Blog Posts

November 2006

• 2006-11-19

  If you’ve ever had to carve the Thanksgiving turkey, this will be funny

  Yes, every year some wag writes a funny article about carving a turkey, but this one is really funny! Among the many chuckles: All conversation dies when he picks up his weapons. The festive warmth that filled the room moments earlier is replaced by a merciless judgment that records every failure of knife work like points lost in a troubled double axel at the winter Olympics.

  From the Boston Globe: Carving out his niche – The Boston Globe

• 2006-11-16

  Code Monkey: Funny

  Came across Jonathan Coulton, the songwriter who embarked on a ridiculous challenge to write a song each week, for a whole year. Quite a crazy thing, but he pulled it off.

  “Thing a Week is a project I’ve been working on since September 2005 in which I record and post a song a week as a podcast. It’s a way for me to keep the creative juices flowing as freely as possible, and a way for me to push myself to take risks, work quickly and trust in the creative process. It’s also a form of protest – I will keep doing this until someone pays me to do it.” (from Thing a Week)

  One of my all time favorites, that you gotta check out, ...

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  #culture
• 2006-11-06

  Did these really not get read, or, …?

  This just struck me as curious:“Letters to God end up in ocean, unread” “The letters â_” about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister â_” ended up dumped in the ocean, most of them unopened.” (from AP)

  powered by performancing firefox

• 2006-11-04

  Not sure if this is a good thing…

  For those of you who avidly follow Curaçao politics, yes, all two of you, and I know who you are, do you think this is a good thing? I am not so sure… “The Dutch government has signed an agreement granting qualified autonomy to the territories of Curacao and St. Maarten, paving the way for the formal end of the Netherlands Antilles.” (from Radio Jamaica)

  We’ll see how it develops.

  #places #politics
• 2006-11-03

  More Long Now Clockery

  If you were intrigued by my previous post about the Clock of the Long Now, I came across a nice, philosophical and instructive article about it:

  “But even if the Clock of the Long Now fails to last ten thousand years, even if it breaks down after half or a quarter or a tenth that span, this mad contraption will already have long since fulfilled its purpose.

  Indeed the Clock may have accomplished its greatest task before it is ever finished, perhaps without ever being built at all.” (from The Omega Glory by Michael Chabon)

  Read it.

  Technorati Tags: clockofthelongnow

  #culture
• 2006-11-01

  Book of Pop!Tech: Clock of the Long Now

  http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=blogbridge-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0465007805&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr I just finished reading Steward Brand’s book “The Clock of The Long Now”. It’s a quick, illuminating read, talking about the creation of a Clock and Library meant to last for 10,000 years, and how that thought and vision will affect the way we are. ...

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  #culture

October 2006

• 2006-10-30

  Experiences creating new BlogBridge screencasts

  Over on our new BlogBridge site, we’ve been working on a new set of Screencasts. We discovered various problems with what we had done before and thought, let’s try to make things better (as they say at Philips.)

  I thought I’d share my stream of consciousness notes from that experience.

  Wow, those .mov files are really big. And they eat lots of bandwidth. How about hosting them on YouTube? Turns out this is fairly easy to do. Here is what they recommend you upload.

  

  Now if you try that on YouTube, you find that for various reasons the screen is always ...

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• 2006-10-29

  [SEMI GEEKY] Blogs That Matter: really interesting

  From LifeHacker (one of my new favorite sites) comes a pointer to a site called FeedsThatMatter.

  What it seems to do is to look at public subscriptions listed in BlogLines, do a tag analysis, and display a tag cloud. BlogLines is a huge web based aggregator service and so I’d guess that their subscriptions are relatively representative of the whole blogosphere.

  [](https://i0.wp.com/s3.m...

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  #blogging
• 2006-10-27

  TSA has no clothes

  Does creating something that demonstrates that a security scheme doesn’t work make you a suspect yourself? Does pointing at it from your blog make you of questionable character? I suppose you might even wonder about clicking on the link below. Does that say you are a bad person? I hope not. Check this out, it’s pretty insterezsting and instructive! Chris’s NWA Boarding Pass Generator

• 2006-10-25

  Interesting video’s about Zune, the new iPod killer from Microsoft

  Scoble writes about the Zune. Also check out the video of the demo and detailed briefing about Zune. Here’s another interesting article about the Zune from Geek News Central! Technorati Tags: zune ipod scoble

• 2006-10-24

  [GEEKY] BostonPHP Meeting: Ajax Update

  “Without a doubt, the concepts behind AJAX are providing the catalyst to move the web from its old clunky “send it all back the server for an update” into the thick client “desktop” feel the average computer user has come to expect.”

