will open up the world of Apple to a much wider audience and if OS X is as great as they think it is, surely some of those people will start spending time with OS X instead of Windows. I can’t really see the issue there.

The review also said that:

A future version of Boot Camp will be included with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” due in late 2007. That version, presumably, will support Windows Vista as well.

I do daresay that I’m actually getting somewhat excited about this. I’ve never wanted to switch from Windows because it is, as I consider it, the ultimate progamming platform. With a dual-boot setup like this, I could still do programming etcetera on Windows and then doodle with Mac OS X if I ever wanted to. Hmm…

The 2006 Future Problem Solving State Bowl was last weekend, which was March 31 to April 1, 2006. (Trust me; there are no April Fool’s inaccuracies anywhere in this post. ) And, as usual with FPS bowls and conferences, it was a great experience. As I always have, I competed in the Team competition this year.

The State topic was Health Care Access. As with all FPS competitions, before the competition we do preparatory research. One thing I like about the FPS program is that kids get to be exposed to so much information on such a wide range of cool topics. Anyway, I learned some interesting things about health care access. (For example, did you know that according to Money magazine, 80% of medical bills contain errors?! )

In the Future Scene (the sci-fi story that is the basis of a given level of competition), many people were living past their 100s. However, these old ages introduced a new variety of diseases and challenges. The F.S. focused on an imaginary disease called Stith Syndrome that affected 1 in 3 people between the ages of 115 and 120. It was a painful disease that caused nerve deterioration and eventually led to death.

The solution to this was health care known as Aqua-Treatment, which consisted of confinement in underwater high-pressure chambers. The big problem in the Future Scene was the cost of this healthcare.

After completing the written portion of the competition, my team and I competed in the skit competition. We did a play on the word “Stith” and changed it to “Sith.” In other words, we had Darth Vader be a 115-year-old with Stith Syndrome.

We received the results on the second day of the bowl — April Fool’s Day — which led to a very believable April Fool’s joke claiming those in the Senior division would have to wait 2 weeks for their results. My team placed first in the written competition and third in the skit competition. This means we’ll be going to Connecticut for the International Conference in June!