Robert Cottrell

For me, the hardest thing seems to be coming up with an idea that is worth working on. I can never seem to come up with anything that would hold my interest longer than putting together a quick prototype.

With the release of the latest Rails last weekend, however, I felt particularly inspired for a few marathon hacking sessions to explore the new framework additions and think I came up with an idea for a plugin with enough substance that it could make for an interesting project.

I quickly rushed off to RubyForge and registered a new project before I could talk myself out of it.

At lunch today, Matt commented how he had this fancy smart phone with video call functionality but had never once made a video call and couldn’t see why anyone would possibly want to make a video call. Well, I couldn’t just let things go on that way. And, as it turns out, I also have a fancy smart phone with video call functionality that I have never used to make a video call.

I suggested that we should try a video call as we both sat on opposite ends of the table. Matt was up for the experience, so I keyed in his number and anxiously clicked the make video call button, unsure of what would happen. The phone rang, Matt answered, and after a few second pause to buffer the video, we had a video call streaming the tens of inches that separated us.

The video quality was surprisingly good, considering how underpowered phones can be. There was a noticeable delay of a few seconds between when words were spoken and when they were heard at the other end, which is a bit strange when you’re standing so close together.

I’m not sure if I will necessarily ever have a need to repeat this, but a good time was had by all—as several coworkers gathered behind either me or Matt to view this display of technological wizardry. But I have no idea how much this little experiment is going to cost on next month’s phone bill.

As I was grabbing my coat to head off to work this morning, I saw the glowing purple light on the Wii console indicating that a new message had been received. I quickly powered on the unit and navigated to the messages center where I soon discovered that the Opera browser for the Wii was now available for download. Since work today was going to be very light, I delayed leaving to download the software and give it a quick test.

My first site to browse? Why my 43 Things/Place/People subscription page of course! Navigating with the web browser was surprisingly easy, given that I was using just a tiny remote control 10 feet away from the television. The font used on the subscriptions page, however, was a little bit hard to read.

I thought about writing this post on the Wii, but decided that I would soon get a little too tired pointing at the virtual keyboard. Maybe that’s a task for wasting some time during the holidays.