The Daily Parker - Software|Cool links

Personalizing machines

David Braverman — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:37:39 GMT

Diane will understand why Wired editor Jonah Lehrer keeps his crappy GPS. Not because her GPS is crappy, but because "Jack" talks to her:

I have a complicated relationship with my GPS unit. On the one hand, it rarely works. Here's what happened the last time I turned it on. First, there was a five minute delay while it searched for the satellite signal. Then, it couldn't find the street I was searching for. Then, it found the street but lost the satellite signal. Then, it regained the signal but sent me in the wrong direction. And then, after I'd already gotten accurate directions off my phone, the GPS unit finally decided that it knew where I was going. In other words, the device sucks.
But here's the funny part: I still use the device every time I'm even a little lost or unsure of where I'm going. In fact, I sometimes turn the machine on even when I know exactly where I'm headed. Why? I'm not quite sure. Although the device drives me crazy, and I'm constantly complaining about it (see above), I also enjoy interacting with that posh British voice emanating from the gadget, as it mispronounces every street name and tells me to take the wrong turn. When I'm alone in the car, the stupid piece of plastic feels like a companion.
... Why, then, am I so indulgent of my GPS unit? The answer, I think, has to do with the facade of agency. This machine speaks to me, calmly telling me where to go and why it's failing to telling me where to go. Sometimes, when the gadget is really struggling, I get the sense that it wants to apologize, that it feels bad it's so utterly ineffective.

For the record, "Jack" is Australian. And I have to laugh the way "he" reacts when Diane decides to follow a different route than Jack plotted for her: he seems to sigh and, with the patience of someone training a puppy, tells her he's "recalculating." We really aren't far away from Genuine People Personalities, are we?

On my shopping list

David Braverman — Sun, 30 May 2010 13:53:59 GMT

What will they think of next. Now you can get a pair of 2GB USB cufflinks in silver or gold. They're maybe a little pricey ($195), but I do have a birthday coming up...

Oooh I want one

David Braverman — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:37:58 GMT

This may be the coolest computer ever:

Coolest wedding announcement in history

David Braverman — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:20:14 GMT

Good luck to Jeff and Erin:

Nice. Very nice.

Friday afternoon potpourri

David Braverman — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:44:02 GMT

Randomness:

Parker and I did, in fact, walk today (8 km), and it is, in fact, sunny and 16°C.
Roger Ebert responds to Rush Limbaugh
Via Greening Your Library, a quick and informative explanation of single-stream recycling.
My books for next term only weigh 4 kg this time. I appreciate that. The 6 kg I carried to London was not fun. (This is a joke. Ha, ha.)
Speaking of: "The cause of the floor's collapse remains under investigation." (I believe this is the source link.)

Really. January.

Meta-Nebraska

David Braverman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:05:08 GMT

Via Strange Maps comes a field outside Minden, Neb., shaped like...well, like Nebraska:

Smarter than a cat

David Braverman — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:59:09 GMT

IBM has created a supercomputer with more cerebral capacity (as measured by neurons and synapses) than a housecat:

The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and specializations as a mammalian cortex. In other words, this is a virtual mammalian brain (or at least part of one) inside a computer, and the simulation is good enough that the team is already starting to bump up against some of the philosophical issues raised about such models by cognitive scientists over the past decades.

...[B]uilding a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

On the other hand, I've met a number of cats in my day, and as cute as I think they are...do your really need that much computing power to outsmart one? I've seen gerbils do it.

Strange maps, including good beer

David Braverman — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:02:27 GMT

Via Tom Hollander comes Strange Maps, a blog I will have to read through when I get a free moment next year. The blog supports Frank Jacobs' forthcoming book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. The blog starts with "Lunatic Asylum Districts in Pennsylvania," moving through "The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World" and "Heineken's 'Eurotopia'" on its random walk through maps. Very cool blog.

