a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Thanks to a recommendation from a friend, I had an amazing meal in San Fran tonight…
The place is called the Slanted Door and it’s a Vietnamese fusion place on Embarcadero now in the ferry building. The tastes were excellent — very clean and simple but soooo good! I’ll definitely have to try it again next visit.
I’ve noticed that even though I have set a different browser as my default on the PC – Firefox if you must ask – IE will still acquire links I click if it happens to be open. I need it for some intranet related pages…
This is great news for Dave and well deserved. Chappelle’s Show is one of my favorites and this means 2 more seasons, plus more ideas and craziness coming soon as he also locks in a development deal for his production company.
Sources familiar with the deal indicate it could be worth about $50 million, vaulting Chappelle, 30, into the rarefied realm of television’s top earners. The new contract is believed to mark not only a steep increase for Chappelle as star, writer, co-executive producer and co-creator of “Chappelle’s Show,” but more significantly, reward him with a hefty chunk of the series’ robust DVD sales. [CNN.com]
I just caught this item from Mark Cuban …
Im working with a company called IceRocket.com. (http://www.icerocket.com). IceRocket is a brand new search host that combines the best of spidered search, meta search, and what we hope are some unique and different features that make using the engine more efficient and addictive. [Blog Maverick]
I shot over and gave it a shot, skipping the usual search on the page stuff and heading right for some of the unique features which immediately appealed to my mobile senses. You can search via email for search, news and pictures with an email to either search@icerocket.com, news@icerocket.com or pics@icerocket.com. I did one of each for a work project on the search and news and decided to see what might come back with pictures of the “Treo 610.” I was disappointed with the results.
Search works… I can see using this on occassion, but you’ll still have to click through to get detail greater than a search result. News came back blank, with a link to click for the next 5 items… not too cool considering the same topic is something I track with Google News and have gotten a few alerts already today. Pictures though was by far the most interesting and unfortunatley disappointing… My “Treo 610” search came back with links to overweight people and some other random stuff…not even close.
I’d say Google still has the edge.
Forbes reports on a method recently revealed to take advantage of a security hole in RFID tags… fortunately for retailers these are not in too massive a distribution. The program to do it all is freely available…
A would-be scofflaw heads into a grocery store where all the products have RFID tags on them. Rather than paying $7 for a bottle of shampoo, he’d rather pay $3. To make that happen, he whips out a PDA equipped with an RFID reader and scans the tag on the shampoo. He replaces that information with data from the tag on a $3 carton of milk and uploads it to the shampoo bottle tag. When he reaches the check-out stand–which just happens to be automated–he gets charged $3 instead of $7, with the store’s computer systems none the wiser. [Forbes.com]
Gizmodo points to one slick business messaging phone! I love the blackberry messaging built-in and can’t wait to see that show up on more devices. Speaking of which I am currently able to get around the blackberry-only IT support courtesy of T-Mobile’s mobile messaging which is somehow able to log-in and pull messages down for me in the mobile client of my choosing…But I digress.
Seimens has unveiled a very interesting phone design, aimed at business users, but certainly appealing to the IM- and SMS-heavy set. The SK65’s defining feature is a central swivel with reveals a QWERTY keyboard, made all the more appealing with the inclusion of Research in Motion’s Blackberry push email, making the unit a potentially very effective corporate communication device… [Gizmodo]
Will Ferrell – A message from White House West is a satirical political ad, though quite serious in nature to encourage active participation in this years election.
Tonight I was scooping the cat box and decided it was time to add some more litter… I opened a fresh tub and started pouring it. As I did, a coupon folded up in quarters poured out directly into the existing litter.
That would have to be an extremely valuable coupon to warrant my taking it out by hand and carrying it to the store on my next purchase. I chose the easy path… I scooped it out and disposed of it along with the rest of the load.
I’d certainly like to wish Steve a healthy recovery!
In the e-mail, Mr. Jobs said: “This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.” [WSJ.com]
Amazingly in high spirits… the P.S. of the email to staff states:
PS: I’m sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.
