2008 Feb 18, 6:02FTA: "PicoCool is dedicated to bringing you tiny bytes and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Cool content from real people."blogdesigncultureartemily-changmonthly
2008 Feb 9, 12:57The Calais API documentation. Looks like its geared towards discovering companies, people associated with companies, mergers between companies, etc etcapireferencecalaisreuterswebsemantic
2008 Feb 8, 3:24FTA: "...Using a mix of natural language processing, AI techniques, and a massive databases, Reuters' solution extracts important bits of information from raw HTML pages. People, Companies, Places,
and Events are really at the heart of many business articvia:sambrookapireutersnewstaggingsemanticsemantic-webweb
I use my recently added
books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added
books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in
LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who
had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.
Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly
differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.
When throwing together an HTML page at work that other people will view, I stick the following line in for style. Its IE's error page CSS and contaits a subtle gradient background that I like.
2008 Jan 29, 11:55Includes an online version of Fluxx. I have my own version of Fluxx over the Internet that I had working but not pretty but this is apparently a publisher sanctioned version so there you go.fluxxgamecardinternetonlinefree
Two and half weeks ago Sarah and I went to Las Vegas where I got to
see Jesse, Pat, Chris, and (briefly because he's some kind of big shot too busy for his friends now etc) Grib from college. They're mostly in San Jose and I hadn't seen them for a while so it was a
lot of fun to hang out. We all stayed at the MGM which is a nice hotel with some good restaurants. In other Vegas related links, Sarah added Sarah's Las Vegas restaurant reviews to her reviews and Jesse has Jesse's Vegas
photos up too.
Sarah and I saw the Blue Man Group (video from a concert) and the Price is Right Live Show. The Blue Man Group
was very cool although the music was all rock with a heavy drum focus (not depicted in the videos I linked) which I got a little tired of. But despite that I really enjoyed the show, very funny and
I totally recommend it. The Price is Right Live Show is like the regular show on TV except the recording is not televised and its not hosted by Bob Barker or Drew Carey. So folks from the audience
are still called up to play the same games and really win prizes. It was advertised as hosted by Todd Newton, B-list game show host, but was instead
hosted by JD Roberto who hosted such things as "Reality Remix" and the show "Are You Hot? The Search for America's Sexiest People". The showcase
showdown included the 2008 version of my car and thankfully I wasn't picked to compete for that because, well I don't know where they bought the car, but I would have gotten the price very wrong.
We sat right next to the stage for that show and had a good time.
For New Years Eve Sarah and I stayed in and watched the glitched Seattle Space Needle fireworks show from a safe distance. On New Years we went to a pot-luck at Todd's house and had a fun time. Todd's place
is on the top of a hill and has a lovely view of Washington's snow-capped mountains.
2007 Nov 28, 5:07Vishu, my ex-office-mate, has left Washington and Microsoft for California and Facebook. Vishu and I shared an office for a while and I really enjoyed it. We were able to distract one another from,
and help each other with work. We'd often bounce ideas off of one another, work related or otherwise. For one such idea I recently received a Microsoft patent cube, a small marble cube inscribed with
my and my invention's name. There are some photos of other people's patent cubes on flickr. Vishu
would have received one for this idea too since we developed the idea and wrote the document about it together, but they wait a long time to send you the cube and he was gone a few weeks before they
sent it (don't worry, he got the credit and other rewards though).
A week or two after I got my cube Vishu was visiting the Microsoft campus just before moving his family down with him to California. A bunch of us joined him for lunch that day and it sounds like
he's enjoying his new job already. Have fun Vishu!microsoftfacebookvishucubepatentnontechnical
2007 Nov 19, 3:47I really appreciate that the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's
firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess
I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.
The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first
gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what
Last.FM has, via a Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it
separates the
Zune Card view, written in flash from the User Card data which is in XML. I hope
they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.microsofttechnicalmusiczunesocial
2007 Nov 6, 2:46Video of TED lectures. TED is (from Wikipedia) "... an annual conference held in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a "group of
remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incanalysisblogvideovisualizationinternetsocialtechnologytedbusinessnewsideasconference