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Emotion Markup Language

One of my many Firefox home page tabs is another tab dedicated to w3.org which is there to remind me to check what is new and happening in the world of markup languages, standards and specifications. I don’t actually check it that often (I’ll freely admit) so was surprised to see that we have a new Emotion Markup Language. Surely, I thought we have now gone too far. Emotions can only be communicated by people. Preferably face to face but at least by voice.

And then I began to think about the potential for this. Communication by email, text messaging and Instant Messenger is extremely limited in it’s ability to communicate emotion.  I find myself sprinkling smiley faces liberally throughout my communications in order to make clear that the mood is happy or amusing or light rather than heavy handed. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for one emoticon.

Think about the potential for communicating with Autistic children? I am more than certain that the initial recommendation will be fraught with limitations but it will be interesting to watch it’s maturing process.

no custom itunes ringtones???

I got an iphone from my husband for my anniversary. I love this thing. It’s a very fun toy.

It’s better than my video ipod for watching video as it uses all of the available real estate for the screen.

What I can’t understand, is why, when every other cell phone out there will let you download custom ringtones, on a product that has an ipod built in, on a product that presumably has some portion of your own personal bought-and-paid-for-music you can’t just pick something from your library and make a ring tone out of it.

I hear a rumor that this feature will be available soon for 99 cents extra. Come on. Now really.

Ta Dah! The iphone makes an early debut at our house

For those of you following the Continuing Adventure of My Husband’s Attempts to Secure his Very Own iPhone on the day of it’s release here it is. It doesn’t look like much now but he hasn’t even turned it on yet.

The Shih Tzu wanted to be in the picture too but I told him no. He is having a very bad hair day.

The important part is that my husband stuck it out, sunburn and all.

Go Team!

have to have an iphone

A friend of mine took a quick look at my infant blog and wanted to know where my iphone rant was. Well this isn’t a rant but here is my story – and I’m sticking to it.

The much awaited and anticipated release of the iphone will find my husband sitting in a line. If you knew him you would know that this is something he simply doesn’t do.

But planning? He could put that on his resume.

He will be armed with sunscreen, a nicotine patch (I pointed out that other people in line might not be happy to be surrounded in smoke), a portable chair which was a random gift I received from a previous web development gig, some reading material and lots of hope. He has been on the forums for weeks. He knows everything there is to know about how to set it up and what it is supposed to do.

He casually ventured, around midafternoon today, that maybe there wouldn’t be a line and maybe he didn’t have to worry.

Ha. He is going to be competing with people whose only experience with camping out has been designed to secure concert tickets.

Concert tickets vs iphone = no contest. He’d better get in line now.

Personally I have a teeny phone that fits in my pocket as phones that you actually use should and a kick-ass video ipod that I love.

But that doesn’t mean that if I got one as a gift I’d turn it down.

Seasonal Recommendations for the Chained-to-the-Computer Set

I’m getting one. The retro usb fan. I gave it a mention on my other blog too.