Example: a map showing the best beer in America, based on the number of medals won, with a handy refiguring of the results by population:

The top 10, reshuffled to reflect the number of medals per million of inhabitants, looks quite different, reflecting a dominance by states with a strong micro-brewing tradition:

Colorado – 64.4

Oregon – 42.5

Wisconsin – 38.6

Washington – 16.2

Missouri – 15

Pennsylvania – 13.5

Massachusetts – 12.6

California – 12.8

Texas – 5.6

New York – 5.1

Also from Hollander, a report that Samoa changed sides:

As sirens and church bells wailed across Samoa just before 6am on Monday, drivers obediently stopped their cars. Then, after instructions issued over the radio by the Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, they shifted to the other side of the road and ushered in history.

"After this announcement you will all be permitted to move to the other side of the road, to begin this new era in our history," Mr Tuilaepa told his people, warning: "Don't drive if you are sleepy, drunk or just had a fight with your wife."

Good advice, that.

Crap beer, cool ad

David Braverman — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:20:37 GMT

Via the Chicago Tribune, Budweiser has an ad running in Ireland shot in Chicago. It's kind of fun:

Subway maps of the world, unite!

David Braverman — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:49:00 GMT

Really cool slide show of alternative mass-transit maps via the Economist's Gulliver blog. One, for example shows North American systems to scale.

I know I should be studying financial accounting, but this stuff is distracting.

How Americans spend their days

David Braverman — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:48:29 GMT

Via The Daily Dish, the results of the American Time Use Survey, in very cool form.

Background:

Sunday Business analyzed new data from the American Time Use Survey to compare the 2008 weekday activities of the employed and unemployed. ... The annual time use survey, which asks thousands of residents to recall every minute of a single day, is important to economists trying to value the time spent by those not bringing home a paycheck.

The chart, though, is wicked cool.

329 Luftballons

David Braverman — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:57:01 GMT

Via Andrew Sullivan, 329 hot-air balloons taking off from Chambley, France, in time lapse.

How green is your city?

David Braverman — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:57:40 GMT

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th.

Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky., Paterson, N.J., and Pine Bluff, Ark.

Cool mash-up

David Braverman — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:27:31 GMT

I sometimes shop at the Book Depository, a British online bookseller, because I'm a nerd. (Also because they have British editions and free shipping to the U.S.)

Today, I discovered their cool Google Maps mash-up, showing who is buying what on their site.

Did I mention I'm a nerd?

Air New Zealand: Nothing to hide

David Braverman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:23:06 GMT

I can't imagine United doing this:

Or this.

Air New Zealand.

Cubs in Detroit

David Braverman — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:01:59 GMT

My cousin turned a very large round number on Wednesday, so, being cruel, I took him to the Cubs game in Detroit. I'll have a rare back-dated entry about that in a little bit, with some kvetching about Amtrak; for now, just some pictures of the game.

But first, a non-sequitur: via Paul Krugman, today is the 35th anniversary of the UPC bar code.

Anyway. The game. Yeah, we didn't see this coming:

Explanation of previous post; Why you need to read Sullivan

David Braverman — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:28:35 GMT

Two unrelated topics in one post? Preposterous. Unacceptable.

And yet.

First: my previous post reflected the difficulties in typing on a tiny G1 keyboard, which magnified the annoyances in maintaining a blog in the first place. Two entries disappeared after unintentional finger sweeps, and don't even get me started on the difficulties of adding an actual hyperlink from my phone. On the other hand, I can post from my phone, which I find so cool it makes me giddy. I do feel like someone living 80 years ago complaining about air travel: yes, ocean liners are more comfortable, and yes, the thing makes a lot of noise, but wake up: you can get from New York to London in one night. At some point the coolness overcomes the annoyance, and a new technology goes critical.

Second, if you're either (a) unaware of the unfolding news from Iran, or (b) not following it on Sullivan, you need to do both. This is what Democracy looks like. I'm more and more hopeful that Iran will prevail, and its unelected dictatorship will fall. It won't look like the U.S., the U.K., or any other European-style democracy, but possibly before the end of this summer, Iran will have an elected leader, and a legitimate government, for the first time in 30 years. There will be a terrific cost, but again: the Iranian people will, ultimately, win this.

I think Thomas Jefferson put it better than I ever could:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Wear green this week if you agree.