I picked up a Vonage box this weekend and hooked up a cordless phone for my new home office connection. So far I am very pleased with how the call quality is as well as how slick the interface is to adjust your account as you like. I love getting emails about voicemails and really enjoy being able to seee all my call details, which makes it quite handy for returning calls or just keeping track of your time. Time will tell on this as a service, but I could definitley see switching our home phone number over as well. We have more than enough bandwidth to handle more than one line…
Coming up on a week of cross-platform usage and a few thoughts circling about regarding the differences…
I use a PC because I have to. I use a Mac because I want to.
I bring home the work laptop and as soon as my wife sees it she says – “That new work computer sure is ugly!” Pretty amazing considering when we met I had a PC, which was later sold (with resistance by her I might add) for the iMac she uses today.
The look and feel of a system is much more than I have probably ever realized. The PC has some nice things, though mainly details with how Outlook interacts with Exchange… I’m infinitely more comfortable using MS Office for Mac, reading on the screen is a pleasure as the LCD is so much easier on the eyes. The thinkpad does have a nice keyboard, but I am so totally accustomed to my Powerbook, which I still prefer.
My Mac just works… I had no idea (literally no idea) that you had to use a silly hexadecimal password to connect to some wireless networks. On my Mac, I just type in the password and it connects, for the PC, I had to look up what the translation to hexadecimal was and then key that in — twice! Apparently Apple took care of this when they wrote the Airport software…I wonder why no one else thought it was a good idea as well.
There are way too many annoying alerts down in the taskbar about various activities… I get it. I understand the icon changes… I don’t need little helper pop-ups getting in my way.
Guess that’s about it. I don’t hate or dislike working in windows as much as I really just love working on my Mac.
Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion feels that there should be a .blogs domain to help push blogs beyond the small level of awareness and enable a mass level of recognition and understanding.
Despite the huge buzz, however, the vast majority of Americans still probably do not know what blogs are. The Pew Internet and American Life Project says that 11% of Internet users read weblogs. My theory is that this number is actually far higher because many news consumers can’t differentiate blogs from professional sites because of their high-quality design and content.
…There is a solution, however, to this problem – a “.blogs” top-level domain name. This will immediately make it easy for everyone right off the bat to differentiate a weblog from a professional news site. Alternately, there also could be a special graphical identifier – perhaps an icon that says “This is a Blog†– that bloggers can integrate into their site template to make this distinction even more clear.
While I don’t disagree that a top-level domain would assist in recognition, I think there are a few issues…and actually don’t think it’s a good idea.
First, I don’t think many people look too carefully at a URI if it’s been clicked on and only would recognize it as a link from an email (assuming it’s not hidden in HTML) or if someone told you what it was.
Second, while the idea of .blogs is interesting and would work for certain types of sites, I believe it would actually limit the potential of a great number of sites. A special domain would allow for easy filtering of search results, which I would be upset to see as often a great deal of solid information can be found on blogs and is always good to see within the context of more commercial endeavors. Commercially viable (not just see my cat type sites) might get filtered through this domain listing as well and this would take away from their inclusion with a corporate site. While there are certainly no rules at this point – there’s no domain either – it’s hard to imagine how it might work which brings me to my last point…
How would it even be enforced… We can’t even get a .sex domain going so a red-light district can be established and maintained away from unsuspecting searchers and children. The initial top-level domains .com, .net and .org all had specific meaning before 1995, but when a larger group of people started to get interested in things the purpose was quickly lost in the pursuit of name opportunity. Even today as more TLD’s have been added, they unfortunately hold little meaning other than what the actual name is and how that might be referenced.
I’ve been watching some serious speed increases with my RoadRunner connection and loving it!!
2004-08-01 09:37:33 EST: 5489 / 391
Your download speed : 5621673 bps, or 5489 kbps.
A 686.2 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 400733 bps, or 391 kbps.
Over 5MB down !!
Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on. [Esquire]