  Check out the next meeting of BostonPHP, October 25, 6:30pm, at IBM/Lotus in Cambridge. Get meeting details here.

  Technorati Tags: PHP

  #programming
• 2006-10-22

  Pop!Tech: Thanks for the memories

  Well it’s over and I am getting ready to head back to real life. Pop!Tech remains my favorite conference (and not just because I can drive here from my house.) It’s hard to capture what it’s like but if you are interested, here are some links that could give you a flavor. Thanks to all the diligent bloggers (most especially Ethan Zuckerman) who did all this writing so I didn’t have to!

  You had me at “erinaeous” – Erin McKean Kidnap and release in Iraq – Micah Garen “It’s about time we start criticizing faith” – Rich...

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• 2006-10-19

  Pop!Tech: why do I feel inadequate?

  Ok, Pop!Tech is a wonderful conference, already, and I am learning and stimulated and all that. But why, oh why, is everyone an author, thinker, serial entrepreneur, extraordinary, world renowned, and inimitable? Inventor, artist, composer, musician, educator, philosopher.

  And these are not the speakers, these are the people sitting next to me and in line with me in the bathroom. Yikes!

  Technorati Tags: poptech

• 2006-10-18

  Late night funny

  Ok so I am getting ready to wrap up and came across this fun toolfor your enjoyment..

  powered by performancing firefox

• 2006-10-18

  Interesting analysis of accuracy

  Bloggers and others are notoriously obcessed with metrics: how many hits, what’s my rank etc. As a result there are numerous services which try to analyze sites and blogs etc, to help measure this. Not insignificantly, a site’s revenue potential is tied closely to this as well. Seomoz.org has put together a pretty interesting study doing a somehwhat empirical analysis of this question. “This project’s primary objective is to determine the relative levels of accuracy for external metrics (from sites like Technorati, Alexa, Compete, etc.) in comparison to actual visitor traffic data provided by analytics programs.” (from ...

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• 2006-10-16

  Arches National Park

  

  North Panorama Arch

  Originally uploaded by Pito.

  Look at that picture. In the bottom right of the image, very small, you can see Pito and Chris. Yeah, Arches is amazing. I am not sure exactly how many arches they have but there are lots and lots, and some are really huge.

  I can’t go into the details here (even to the extent that I understand them, which I don’t) about how the arches are formed, but perhaps wikipedia can shed some light?

  Anyway, Arches is very near Canyonlands National Park and both are spectacular, but quite different. They are both near the town of Moab which has some interesting stories to tell too.

  Definitely worth a visit!

  Technorati Tags: arches

  #places
• 2006-10-13

  More musings on the not-better-RSS-aggregator

  One correspondent asked: “Isn’t this what bb:library is about or Technorati Blog Directory or egs. like Corante Web Hub, Global Voices, World Changing?”

  Well, it might be a reinvention of those wheels. I don’t know yet. I know I am not interested in reinventing wheels. But let me play some more. Here’s what I wrote back:

  “But I imagine this new product/service if it is built, will have in it’s plumbing information like what we have in the library and also an rss aggregator.

  But the idea is that this thing will never include the words rss, opml etc. To give you and idea, so...

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• 2006-10-13

  What’s wrong with Wikipedia?

  Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia who later quite the project over differences in vision, just announced a direct competitor to the project: Citizendium Via Modern Dragons, via KurzweilAI.net

  #blogging
• 2006-10-12

  The answer is not a better RSS Aggregator, continued

  Yesterday’s post drew some interesting comments and emails. Several people wondered what the heck I was talking about. More about that later. First:

  A couple of good analogies were raised. Isn’t this idea a lot like Digg? Or like Top Ten Sources? For me the Top Ten Sources, which I know reasonably well, is the better analogy. Certainly Digg is hot but the reason it doesn’t work for what I am talking about is that it bring you links to content or sites that (random) others have marked as interesting.

  A key part of the idea that I am groping for is that the user somehow tells what he or she is interested in.

  Example: Alice is interested in:

  Cars

  Any articl...

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• 2006-10-11

  The answer is not a better RSS Aggregator

  Before I discuss this new product idea I am turning over in my mind, I want to say a few things about why I keep working in this area. I mean there are so many people working on aggregators, and after all Microsoft is building it into IE, and it’s been in FireFox for a while. Why bother?

  I’ve thought all along, and I still believe, that all these blog readers, or aggregators, or whatever you want to call them are really important but still very primitive.

  I’ve also said and still believe that all of them, BlogBridge included, are very much generation zero, and are more or less following the same pattern, in a way set by email readers.

  The reason I am very bullish on th...

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  #blogging