A Whole Lotta Nothing

links for 2005-11-30

• sheeba store
  Innovative online musician lets fans optionally pay for free music
  (tags: music mp3)
• SnowSaver 1.1b2 – Mac OS X – VersionTracker
  cool winter themed snowflake screensaver for tiger
  (tags: mac screensaver winter)
• Viamatic foXpose
  OSX expose-like view of all your tabs in firefox (for FF1.5+). Very handy.
  (tags: extensions firefox)

links for 2005-11-29

• O'Reilly Radar > My Wishlist Wishlist
  all fantastic ideas for Amazon to make the wishlist feature more useful for customers
  (tags: amazon featurerequests wishlists)
• panoramic photograph of suburban sprawl near San Ramon, California | Matt Jalbert
  weird
  (tags: urbansprawl realestate environment photos)

links for 2005-11-28

• Rose City Rollers
  all-girl roller derby in Portland
  (tags: pdx portland sports rollerderby)

matt and fiona

(matt and fiona, originally uploaded by Alaina B.)

This is my favorite picture of Fiona to date.

links for 2005-11-26

• A Cartoon (Harpers.org)
  Brilliant.
  (tags: democrats politics comedy comics)

links for 2005-11-25

• DDR for Heshers
  Sounds badass. Virtual Metallica power chords!
  (tags: gaming ps2 rocknroll \m/)
• this is sippey.typepad.com: schoolwork
  I'd work at a startup like that.
  (tags: web2.0 comedy school kids)
• Sylvius Neuroanatomical Reference / SylviusVG, iPod Edition
  Neuroscience notes in iPod format. Cool.
  (tags: ipod neuroscience college science)

links for 2005-11-23

• Indieish: Remixing Pop Culture » CC:365
  a full year of CC licensed music, one song at a time
  (tags: music copyright creativecommons mp3blogs)
• Test Run: Home
  wow, free hosted QA software from folks at 6A
  (tags: QA testing debugging)

GoogleVerse

I'll admit upfront I still don't quite get what Google Base is useful for. It's not a Craigslist killer to me because I'm a browser, not a searcher when I'm at Craigslist. I don't see any compelling demo apps built on it and so far it seems like an odd, loose version of the Google index with more of a products and services focus.

Still, as much as I love Naill Kennedy's hacks, his Google Base blog import instructions remind me of Snowcrash, and the Gargoyles to be more specific.

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them.

In Snowcrash, the Gargoyles pollute the databases with thousands and thousands of hours of nonsense. I tend to think my entire six years of blogging would be akin to that.

links for 2005-11-22

• IE 5 Mac tests - Float problems-2
  floated form elements never seem to work in Mac/IE 5.2 -- turns out you need to define a width for the floated block to make it work.
  (tags: css browsers bugs html)
• BestBuy Xbox Inventory Locator
  Wow, a google maps hack showing local Best Buy inventory on the new xbox 360.
  (tags: xbox hacks wishlist googlemaps)

links for 2005-11-20

• How to use milk in bags
  omg, here's what those Canadian bags of milk look like in use
  (tags: thosecrazycanadians milk howto)
• Smokers Brokers ::
  Invest the money you'd waste on cigarettes with this index fund - an economic way to quit smoking?
  (tags: finance economics smokers bestofmefiprojects)

links for 2005-11-19

• RealEstateJournal | Dwell Magazine Contest Results In Chapel Hill Prefabricated Home
  oh, if I only had $600k to blow on a vacation home
  (tags: prefab modernhomes architecture housing)

links for 2005-11-17

• The Battle Over Books
  webcast thursday night, 7pm EST
  (tags: to_listen copyright books google library)

It's new to you

I keep stumbling onto my old archives in Google searches and each time I end up spending 30 minutes or more reading everything. Sometimes it feels like I'm reading someone else's journal. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking when I was writing what I did. But for every insightful, introspective journey through my head that I shared here, I find the flip side of living life in public. I found not one, but two consecutive old posts keeping readers updated on my food poisoning and state of my colon.

Sometimes I wonder why I don't write like that anymore, but more often I'm glad I grew out of it. That all said, I love what Meg and Jason are doing right now, it's very year 2000 webloggy goodness to be a spectator in their lives.

