Category: Ramblings

  • Geeks want to help too.

    One of the things I saw about the relief efforts for Katrina is the number and diversity of missing persons sites. Geeks want to help too. One of the problems that was obvious to the geeks was that there were data about missing people that needed to be shared, and so the geeks pitched in…

  • Welcome Back Me!

    I’ve been on vacation for the past week and a half in the Bay Area. I mentioned this on my del.icio.us but not here, since I figured I don’t update this enough to really impact the update frequency. I loved CA. I’m still decompressing (still over 2500 RSS items to read, and that’s after unsubscribing…

  • Buy.com sucking

    [Update 2005-10-12: Resolved!] Here’s something you weren’t expecting on my blog (aside from two updates in as many days): go check out this purse on Buy.com. OK, you don’t have to, but Buy.com is giving my girlfriend way too much shit over that purse. In June, she ordered that bag for $27.60 including S&H, which…

  • Mr. Brin, Mr. Page, Tear Down This Wall!

    [Update 2006-01-18: As of yesterday, Google supports S2S!] Talk, talk, talk. Everyone’s talking about Google, well, you know. Aside from the standard Google buzz, Google Talk is getting a lot of interest because they implement the open Jabber instant messaging standard. To over-simplify, Jabber is to instant messaging what SMTP is to email; right now…

  • Google Maps thoughts

    After the bajillionth Google Maps site it hit me: Google Maps is at its core a nifty UI widget for a common type of data. The OS doesn’t provide a widget for dealing with location data, and the web browser as a subset of OS widgets certainly doesn’t (hello combo box!). That’s like 10% of…

  • Opting out of the postal service

    I want out. I want the mail to stop coming to me. It’s not a question of not liking what comes to me, it’s just 90% crud useless. And I’m willing to do without the useful stuff just so that I don’t have to deal with the useless stuff. I get and pay my bills…

  • Always on Google

    My girlfriend and I are sitting in a semi-darkened theater on Thursday night. The ticket says 9:45 PM, it was now that time and we had just finished watching 10 minutes of commercials. Instead of the movie, we get an in-depth ad for Ron Howard’s new movie and a great big view of Ron Howard.…

  • RSS vs. the 24 hour news cycle

    Bruce Schneier posted his response to a call for the media to pipe down about terrorist attacks. The argument goes that by publicizing terror attacks the media is creating terror, so why not short-circuit the terrorists’ goal? Mr. Schneier explains that the consequence of doing so would cause worse things than terrorism. He also discusses…

  • iPod headphones as homework

    I got home yesterday and saw my iPod headphones on the coffee table, mangled and broken. This wasn’t that big a deal because I had first noticed they were broken a few days earlier. I figured they got caught in the vacuum cleaner like my ill-fated SOCOM headset, or maybe they got underfoot. Except a…

  • Thank you for not mentioning the outside world

    Is there a proxy that would let me filter any content with the words “SXSW” or “ETech”? That would help me feel a bit better about being in Michigan over the next week. I suspect the Chinese have it in place to keep all their geeks from spending this week in the US. Maybe there’s…