Not the intended post

David Braverman — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:47:14 GMT

I was going to post about the virtues of the Cubs and the T-Mobile G1, but the latter revealed its limitations while I used it to extol the former. Suffice to say: Cubs won, G1 tied, and it's time to go inside.

White Sox at Wrigley

David Braverman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:10:37 GMT

Oh, good game. Very good game. It looked grim until the bottom of the 8th, when the Sox gave up a 4-run lead as the Cubs tied it up. Then Alfonso Soriano earned his paycheck today with a game-winning RBI in the 9th.

I also have to say, my new phone is so friggin' cool, it can do this (after the jump)...

Natural light in the library

David Braverman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:28:09 GMT

Via Beth Filar Williams, the Douglas County, Colo., Public Library has installed a device that brings daylight into the center of the building:

Now that I've taken microeconomics...

David Braverman — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:42:39 GMT

...I can identify this as an example of non-price competition in an environment of monopolistic competition. It's also damned funny.

What's new in Weather Now, part 1

David Braverman — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:07:47 GMT

I announced Friday that I deployed a complete, ground-up rewrite of Weather Now, but it looks a lot like the old version. So what's really different?

(Because of the limited appeal of technical information, the answer is after the jump.)

Weather Now 3.5

David Braverman — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:22:48 GMT

Weather Now 3.5 is now the official, public version of my 9½-year-old demo. I first launched the site in September 1999 as a scripted ASP application, and last deployed a major update (version 3.0) on 1 January 2007.

As ~~threatened~~ promised, I'll have a lot more to say about it in the next few days. But I should address the first obvious question, "Why does it look almost identical to the previous version?" Simply: because my primary goal for this release was to duplicate every feature of the existing application, without adding new features unless absolutely required. It also had to run on the existing databases. That's why this version is 3.5, not 4.0 (which I hope to finish in early 2010).

I couldn't avoid some user interface (UI) differences, mainly because I used better design techniques than in the last release. And just as a matter of course, as I re-wrote each UI feature, I corrected or obviated numerous defects along the way. That said, version 3.5 has all of the features that 3.1 had, and any URLs that worked in 3.1 will work in 3.5.

I invite everyone to play with the application, and let me know about any defects or hiccups you discover. I think you'll find that it's an improvement over the last version.

Feature complete

David Braverman — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:54:29 GMT

The new Weather Now demo is feature-complete, meaning it has all of the pieces required for release. I will push it out to production, replacing the current demo, tomorrow morning, after I make some configuration changes to the web server it's going on. But because you read this blog, you've got a sneak preview.

Over the next few days I'll be writing about the demo, why it's completely new even though it looks an awful lot like the old version, and what I'll be doing in the next few months to improve it.

Potpourri, without the odor

David Braverman — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:12:00 GMT

Quick update:

The Titanic dinner at Mint Julep Bistro was wonderful. Rich's wine pairings especially rocked—as did his beef tournedos in port reduction. Mmm. Not so much fun was Metra's return schedule (featuring a 3-hour gap between 21:25 and 0:35), nor my reading of it (I did not remember this three-hour gap). The fine for taking public transit out to the suburbs (because driving to a 10-course, 9-wine-plus-apertif dinner seemed irresponsible) was $80, paid to the All-Star Taxi Service.
I did, in fact, buy a Kindle, and I love it. I've now read three books on it and numerous articles (converting a .pdf or text file costs no more than 10c for automatic downloads), and I hardly notice the machine. It only holds 1.5 GB of stuff, but the complete works of Shakespeare ($4) only takes up 4 MB so space is not exactly at a premium.
I may have a new release of Weather Now out today; if not, then tomorrow morning. I'll be writing over the next few days more about what's different, and why it took nearly two years to produce something that, to some, will look almost identical.
Tangentially about my Kindle and software releases, I'm now reading Almost Perfect (hat tip Coding Horror), Pete Peterson's account of the rise and fall of WordPerfect. It's a fascinating tale of what happens when everyone in the company is just like you, and when entrepreneurs can't let go.