Also, for no apparent reason, three images from my April 2001 archives:

MeFi board game by Scott

Vinod the king of all VCs as a desktop wallpaper

Me goofing around with a magazine cover

How to find good food in a town like Toronto

After a few minutes of Googling, I found a pretty good method of finding not only specific food I wanted to eat in a new town I've never visited before, but the best of the lot.

Canada has some good resources. Foodpages lets you search for restaurants within a radius that meet criteria (Is there a US equivalent of this? There should be). Toronto.com is a good spot to find reviews and works just like any Citysearch.com directory. Lastly, Google Maps comes in handy for walking/driving directions to get there. It'd be cool if someone could mash all three up, so that the "reviews" listing at foodpages.ca was populated/linked with toronto.com's data. Google Maps already integrates with Foodpages.ca, which is probably how I found it in the first place.

So there I was in Toronto for a few days, knowing that I wanted to eat some good Indian, good Ethiopian, and some damn fine doughnuts, but I knew hardly anyone that could point me in the right direction. All I had to do was put in my hotel's zip code, search for "indian" cuisine within 1km, then hit toronto.com to pick out the best one based on reviews, and finally get directions from Google Maps. This allowed me to find Trimurti among the "little India" section of Queen St that featured several Indian places side-by-side. I found Ethiopian House via this method, which was also was great. My favorite food of the trip I found by accident, while walking past Cafe Crepe.

It may not sound like a big deal, but getting plopped into a strange town and wanting some good food is usually a pretty difficult problem to solve. In the old days you have yellow pages and word of mouth. These days, a little technology goes a long way towards finding what you're craving.

links for 2005-11-15

• Treehugger: TreeHugger Holiday Gift Guide
  Lots of great stuff here
  (tags: wishlist gifts green)

links for 2005-11-13

• Mixiran: Convert Xp To Media Center
  just one 17Mb file contains all the media center apps. Sounds adventurous, but I might try it out.
  (tags: hacks xp windows mediacenter)

JetBluePlus?

After reading an interesting Business Week piece about Eos Airlines, I couldn't help but notice while I love the concept, and their seating arrangement looks amazing, the price is still out of reach for anyone but Fortune 500 business travelers.

Why doesn't someone go after the normal everyday traveler that is willing to pay a bit more for a bit more comfort? I know JetBlue operates on razor thin margins, stuffing as many people into a plane as possible for the lowest possible price, and then keeping the planes up in the air as much as possible. I fly JetBlue when I can but the experience is just barely above a tolerable hell for several hours.

Given their prices are so low, I'd be willing to pay double their rates for half as many seats in the same plane offering twice as much room. Their prices are often 1/3 or more off other airlines, so in the end it wouldn't cost too much more than a United or American flight.

links for 2005-11-12

• CafePress.com : Learning Center
  how to make black shirt designs for Cafepress in photoshop
  (tags: photoshop cafepress tshirts)

Things I've learned in Canada

- chinese food takeout comes in standard styrofoam to-go containers. The little paper ones with wire handles we get in the US are only seen in TV shows and movies in Canada. Oh, and milk comes in plastic bags. WHAT THE HELL CANADA?!

- flavors are so tasty and colors are so bright they had to add an extra "u" to them

- either I look Canadian or tourists see people with a big stroller and baby and assume I live here. I've never been asked for directions so many times in a strange town.

- having only been in Vancouver a bunch of times, I thought the jokes about Canadians being obsessed about hockey were overblown. Then I went to a couple bars in Toronto. Those jokes are true.

- Canadians in Toronto fall on the British side of the great top sheet vs. duvet cover debate.

links for 2005-11-11

• joar.com: Using encryption and digital signatures in Mail
  slick, looks easier than standard PGP public key stuff
  (tags: howto mail security encryption)
• sfgate_alt_tag on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  best use of the alt tag ever
  (tags: sfgate comedy html)

links for 2005-11-09

• ALIFE X Reebok Court Victory Pump - The Ball Out -- FRESHNESS · Sneakers · Shops · Art
  sweet. someone should make a pair of pants out of tennis balls
  (tags: design shoes reebok retro)
• phil ringnalda » Blog Archive » strong is not a better b
  “No, really, dude, I mean it: vertical bar!” heh
  (tags: html wordpress)
• Dialog Box - trenchant.org daily for November 8, 2005
  Sometimes software isn't designed for personal situations
  (tags: windows software personalstories)
• Image America: Robert Clark travels around the US taking photos with a sony ericsson s710a
  I have the same phone, and I still have no idea how he got such great, clear photos from it
  (tags: cameraphone photojournalism travel)

Awesome, awesome, awesome

I linked to the Egg and Muffin toaster a while back and since I recently got an amazon gift certificate, I decided to pick one up.

