Blog Posts

March 2006

• 2006-03-04

  Pandora helps me discover Beth Nielsen Chapman

  I’ve experimented with all kinds of novel music related services and products.

  My favorite is Pandora. This is a a site that helps me discover new music that I like. It’s introduced me to several artists that I had never heard of before which are now favorites. In this case I am plugging Beth Nielsen Chapman. A wonderful singer songwriter, I think from Europe, that has the sound I really like. It’s quite wonderful to create a Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Bill Evans channel discover new artists.

  It’s great!

  By the way, also of interest are:

  Last.FM – An application that is supposed to do something simi...

  Read more →

  #culture
• 2006-03-03

  Rim and NTP Settle Blackberry Dispute!

  From the Wall Street Journal: (subscription required)

  “Research In Motion Ltd. agreed to pay $612.5 million to settle its long-running legal dispute with patent firm NTP Inc., according to NTP lawyer Jim Wallace.”

  #politics #business
• 2006-03-03

  How clever is Mac OS X?

  I guess because deep down I am still a paranoid Windows user, my OS X is configured to automatically reboot every Saturday at 7:00am, “just to clear out the cobwebs.” A very handy setting by the way, which I wish that Windows XP also had.

  Am I imagining this?

  Last week I turned off my Mac – turned off the power – because I was going to be away for a week. When I returned I found that it seems to have rebooted itself on Saturday as it does every Saturday. Can this be? It was off! I dunno, maybe I just imagined having powered it off a week ago…

  Technorati Tags: osx

  #computing

February 2006

• 2006-02-25

  Hello from Curacao

  I’ve discovered how hard it is to work on a laptop with a tiny screen, 1.2GHz and, esepcially, 256Mb of memory. Sloooooow! I’ve been keeping up with emails but not really getting into a blogging mindset. This is just a cheat post to make my blog not appear dead 🙂 Curacao? Those of you who know me, know. Those who do not, probably don’t know where Curacao is. Look it up on a map. A little island (and I mean little) in the Caribean, right off the coast of South America. It’s where I was born and grew up,so I get back here regularly. Nice.

  #places
• 2006-02-21

  Insights on the world of mashups

  Adam Green has two very insightful posts about Mashups inspired at Mashup Camp:

  All of this is very cool. At least that is what one side of my brain says. The other side is saying “How the hell is the average person going to understand any of this?” I even doubt if the average blogger is going to be able to follow all of this data flying around the Internet. (from “Cognitive dissonance at Mashup Camp“)

  and also about business models in the new world of Mashups:

  “At the end of his pitch we had a standard joke. “Do we pay them or do they pay us?” These conversations were going on ...

  Read more →
• 2006-02-21

  Very cool new idea for travel web sites

  You probably already follow TechCrunch but if you don’t take a look at Flyspy, a very clever new idea for adding very useful information to booking flights online.

  “The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.” (from “Flyspy Brings The New Web To Airline Ticketing“)

  Very cool!

  Technorati Tags: onlinetravel

  #places
• 2006-02-20

  Mashup Camp: Wish I were there!

  Even as we speak, Mashup Camp is going on out on the West Coast. Looks like fun! It’s another in the sequence of ad-hoc, QAD meetings/conferences/events that are popping up all over. Very cool. Wish I was there:

  Adam Green on Mashup Camp

  Matt Harrison on Mashup Camp

  How to use BlogBridge to follow Mashup Camp

  Technorati Tags: mashup, mashupcamp

• 2006-02-19

  Cartoon Madness

  The Freakonomics blog often has good stuff in it, even if you haven’t read the book, which also has good stuff in it.

  “Mitai Sandy, a 29-year-old graphic artist and comic-book publisher in Tel Aviv, came up with the following solution: a new anti-Semitic cartoon contest, with the submissions drawn by Jews themselves.

  “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” Sandy said. “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!” (from “Applying the Old Incentive Switcheroo to Anti-Semitism“)

  Also see this and this.

  Technorati Tags: cartoon

  #life
• 2006-02-17

  Demo 2006 Note: Riya – Photo Sharing with Face Recognition

  This one was probably one of the most talked about sites. The principle is, Flickr is nice, but no one really wants to take the time to tag. So instead, with Riya, after you upload your images, you can search for them based on who is in them and where they were taken. But the trick is that it uses image recognition to help you locate the pictures. Pretty impressive! Check out Riya.

