06/05
Google Sightseeing: Target in my neighborhood —
There’s an amusing site called Google Sightseeing whose sole purpose is to point out cool/curious/amusing features that...
06/02
Useful and cool little utility — Ever wonder what speed your internet connection really has? Try this handy-dandy little utility!
06/01
Portland OR smokes — I’m in Portland Oregon for a few days for a conference, and this may be an unfair sample, but I was amazed to see how many more people seem to be smoking cigarettes – on the street, in restaurants, etc – than what I am used to in Boston. Only one data point, but notable. I wonder why.
05/29
Why should do online check-in when flying? — This, from American Airlines: > “Your trip is eligible for check-in now. Save time at the airport and check-in on AA.com® any time from now up to one hour prior to your departure. To use our new instant check-in feature, simply click the button below and print your boarding pass. Save this email and use your personal check-in button for quick and easy check-in for your return flight.” Anyone have any idea what possible benefit I get for checking in online? I don’t think any of these - Save Time? How? I still have to go show my Id before getting my boarding pass don’t I? - Checked bags? Still have to go to the counter as usual, don’t I? Checking in online seems cool, but why???
05/28
Big Search, Mechanical Turk and why Amazon is at least as cool as Google — Adam Green points to Scoble who re-discover and discover, respectively, Amazon’s street by street, address by address, photographic coverage of the map of, what, the universe? It’s a neat new user interface of something [they’ve had for a ...
05/22
Asymmetrical conflict in the blogosphere — I met with a potential client the other day who was on red alert because there were a lot of nasty things being said about them on blogs, comments and forums. And I thought of the concept of asymmetrical conflict as we have learned about it in recent years. Even without knowing whether the criti...
05/21
Creepy —
(Thanks, Aleksey) Technorati Tags: funny
05/20
Really cool rowing instrumentation — If there are any rowing fanatics out there, or competitive rowing coaches, take a look at this cool in-boat rowing instrumentation product. Here is a bit about it from their site: > “The RowMetrics system is innovative in-boat instrumentation bundled with...
05/19
Arduino: Open source hardware — Check out Arduino, a totally cool tiny embedded computer suitable for creating smart things – art, robotics, sensors and controllers. You program it on your laptop, and download the program to the device. I tried it, it was pretty easy. Had to touch wires and stuff though 🙂...
05/17
Amusing: French words missing in English — “No language is perfect, and English is no exception. There are always words or expressions that cannot be rendered from one language to another. English supposedly has the largest vocabulary of any languages in the world (7x more words than French !), and well-educated people typically know less th...
05/16
Ray Kurzweil @ MIT — Went to hear Ray Kurzweil yesterday at MIT, at an event jointly sponsored by IEEE and GBC/ACM Robotics Sigs. The blurb said: > “[…] With input from people around the world, an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to...
05/16
Very cool illusion — Try this out, it really worked for me, and is really strange and wonderful! > “This should be proof enough, we don’t always see what we think we see.” (from Very Cool Illusion, via del.icio.us) Technorati Tags: cool
05/09
Firewalls scanning IM messages: Google as symbolic link — Here’s something I hadn’t seen before: I IM’d a friend of mine at a Big Company and the message got rejected because it included a URL. I have to suppose that it’s any URL that gets bounced, but who knows? So the workaround? I sent the text for a Google query that returns the same url. Further details: Discussing it with him, the logic seems to be that someone could send an employee a phishing link in an IM message.
05/08
Know Rule 240! — I recently was on a trip with United Airlines. It’s a long story, but basically the short form is that the pilot didn’t show up, our flight was about 2 hours late, and I was going to miss the connection, also on United. A bunch of us were in the same boat (or plane) and so there was quite a buzz in ...
05/05
[GEEKY] Cool open source product analogous to Yahoo Pipes — SnapLogic is an open source product (at least in it’s base edition) providing tools to construct pipelines that deliver and process and filter information through collections of interconnected REST services. As usual, they provide a free ‘community’ edition, and then variously priced developer and enterprise editions. Pricing wasn’t indicated but if you have this kind of need, SnapLogic looks like it’s worth a peek.
05/02
Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products — Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products contains some excellent Do’s and Don’ts for someone (like me) thinking of starting a new business. Here is just one little ‘D...