Finally, in a tiny piece of good news, it looks like we'll have tolerable weather Friday for my first Cubs home game this season.

Beginning of Quarter Round-up

David Braverman — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:15:50 GMT

All of these are true, and all of these are appropriate for April Fool's day:

Punzun Ltd., my software firm, proudly announced record earnings yesterday, earning a net profit of $0 on $0 of gross revenue and ($0) expenses (all figures in millions). It's the best quarter we've ever had, 11% better than our last record in 4th quarter 2004.
Mark Morford, on GM's "recovery:" "Behold this weird new Camaro. It is, in sum, exactly the wrong car at exactly the wrong time with exactly the wrong attitude attached to exactly the wrong hopeless hope for a return to a rather crude automotive golden era that never really existed in the first place."
The Justice Department is halting its prosecution against former U.S. Senator Stevens (R-AK), figuring he's suffered enough. This, you remember, comes after the conviction. Yes, it's April Fool's day, but no, this isn't a prank.
Congress is set to repeal the ban on travel to Cuba. The loudest opposition came from U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who said the measure would prop up the Castro regime, though one expects not for any longer than the Castro brothers' walkers would, given they're both in their 80s.

Finally, the creaking, old Weather Now demo project is getting an injection of mojo. I'll have more when I release it for real, but meanwhile you can check out the Beta version. (It's actually a ground-up re-write, even though it looks the same. Really. It's cool.)

CTA Bus Tracker

David Braverman — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:50:17 GMT

Despite recently complaining about public transit in Chicago, I have to say I like ctabustracker.com, the Chicago Transit Authority's online bus tracker. It's a public-private venture with Google, and I think everyone benefits.

In fact, I'm writing this blog entry because I have 11 minutes before my bus comes, and it only takes me 4 minutes to shut down my laptop and get to the bus stop. This, I think, is the epitome of efficient labor markets.

All right, maybe not the epitome, but certainly a good example of them.

Kindle zeitgeist

David Braverman — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:00:20 GMT

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote this evening about his own thoughts about physical books vs. Kindle:

I've always been an inveterate collector of books. Not in the sense of collectibles, but in the sense that once I buy a book, I never let it go. As I made my way through adulthood it was while dragging a tail of several hundred books along with me.
... Don't get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn't realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.

I thought about this also. I love books. I have two shelves yet to read, in fact, and it would be a lot easier to take them on trips with me if they weighed 290 grams instead of, say, 100 times that. Still not completely sold, though. Maybe next month.

Bleg: Should I get a Kindle?

David Braverman — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Having already admitted to frequent flying, and looking at an enormous amount more in 2009 and 2010, I've started thinking about getting a Kindle.

So, I'm blegging for opinions.

I'm almost entirely sold because you can email PDF files and Word documents to a Kindle, to go along with the up to 1,500 books it can store in its 290-gram innards. Given the volume of reading I'll have in the week before each Fuqua residency, and given that much of it will be electronic anyway, it's starting to make more sense.

So, thoughts? Or, more concretely, why shouldn't I buy a Kindle?

Visa mystery resolved

David Braverman — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:44:32 GMT

Romi Tharakan at Henley & Partners AG, the Swiss firm who produced the visa-free travel list I mentioned before, sent me their master list of visa-free travel as of 24 July 2008. I was right: the lists for the U.S. and Canada are not completely orthogonal. Americans (but not Canadians) can travel visa-free to Côte d'Ivoire and Equatorial Guinea; Canadians don't need a visa to visit Bolivia (but Americans do).

Mystery solved.

Long walk off a short island

David Braverman — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:58:56 GMT

Some readers, I know, will find this as interesting as I am: the GPS track (in Google Earth format) of my very long walk around Sint Maarten.

Other readers will just figure I'm waaaay too geeky.

Both sets will be correct.