I love egg mcmuffins -- egg mcmuffins without meat to be precise. While I spent much of my youth eating at McDonalds, when I went strict vegetarian after high school, I boycotted the place for almost a decade. But the egg mcmuffin brought me back. These days, about once a week I get one, toss the ham in the trash, and enjoy. So the idea of being able to have perfect egg mcmuffins (without meat) at home was enticing.

After making a couple, I'm hooked. The product does exactly what it's supposed to do, making sure both the egg and the muffins are perfectly done at the same time (it waits a while to toast). Now is the time to experiment. Different breads (it can fit bagels too), different cheeses (the extra sharp I have might be too much), and different additions (maybe smoked salmon?).

While I'm of the Alton Brown school of "never buy a uni-tasker" this one does it so perfectly well that I'm willing to sacrifice some counter space and keep this unit around. If you're a fan of egg mcmuffins, this is priced at around 8 egg mcmuffin combo meals, and once you've got it you can make as many as you want, as often as you want, and exactly as you want.

links for 2005-11-08

• Printing from a Windows XP PC to a printer attached to an Airport Extreme Base Station or Airport Express
  Most docs I found say you could only share airport express printers with a mac -- this how-to worked great with my winxp PC and airport express
  (tags: apple utilities pc printing)

links for 2005-11-06

• wtf_inc: spare parts motorcycle
  badass. This is what monster garage should be about, building stuff from random junk
  (tags: motorcycles via:makezine hacks design)

Google KILLS CHILDREN

This is the most intellectually dishonest article title I've seen in quite some time: Google Print upsets children's hospital.

On the one hand you have a ridiculous story about how scanning public domain books to make the knowledge easier for everyone to share is somehow detremental to kids. But if you look at the facts, it falls apart even more.

1. Only 4% of books make any money at all, and we're talking about one story. Should laws be written to cover the very few?

2. The story Peter Pan isn't even in the Google Print index, according to friends working at Google.

3. Publishers can opt-out of the program, so the children could live another day if the hospital wanted out.

4. How exactly does searching for a book take money out of a publishers pocket again? Would people really not read a book and instead click through Google page by page by hundreds of pages to read it? Do people read search results instead of reading websites? Seems to me like it'd spur on sales, not steal from them.

links for 2005-11-05

• Extended Desktop
  the new imac g5 defaults to mirroring on additional monitors, this lets you have an extended desktop
  (tags: apple hacks utilities imac)

links for 2005-11-04

• HousingTracker: Median Home Prices & Housing Inventory Data
  Pretty cool, this keeps track of average home prices and inventory over time. Click any city to see the past few months.
  (tags: housing realestate money)

links for 2005-11-03

• Evolutionary Interface System Set To Be Standard Fit On New Jaguar XK
  Macromedia Flash in the new Jaguars. I wonder if you have to skip intro before you can set the climate control
  (tags: flash cars via:jalopnik)
• simplehuman | blog: Pumpkin Carving Contest
  badass
  (tags: pumpkins halloween design)
• cheap and tiny // A weblog on small and affordable gadgets.
  great new blog on all the tiny gadgets that won't break the bank
  (tags: blogs gadgets shopping)
• Stay Free! Daily: Cafepress: Copyright Cops
  A parody so good Cafepress banned it
  (tags: copyright copyfight cafepress wtf)
• what happens is the news. weekinreview
  I keep forgetting these guys are still going. I'll paypal $20 to anyone that can create a RSS feed for it
  (tags: blogs art news illustration)

links for 2005-11-02

• On abortion, a nuanced stand | csmonitor.com
  roe v. wade could live on another day if Alito gets in
  (tags: supremecourt politics abortion via-dangerousmeta)