  #ai
• 2006-02-17

  The world is flat, part deux

  Funny.

  

  Via Bob Congdon

  Technorati Tags: funny

• 2006-02-17

  Demo 2006 Note: Kosmix

  Check out this cool subject matter specific search site. Currently they have 3 subject matters, Health, Politics and Travel. Looks nicely done. Kosmix.

  Technorati Tags: cool, cooltool

• 2006-02-16

  Geek Dinner a great success!

  

  For those of you who came, thanks for joining us. For those of you who didn’t come, you missed out! I think we had about 30 people (but didn’t count) and I met many new people which was great. It seems like these Geek Dinners are popping up all over, and makes us East Coast geeks feel like we actually exist!

  Thanks to my co-organizers Adam Green and Mark Doerschlag, RSS Labs, Bela Labovitch and Indigo Tabor for pitching in!

  And also thanks to Brian Del Vecchio for the photos!

  Technorati Tags: geekdinner

• 2006-02-16

  Optical illusion fun

  I got this in an email, not sure exactly where it came from but it’s pretty cool. The image looks like it’s moving, doesn’t it? But actually it’s not an animation at all. It’s your brain that getting its circuits scrambled. You know how you can tell? Just cover most of the image with your hands and look at a small part. It doesn’t move. Amusing!

  

  !

  Technorati Tags: funny

• 2006-02-13

  Headline: Geek Dinner plans go forward despite blizzard

  Just a quick reminderof a Geek Dinner organized by three of us: Adam Green, who writes Darwinian Web, Mark Doerschlag, and yours truly who writes this Blog and also runs the BlogBridge project.

  What is this “geek dinner” thing again? Well we’re inviting all their geek friends to hang out and geek out for a few hours. Each of us have almost non-overlapping networks so this is a chance for us to make new connections around town, and for you to do the same.

  Location: ...

  Read more →

  #places
• 2006-02-06

  Off to Demo 2006

  I’ll be at the Demo 2006 conference for the next several days. Next post from Arizona!

  Technorati Tags: demo2006

• 2006-02-05

  Some really interesting Reading Lists are generated by algorithm rather than by a person

  Amyloo has an interesting post about reading lists. One thing bears expanding on:

  “There’s a tendency to think of reading lists as topic-oriented and fairly static — refined and appended to, but keeping most of the same data over time. A slant on reading lists I’ve thought about are specialized lists that change their composition entirely on a periodic basis, a list in which none of the feeds you see today may be there next week.” (from Churning urns of burning funk)

  True. And actually there are a lot of very ...

  Read more →

  #blogging
• 2006-02-04

  Check out Reading List FAQ in BlogBridge site

  I just posted an intro to Reading Lists – publishing and subscribing – on the BlogBridge site. If you’ve wondered what the heck the fuss is about Reading Lists, check it out. There are even two short screencams so you can actually see and hear how it all works!

  Technorati Tags: aggregators, readinglists

• 2006-02-03

  [GEEKY] RSS Advisory board has a pulse again!

  For those of you (like me) who have lots of dependency on RSS, this is exciting (geeky) news! The RSS Advisory Board suddenly looks like it’s back alive, with new members and a totally new draft specification.

  “A new era begins today for the RSS Advisory Board, an independent organization formed in 2003 that publishes the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification, helps developers create RSS applications and broadens public understanding of the format.” (from RSS Advisory Board)

  RSS is a really great format and it’s been a little neglected recently with all the attention going to Atom. Only good things can come from this new development. **Let me know if I can help!

  **

  [via Darwinian Web]

  Technorati Tags: atom, RSS

• 2006-02-03

  Decorating tip

  Hanging a picture on the wall? The perennial question, “how high should it be”?

  Here’s the formula, handed down from the decorating gods:

  60″ + height of the frame / 2 – distance between the top edge and the hook

  Supposedly works perfect, every time.

  Yes, this is a full service blog.

  Technorati Tags: decorating

• 2006-02-02

  How come no-one has invented this yet :?

  I write a lot of emails and IMs with smileys 🙂 and big smileys 😀 in them. It’s very effective. But there’s one that keeps coming up for which for some reason there’s no correct emoticon, at least as far as I know…

  I need an emoticon to denote a funny question. Haven’t you had that need 🙂 ?

  I need an emoticon to denote a funny question. Haven’t you had that need ? 🙂

  See the problem? Is there one that exists or do we have to create a new one 😕

  Technorati Tags: funny