Better driving through variable tolling

David Braverman — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 19:53:49 GMT

Now that Illinois has started the long process of removing our ex-governor's name from tollway signs, this essay from the New York Times' Freakonomics blog extolling the virtues of congestion tolling is worth a read:

{I]t can be hard to convey this because the theory behind tolling is somewhat complex and counterintuitive. This is too bad, because variable tolling is an excellent public policy. Here's why: the basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space — for less than its true value, shortages result.
Ultimately, there’s no free lunch; instead of paying with money, you pay with the effort and time needed to acquire the good. Think of Soviet shoppers spending their lives in endless queues to purchase artificially low-priced but exceedingly scarce goods. Then think of Americans who can fulfill nearly any consumerist fantasy quickly but at a monetary cost. Free but congested roads have left us shivering on the streets of Moscow.

(In an odd bit of timing, the concepts of "shortage" and "free goods" will be on my Intro to Microeconomics exam next Thursday.)

Now, living as I do only a 20-minute bus ride from the Chicago Loop, and dreading any time I have to use one of our area's expressways, I think congestion pricing makes perfect sense. Especially when you see, for example, the traffic loads on the Kennedy Expressway during the week. Check this out...

New Scientist: Smart soldiers die faster

David Braverman — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:25:04 GMT

A British government study found that smarter Scottish soldiers were more likely to die than dumber ones in WWII:

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test - which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 – averaged 97.4.
A previous study found a fall in intelligence among Scottish men after the war, and at the time Deary's team theorised that less intelligent men were more likely to be rejected for military service. The new study appears to refute that suggestion. Men who didn't serve were more intelligent than surviving veterans, and of equal intelligence to those who died.

In related news, our governor, who still hasn't resigned, has announced a press conference today at 2pm.

Efail?

David Braverman — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:58:46 GMT

Via Jeff Atwood, San Francisco-based programmer Tantek Çelik's definition of Email as "Efail:"

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.) and will thus experience a productivity failure. The obvious solution is to push as much 1:1 communication into 1:many or 1:all forms such as public blogs and wikis. ...

think two specific reasons in combination account for most of the problem. [First,] point to point communications do not scale. ...

The second reason that I think email is becoming a worse and worse problem is directly due to its higher usability barrier, that is: Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.

Lolfed

David Braverman — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:17:56 GMT

Via Krugman, Bernanke lolfed:

Paean to Lolcats

David Braverman — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:18:41 GMT

Salon has a sublime ode to the "I can haz cheezburger" crowd:

By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got their very own coffee table book, "I Can Has Cheezburger," published by Gotham Books.
What makes lolcats different from the cat porn of the past -- the motivational posters of the '70s and '80s featuring furry kittens hanging from tree limbs, covered in toilet paper or in some other kind of adorable predicament -- is that lolcats aren't trying to be cute. In the cat-based imagery of ages past, cats retain their iconic traits: curiosity, skittishness, the tendency to curl up in a ball and just lie there. Even the YouTube cats of today perform characteristically catlike actions, repeatedly flushing toilets, dragging their paws along piano keys or getting flung off the ends of treadmills.

Lolcats are different in that the characters they portray -- and yes, they are portraying characters -- don't represent cats at all. They're a completely different kind of beast, mischievous (if incompetent) rascals, scheming for cheeseburgers and stopping at nothing to get them.

Take the lolcat that started it all, created by a Hawaiian blogger named Eric Nakagawa, who posted it in January 2007. The image features a cat with a crazed look of pure animal hunger, its eyes maniacal with desire, asking, "I can has cheezburger?" Underneath is the comment: "The Internet's piece de resistance, the website's raison d'etre."

This ur-lolcat created such a sensation that Nakagawa turned it into a blog, spawning not only the eponymous Web site but also a whole mythology. The cheezburger has become the Philosopher's Stone of the lolcats mythos -- the most prized, cherished and elusive object in their universe. It is for this reason that, when a tiny kitten being sniffed by a Great Dane 20 times its size needs a quick escape, it says, "I iz not cheezburger, kthxbai." It is for this reason that when a user finds a photo of a cat sitting by the window with its paws in its lap, the caption reads, "I iz waitin for cheezburger man. Does you have a money?"

The Web is now spawning a wave of next-generation lolcats sites that take the lolcats concept and run with it. There's lolpresident, loldogs, and even lolhan, a site devoted to Lindsay Lohan that includes such classics as "I layded you an egg but I'z hidin it."

