Monday, February 28, 2005

Cote on Feed Searches

Cote talks about what web services he'd be willing to pay for. In summation, he decides there would be very few. He does concede that he would probably be willing to toss more money to our new search-engine overlords:

Put another way, it'd tell me about each new site Google found that linked to my weblog. I'd want to be able to do the same thing with any Google query: I don't want to subscribe to the current results the query would return, I just want the diffs since I ran the query last. I want to new just the new results in the query every day/week/whatever.

With Google, I have to manually do this today and sort out the new links from the old links. It's tedious, repetitive, and time consuming: the kind of stuff those amazing computers are really good at. Long ago, before weblogs, when we had to walk to each website we wanted to read (usually up hill, both ways, through snow), I'd do this manual searching about once a month for my websites.

It's amazing to me that Cote's been willing to put that much work into this whole "online experience" thing. I'm sure he's not alone. Back in the golden day, he essentially would function as a "manual, human feedster". Me, on the other hand, found it much easier to just sit back and relax until Feedster and PubSub got created. Now, I get all the rip-roaring ego-strokin' content I need.

Here's the Holy Grail of web content as I see it: To quote Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump, "Even the sun shines on a dog's ass sometimes." To put it another way, even the most moronic, Everquest-addled, Babylon 5 quotin', World-of-Warcraft-lording, Furry-message-board-posting dweeb can express a good idea every once in awhile. I want something to take my meta-interests and scour the web constantly and report back to me after filtering out the junk that these types would talk about that I have absolutely no interest in. Oh yeah, and I want it to be accurate.

As it stands right now, the social networking technology is really good at getting you to people who have a lot in common with you, or at the least, a strong affinity on one characteristic (political views, musical tastes, programming editor of choice). Now I want you to take care of the edge cases for me. Get me the people I have nothing in common with, who I would hate to talk to in real life, and give me the single distilled idea that they have that I would find useful.

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Sunday, February 27, 2005

Investopedia Search

I finally got around to creating an investopedia search plugin for Mozilla. If you're interested just download it and unzip it into the 'searchplugins' directory (c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\ is the default on Windows) and restart Firefox.

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Thursday, February 24, 2005

GloFish

For my birthday, Audrey got me a pair of GloFish! Ever since I read about them I've been keen on getting some. Something about the concept of genetically-engineered pets just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

I have to get a blacklight so I can see them "glow", but even in natural right they're pretty luminescent and shiny. Well, one of them is, the other one doesn't have the "glow" gene expressed all that strongly. Still, I'm planning on getting some more in a few weeks (she bought the last two in the store).

Ahhh, science, how I love thee!

I'll see if I can get some good pictures to post once I get the black light in.

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Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Joi Ito's Web: Shinkuro

It's about time Joi Ito finally jumps on my bandwagon. I've been talking about Shinkuro for a long time now to anyone who would listen (see this post from the Shinkuro v1 days).

While there are some shortcomings (mainly that there is no API for programmatic interaction to build apps on top of it, Shinkuro IDs are tied to machine for security reasons, and file sharing large libraries of files can be cumbersome) it has a lot of promise, especially for ad-hoc project collaboration. Oh yeah, and Jeff Kay (the lead developer) is just a swell guy with some really sharp insights.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...watch this app.

Update: I just installed the latest version and it looks like they have "Key Escrow" abilities so you can get your encryption keys off the relay in case of hardware failure replacement. One more reason not to use this app has been done away with. Resistance is futile.

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Thursday, February 17, 2005

cote on 43 Things

Apparently, cote has only done one thing!

Just when I thought I had caught up with Jones, he pulls one over on me and adds more content! And he's got laser eyes to boot! (Note to self: get laser eyes, then agree to meet Cote somewhere and lop off his arms with my laser eyes. Let's see him aggregate as much content after that.)

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Feedburner

Inspired by Cote (I've gotta keep up with Jones, baby!), I've got myself a Feedburner feed. So, if you want to partake in all of my flickr-ey, del.icio.us-ness, as well as my blog posts via RSS, then that's where you want to go.

Content, baby, it's all about the content! Soon, I'll be able to let you know via RSS feed whenever I go to the bathroom via the RFID chip I'm going to implant in my skull, and then I'll use some sort of online recommendation engine (ExcretionScrobbler.com?) that will analyze my stool and recommend friends who eat the same sort of thing I do. All praise the internet!

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Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trailer

Slashdot is reporting that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trailer is up at amazon. I actually saw it earlier this morning after it was posted by Christie at All Things Christie (at 4:40AM no less)! I thought the fellow who played Ford Prefect looked awfully familiar, but I couldn't figure out who the actor was. So I was completely floored (and stoked) to discover that it is none author than bad-ass rapper Mos Def!

I'm guessin' if Cote was sittin' on the fence on watchin' this one, he's all there now, yo!

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Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Lejo

Lejo rocks! Lejo is a minimalist hand puppet that is just entertaining to watch. Check out the videos. via [all things christie]

Thursday, February 10, 2005

I've really never had a psycho ex-girlfriend...at least not on this level

British woman rips off ex-lover's testicles after he breaks up with her.
She grabbed him by the genitals, tearing off his left testicle, then hid it in her mouth before a friend of Jones handed it back to him saying "that's yours."

Which leaves me to wonder, who breaks up with their girlfriend naked? With their friends around in case anything bad happens?

This just seems too bizarre to be true.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Printing from emacs on windows

Anyone have any idea why my new Konica-Minolta 1350W won't print from emacs on Windows? I've tried manually setting the printer name, using the network name, using printing.el, and a bunch of other things to no avail.

Everytime I try to use print-buffer it tells me it's "spooling with options (print headers are not supported)...done"

My old printer worked fine.

UncleT's MAME Cabinet

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Jurvetson's Bookshelf@work

It's almost creepy that I've read almost every book in Steve Jurvetson's Bookshelf@work. But I find it telling (in a good way) that most of the books on the VC's bookshelf have little to do with investing.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Installing OS X on a PC

Has anyone out there tried Installing OS X on a PC, yet? I might just have to do this on a spare machine I've got at the house and see how it goes.

P&T BS!

Aww yeah, baby, look what's coming my way! It should arrive by Friday, and I'm drooling with anticipation!