2009 Feb 17, 1:56Track real time bus info in a manner more convenient than what's provided by King County's bus website.
bus traffic washington seattle redmond map 2009 Jan 25, 5:39
Microsoft isn't completely shielded from our economies issues but I still have a job and
still get free soda. While that's all still the case, I decided to test Sarah's claimed ability to differentiate between Pepsi, Coke, and their diet counterparts by taste alone. I poured the four
sodas into marked cups and Sarah and I each took two runs through the cups with the following guesses.
Soda Identification Challenge Results
|
Drink
|
Sarah
|
Dave
|
|
Guess 1
|
Guess 2
|
Guess 1
|
Guess 2
|
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Pepsi
|
Diet Pepsi
|
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Coke
|
|
Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
|
Total (out of 8)
|
6
|
3
|
As you can see from the results, Sarah's claimed ability to identify Coke and Pepsi by taste is confirmed. The first run through she got completely correct and on the second run only mistook Diet
Pepsi for Diet Coke. Her excuse for the error on the second run was a tainted palate from the first run. I on the other hand was mostly incorrect. Surprisingly though my incorrect answers were
mostly consistent between run one and two. For instance I thought Pepsi was Coke in both runs.
coke microsoft waste of soda pepsi waste of time soda 2009 Jan 20, 6:01Olly Moss designs posters and things that I see people linking to all over the place on the web. Lots of good stuff, esp. the zombies. Check out his flickr account too.
olly-moss design poster movie art 2009 Jan 20, 2:25"Pro Pants, now in its second year, is a counter-movement to Improv Everywhere's annual No Pants! Subway Ride. The Pro Pants mission is to inform pantsless riders about the joys and advantages of
pants and to persuade them to accept pants into their lives." Don't you hate pants?
humor pants subway improv-everywhere 2008 Dec 29, 2:20"But the most accurate account of the bomb's inner workings-an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents-has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from
Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree."
via:swannman bomb atom-bomb atomic-bomb history goverment nuclear physics security research science 2008 Nov 4, 8:33"Watch as real-time election results come in on Tuesday, November 4th. Select a state to see county-by-county results and view House and Senate races by using the dropdown toolbar."
google map politics visualization elections mashup president 2008 Oct 30, 12:13On hearing news of Live ID supporting OpenID this is pretty much exactly what I was thinking: "With every big portal acting as a provider but not a consumer of identity credentials, users are still
going to wind up creating accounts for more than one service (says this user of Flickr and Google Calendars). When it comes to third-party sites, they may not need to remember a new username and
password, but they will have to remember to which of the providers they chose to provide the credentials for their account. Anyone who slips up may wind up with three or more identities on a single
website, with different data associated with each."
openid identity microsoft google 2008 Oct 13, 2:40Watch out for too good to be true washing services (or free network traffic anonymization): "The laundry would then send out "color coded" special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads
for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was
coded. While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle -- every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in
the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue." From the comment section of Schneier on Security on this topic: "Yet another example of how inexpensive, reliable home washers and dryers help
terrorists. When will we learn?"
security history laundromat ira terrorism bomb 2008 Sep 23, 1:19The economic bailout program written as 419 spam. "I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800
billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you."
humor politics economics satire spam via:boingboing 2008 Sep 18, 10:05Sarah Palin's Yahoo email addresses were hacked. I agree with the commenter: "I was just about to post how I feel bad for her despite disagreeing with most of her politics. There are plenty of
legitimate reasons to attack her (or any politician), but this is clearly personal, not politics. From what I've read, this wasn't even the account she used for those communications she wanted to
hide from subpoena, so the vigilante justice angle is BS. This is just plain mean." Although the last sentence of the following made me laugh: "A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password
account with the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as "white knighting". This locked everyone else out of the account. The "white knight" posted a screenshot to /b/ of his
pending message to one of Palin's contacts about how to recover the account, but made the critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set."
security politics hack privacy government legal email yahoo 2008 Sep 16, 7:54
I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi
and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old
Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for
the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and
now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one
may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF
short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers).
For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like
Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron
Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
Achievements for Everyday Life
|
Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
|
|
Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
|
|
Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
|
|
You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.
|
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
self-tracking data achievements 2008 Sep 16, 5:08"Today I invented a new way to tell time. ... it will revolutionize time-keeping as we know it.... time is based on the percentage of the day. 12:00 midnight is 0%, 12:00 noon is 50%, 6:00 p.m. is
75%, and so on." I imagine this would be the most depressing way to look at time. Good morning, you've already wasted 33% of the day unconscious in your bed! Every day would be a progress bar slowly
counting down the time. I'd probably stop watching TV completely. Why stop at counting the percentage of the day, how about the year, or how about the percentage of your life expended based on
average life expectency?
time humor 2008 Sep 11, 1:02Register to vote in Washington State online. "You must complete a voter registration form if you are registering for the first time in Washington or if you have moved to a new county. If you have
moved within the same county, you may transfer your registration by completing a new form or contacting your County Auditor by mail, email, or phone. There is no registration by political party in
Washington state."
politics government vote washington elections registration 2008 Aug 4, 8:39
The weekend before last I saw Dark Knight with some friends from work and then we all ate at Z'Tejas after. Like everyone has said and as the name implies Dark Knight is... dark. Dark Knight was a
little over the top at times as compared to Batman Begins but I really enjoyed it. Two times during the movie I thought it had ended but I was wrong. The Joker is both frightening (Cringe inducing
line "Wanna know how I got these scars?") and humorous ("Where is Harvey Dent? ... You know where Harvey is? You know who he is?", as well as the pencil magic trick). I can certainly recommend it
to anyone who enjoyed Batman Begins. The previews included Burn After Reading a new Coen Brother's comedy that I look forward to, and
Quantum of Solace which hopefully does the same thing Dark Knight has, keep up the new direction on the refreshed franchise.
This past
weekend Sarah and I went to a Mariners baseball game. I think this is the first MLB baseball game I've seen in person. Sarah's company gave out tickets for the game and the use of a suite. Its a
room half way up the stadium with comfortable chairs, a mini-fridge built-in to the marble counter-topped center table, and a big flat screen television with the game on it. I suppose that's in
case you don't want to turn to the right and sit at the window, or walk out onto the balcony which features three rows of comfy chairs overlooking the field. Anyway there was free food and drinks
and I met some of the people Sarah works with.
baseball batman nontechnical 2008 Jun 16, 3:57An awesome and frightening photo of a tornado.
photo nature tornado weather news via:swannman 2008 Jun 15, 7:57
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in
the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a
strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that
reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
media-center thai netflix ong-bak vista 2008 May 30, 10:02'What happened to me (and what happens to thousands of others each month) is known as "cramming." The [FTC] calls this "the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your
telephone bill...'
article cramming security marketing 2008 May 19, 12:28"Were he alive, Konrad Kujau, the man who forged...countless paintings, would no doubt feel a tingle of pride for his great-niece...being prosecuted for forging his signature on hundreds of cheap,
Asian-made copies of works such as the Mona Lisa..."
art history fraud 2008 Apr 29, 5:16Some folks thoughts on how to add an aux. input to the Mazda3 audio system. Unfortunately its not a standard feature and requires some doing.
car reference forum mazda3 mazda audio aux 2008 Apr 3, 9:00
With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.
-
Composition
-
I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the
activity. I talked about activities previously.
-
Search
-
I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the
comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.
-
Monitor
-
New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed
means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom,
click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites
bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get
new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.
activity gmail search howto google ie feed rss opensearch
Some rights reserved