On that note, I turn in to see y'all in the morning.

Cool stuff from Gulliver

David Braverman — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:11:57 GMT

Via the Economist, a video simulation of every airplane in the world over a 24-hour period:

BBC identifies world's oldest known joke

David Braverman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:53:22 GMT

Via Scott Adams: Apparently, the Sumerians thought farts were funny:

Academics have compiled a list of the most ancient gags and the oldest, harking back to 1900BC, is a Sumerian proverb from what is now southern Iraq.

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap," goes the joke.

Those ancient rubes. We're much more advanced today.

Cake wrecks

David Braverman — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:25:55 GMT

Via friend RU, a blog about...well, really hideous cakes.

It's official: 2007-08 one of the worst winters ever

David Braverman — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:50:50 GMT

From Chicago Tribune weather forecaster Tom Skilling:

Chicago's 2007-08 snowfall tally eased above 153 cm Thursday, making it one of only seven season to reach or exceed 60 inches. ... Thursday's 4.3 cm at O'Hare became the city's 43rd day of measurable snow. No season since 1978-79 has recorded more days of measurable (2.5 mm) snow.

Skilling yesterday gave the cheery forecast that the Cubs' home opener Monday will get rained out.

Finally, did you know the U.S. government patented the atomic bomb? This suggests a tactic we can use against North Korea: sue them for infringement! Forget the 82nd Airborne, send the patent attorneys!

While on the subject of spooky tech things

David Braverman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:57:21 GMT

From my co-worker MG, evidence that we're one step closer to making a Cylon:

Parker needs one

David Braverman — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:44:31 GMT

From reader TLC, I don't know where I'd put it in my apartment, but I think Parker would dig this:

Geek humor

David Braverman — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:33:32 GMT

I don't know how to introduce this comic, except to say that another developer sent it to me.

Cool little tool

David Braverman — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:03:18 GMT

I've just spent a few minutes putting together a little countdown clock for my blog. (Credit goes to Kris van der Mast for the code sample.)

What does it do? Well, it's driving the Dubya Clock and Other Countdown tools on the nav bar to the right.

Another "who's your candidate" quiz

David Braverman — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:23:15 GMT

This one from the Washington Post. Unlike the one I mentioned from WQAD, WaPo's limits you by party, and to the top 5 in each.

I came up all Edwards again, mostly because of his positions on health care.

Which candidate?

David Braverman — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:19:12 GMT

Via my dad, an interesting tool to help pick your primary-election candidate from the NBC affilliate in the Quad Cities.

Ecommerce + Rube Goldberg = effective use of animation

David Braverman — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:17:52 GMT

Ordinarily I think unexpected animation on a website is distracting and irritating. Jamie sent me a very cool counter-example from a Dutch housewares retailer. That's the way to do it.

How walkable is your neighborhood?

David Braverman — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:25:35 GMT

Via Joel on Software, WalkScore.com. My current apt rates 85 out of 100; my new one gets an 89; Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rates 97. Sadly, my dad lives in a walking-deprived part of the world, and gets a 29. On the other hand, he can walk to an altogether different kind of beach than I can.

Cooler weather, just not on camera

David Braverman — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:39:26 GMT

Useless fact: Today was the first time since April 6th that my walk to work was below freezing.

Not useless fact: the Inner Drive Webcam was temporarily off-line overnight, as I'm making some infrastructure changes and the computer it's attached to is being decommissioned. (It's back up now.) Apparently people noticed....

Really cool gadget

David Braverman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:35:05 GMT

I want one of these:

Obviously printed photos are so last-decade. Digital photo frames allow us to go directly from shooting to displaying our photos with no messy meatspace-based printed version needed. The eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi Photo Frame takes this concept to the next level by connecting to your local Wi-Fi network and allowing you to send photos to it via e-mail or RSS photo feed.

With full web-based access you can control exactly the photos you want on your eStarling frame at any time from anywhere in the word. E-mail photos as .jpg attachments and they appear on your frame.

I heart ThinkGeek.