“A sufficiently advanced Google search is indistinguishable from magic.”
If you have any interest in weblogs and search algorithms, you must read Google Loves Blogs: How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches A Week. I’ve been saying that without Google, I am not as smart as I am with it. Very often I will not so much know something as know where I have the answer stored. An example, for me to get lorem ipsum text for a project, from wherever I’m sitting at work, all I need to do it do a search for artlung greek. Blammo, there’s my lorem ipsum for my project. Any number of items in my lab are just like that. In so doing I appear nearly clairvoyant to my co-workers. But like any good programmer, I am merely lazy. I have no need to memorize lorem ipsum. I have no need to keep a file with lorem ipsum on my desktop at work. But with a string of 13 letters and a click I get precisely what I need. Google is my command line to the web. And I think I am not alone.
Happy Birthday Mike!
Happy Birthday to ASP guru (yep, he’s for hire as far as I know) and all around cool neat geeky (there’s a skiing game written in assembly on his website) Mike Roufa! The guy also bakes! How’s that for a man-about-town?
AnswerBus is to AskJeeves as Google is to AltaVista?
Well … maybe. Check it out! AnswerBus —
I find this pretty interesting. It’s simple, and provides a nice mechanism to change your question. I tried:
“When was San Diego founded?” that got me some unrelated org –
I changed it on the fly to:
“When was the city of San Diego founded?” and got much better answers.
AnswerBus looks like a neat tool.
I also did “where are san diego web developers?” and got some nice results. 🙂
The response output makes more sense to me than AskJeeves’ – which is very powerful, but also overly complex. This simple interface provides a facility to alter your question in a much quicker fashion. Worth a look.
( via robotwisdom )
Building a Giant Gameboy » Gameman!
I love this a local guy is building a gigantic gameboy. Be sure to look at the construction photos! I can’t wait to see progress on this.
(Aside: This is a big payoff for my San Diego Bloggers page, this is one of the journals I found in my searches for San Diego journals. Cool. )
Mothers of Invention Ticket
Steve passed this along to me a few years ago (March of 2000 by the timestamp on my copy of the file). I have it in my Zappa folder on my main computer, but I thought I’d add it to my Zappa Fan piece , and include it here in the blog. So here it is!
At the time I think I was living in San Diego, and I was 6 months old. At the time SDSU was “San Diego State College.” It’s a damn cool artifact.
From rini…
From rini.org — Chilling Effects.org
Reported by rini.irg, Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a mechanism to empower web folk who get the scary, classic Cease and Desist notes.
I’ve gotten one of these myself, back in 1997. You can still find the questionable items in the Flash part of my portfolio, because hey, it was an example of my work, and still is. I was never pursued on the issue.
Mind you, I’m not cavalier about such things – these must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. However, much of what lawyers produce is hot air.
Puzzles without Pictures
I’ve just spent the last two hours playing with Legos. It’s been several years since I got them out. I’m a 31 year old man and I had a terrific time just playing. I’m not sure whether Legos are like composing in Photoshop or that composing in Photoshop is like Legos. I get the same feelings in both pursuits. I got ideas in my head about what I wanted to build, but as my composition progressed, other ideas presented themselves. What seemed like a good idea was discarded as an unanticipated effect would move up in prominence. Better, stronger, more funny, smoother ideas would pop out at me. It was definitely a creative process. The same process that I’ve done with these same Legos for about 25 years. I build, tear apart, discard, build — in waves. Eventually order comes from chaos. The result comes from the intellect and from the gut. The result is the picture on the outside of the puzzle box. When I make new headers, like last night, I get the same feeling. The world around me disappears, and in that building time I am lost in the process. I can stand being thought childish if I can keep getting that feeling.
New Header
It’s been a while since I did a new header. So here’s one now! –archived link. All headers here. The photograph was part of a larger AVENCOM shoot by Paul Bowers, excellent and wonderful San Diego photographer.
Supposedly…
Dark Knight Returns (DK2 #3) will come out on Wednesday. I’ve talked about this before. The themes in this latest series are of media manipulation, surveillance, coercion, and of the compromises made to be part of “the establishment.” I’m looking forward to this 3rd of 3 issues.
My Favorite Characters from Fiction.
For no particular reason, some of my favorite characters from fiction. Understand these choices of mine and it may help you understand me.
Sefton (played by William Holden) / Stalag 17
Al Rockoff (played by John Malkovich) / Killing Fields
Lt. Greenwald (played by José Ferrer) / Caine Mutiny
Gaff (played by Edward James Olmos) / Blade Runner
Rorschach / Watchmen
Colin Laney / Virtual Light
