I love getting emails from Virgin Galactic. It is like getting an email from Bugatti asking if I would like to put down a deposit to buy the Veyron. Why certainly, I’ll take that out of my friday fish & chips money mate.
Some web-based journalism really bugs me.
AutoExpress.co.uk has an interesting story entitled Revealed: Missing MGs. The article is short and explicitly mentions a website. In fact the website is the whole reason for being for this article.
Yet they don’t link to the website in the article. Not even a text-URL.
Why is this? Do they not understand web-based media at all? Do they think they are making a “sticky” site by not allowing external links? I had to use Google to find the website they talk about but don’t link to.
I won’t go back to a site that does such practices.
Dec 20, 2005 by Paul Watson product 
King Kong
★★★★★ I went in expecting to be amazed by the technical merits of the film but did not expect to find much in the way of a story or emotion. Afterall, it is a story of love between a great, big monkey and a blonde broad. By the end of the movie I was more impressed by the character interaction than by any of the effects, some of which were decidely dodgy (though made up for by some effects which were quite incredible.) It is the best movie of the year. Movie in the sense of entertainment and spectacle. Mr. Jackson, well done.
I am not sure what to make of the Bugatti Veyron. On one hand it is blindingly fast. At full clip it will cross the length of a football pitch in one second. One second. Think about it. As Ronaldinho’s boot connects with the ball the Veyron crosses the goal line. The ball travels about ten feet from Ronaldinho’s boot and the Veyron is now at the other goal line.
That’s mad fast.
The Bugatti Veyron is as fast as a Hawker Hurricane in level flight.
The Bugatti Veyron is so fast that the door mirrors create enough aerodynamic downforce to make a difference. You won’t want to stick your hand out the window or let Ol’ Yella have a tongue wag out the passenger side.
On the other hand it is blindingly ugly, blindingly expensive and blindingly bad for the environment. In this day and age you have to wonder about the excess, especially coming from Europe.
Clarkson calls it more than a car. The only reason it is called a car is that it passes noise and emission standards and has four wheels. Otherwise it is a low flying fighter jet.
And that is where I think it is less than a car. It is a marvel, an achievement of the highest order but it is an engineering achievement. It is applied science. Lets hope various industries can learn from the aerodynamic and heat management accomplishments of the Veyron but otherwise it is nothing like a car.
Given the chance I’d take one for a drag down the strip and then hand the keys back. Thanks chaps, mad fast it is, but I’d never drive it anywhere.
…the buzz around tagging is not because we can create tags to help ourselves, but that we can create tags that will help others.
from The Tagging Hall of Shame: Amazon by Jennifer Golbeck.
The buzz is misplaced or misreported in my opinion. This whole idea of social tagging has not been investigated and yet claims are made against it all the time.
I use tagging every day on Blinklist and Flickr. It is great, a real revolution in how I organise my data. I honestly wish I could do the same for local and networked files, for my email (through Thunderbird), for my music and every other bit of data I own, produce or consume.
But I don’t tag for others.
For instance on Blinklist (or del.icio.us to be popular) I have very rarely gone searching for items by tags. When I have done it has been for a specific case e.g. a person or service name. More commonly I will do a Google search.
I have used social tags more on Flickr but the impact has still been far less than what it has been to my personal organisation habits.
From the article also one sees that people are using the tags for purely personal purposes; Next book to read, Gift for dad, Good book, etc. Those are tags by people who want to come back and pickup where they left off or for making a list of potential gifts.
This time next week I’ll be in an Austrian village set between snow covered mountains. The week cannot go fast enough.
http://www.pc-memory-upgrade.co.uk/
PC hardware reseller.
I ordered:
Shipping cost €5 for DHL Express Domestic Shipping.
Placed my order late on the 14th of December 2005. Delivery was made late on the 16th of December 2005.
Cheap, fast and seem reliable.
No order tracking, just one email communicating the placed order and a rough website.
Good. Co-workers have used PC-memory-upgrade before and had no problems.
But I live in the District of Columbia, which has one of the nation’s toughest gun laws… …if one of us feels a need to discharge a weapon, we are supposed to file a request with the chief of police asking for permission. (He must spend all his time answering yes, as D.C. has one of the country’s highest murder rates.)
from Guinea Get Your Gun.
Emily Yoffe’s Guinea Pig series is entertaining and interesting. Every “episode” she takes on something that many of us would never do. From singing to shooting to posing nude for an art class. I admire her steely disposition to see these tasks through. Not only that but she takes them on with relish.
The key to a successful drunk is the application of the “one thing at a time” principal. Do not multitask. Commit to a task and see it through. For instance, do not try and open the door and put your wallet back into your back pocket. Open the door. Ensure the door is open. Put your foot into the door to keep it open. Then, put your wallet back in your pocket. Now push the door open fully, ensure it is open fully and then, placing one foot in front of the other, walk into your apartment.
Focus. One thing at at time. These are the keys to a successful drunk. Abuse them at your peril.
Openomy is an interesting idea. Provide file storage online but with a flexible API that developres can code against. So, for instance, instead of your photos being stored on Flickr, Flickr would just be an interface to your photo store on your Openomy account.
So I had a few minutse to kill as my unit tests ran and I thought I would go and check Openomy out, see what use I can make of it. Sadly, it is down. A text error, see above, mentions a user surge.
I love the idea and a lot of web 2.0 projects have great ideas but are we forgetting the infrastructure that needs to go behind ideas to support them? Openomy is in beta, true, but we can’t carry on saying “oh, it’s beta, you can’t blame it” because at the same time Openomy and co. want people to be using them. They want adoption but don’t blame them when too many adopt and they fall over.
It is a problem though. A lot of web 2.0 ideas are bootstrapped. Too little cash in hand to invest in suitable hosting. They start with a spare machine in a corner and then as demand crashes that upgrade to whatever can be afforded at that point and so on.
I love the model but I am not sure it is suitable for critical services. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft or a big ISP needs to do Openomy.
Daily bits...