Here's a theoretical scenario. Let's say that last week I missed a friend and co-workers going away party due to a raging hangover and an empty wallet. If that were the case I might be inclined today to call my friend up and say "Hey how 'bout I swing by later with a box of beer and we put that box to a quick death?"
He might just say "Sure here's my address, call me when yer leavin", and I might very well take that address and punch it into google maps to see where I need to get to. But being that I live in TO and I Ride the Rocket(TM) I might be so inclined to open a new browser tab and take a look at Crazed Monkeys amazing TTC Google Map to figure out what subway station I'm heading to.
Wait, didn't someone say something about beer? Oh right, I did. Theoretically.
Then it's off to another tab and the astoundingly useful Ontario Beer Hunter. Now if I did all that I'd be flicking back and forth between a regular GMap address lookup and two different mashups and trying to work out were I need to go. What the world needs (in theory) is a way to mash all these bits of data onto one map so my feeble brain need not divide itself between browser tabs!
I'm thinking maybe a copy/paste tool up near the zoom controls, or perhaps on option to generate a KML or GeoRSS file from a given map and then import it into another. Probably a job for greasemonkey for the time being, but I could see this being useful for people who want to create a static mashup of things they've found in various places.
Googlebot ... hear my cries!
9.24.2009
9.15.2009
what's the date today?
"No the year dammit ... TELL ME THE YEAR!"
...
"Oh God no ... I've gone back too far, I'll never stop it now! We're doomed I tell you all of us DOOMED!"
Then I'd grab fistfuls of hair (if I had enough hair to form fistfuls) and run off madly into the street. I've always wanted to run up to someone and do that. Maybe not at a police station or in a psych ward, but y'know, somewhere.
I mention this deranged fantasy to say that the date is important! A friend recently sent me a link to an article for which he wanted an opinion as to the quality of the technical information it contained. It seemed pretty good to me, but I wanted to check the date to make sure it was current as well. However as I've seen on a disturbingly increasing number of articles there was no publishing date, not even in the URL. All the comments on the posting were deserving of datestamps, but the article itself apparently hadn't yet reached this exalted level of worthiness.
"Silicon doesn't wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes ..."
The very same is true of information, probably more so because it's one of the few things that changes faster than silicon. So writers out there I implore you, if your ideas are worth reading then they're worth putting a date on! Besides, maybe you're the first person to dream up whatever you're putting on the page. If you can't point to a date and say "I thought this up first", how will you ever sue someone for a ho-jillion dollars and retire to Fiji?
(Tuesday Sept 15, 2009)
(1:58pm)
8.27.2009
mmm ... fresh spam
Just a quick update; I've been getting a fair bit of Japanese comment spam lately (I'm lookin at you here Paul) so I'm enabling comment moderation.
So for those of you who can't moderate yourselves, I got ya covered.
So for those of you who can't moderate yourselves, I got ya covered.
7.16.2009
all the < blank >'s a stage
Ever get the feeling that some series of events has been set in motion purely for your amusement? Toronto: every corner is a free show ...
Last night while lounging on a friends balcony watching the city blink away below, a buddy messaged me and said I should meet him on a patio near my place for a night cap a little after midnight. I made my way over and we staked out our chunk of patio enjoying a cool summer night and casting pointed looks at the bartender who was studiously ignoring us. We opted to belly up to the bar to order a few and while we were there we were dragged into some idle chat with a local barfly who followed us back out onto the patio and invited himself to have a seat.
Being more or less friendly fellows and no stranger to the desire for idle drunken conversation we traded banter with him and inside jokes with glances at each other, when a fourth decidedly shattered man concluded that it would be in everyones best interest for him to join our table too. "Look how beautiful you are!" he declared to the lot of us after shuffling zombie like through the bar and hurling himself with gusto at an empty seat.
He was more or less unable to form a coherant sentance, so he stuck to laughing when we did and uttering the occasional "muth-fuck" of agreement after a break in conversation. "That's a really nice watch", said the first interloper to the shattered man.
"One of you three buy me a beer!", responded the shuffling drunk.
"I'll buy you a beer for that watch", says the first drunk while my friend and I share an amused look. The shuffler struggles out of his watch and hands it over, and chatty drunk straps it on clearly pleased with his good fortune and wanders up to the bar to pay the shuffler.
As soon as he's out of earshot the shuffler suddenly regains the power of speech and tells us "That watch cost me seven dollars, and there's no WAY that girl is gonna serve me". Then tangentally, "I'm queer eh guys, you're cool with that huh?" We assured him he was still welcome at our table and watched with amusement as he accepted his beer from the chatter and proceeded to sip his brew and hit on him with wild abandon, codling his arms and patting him gingerly on the face.
Deciding this was more than he'd barganed for the chatter took his new watch and ambled out making some muted declaration of heading home to smoke a bowl. Which left us with the dejected shuffler who presently inspected his warm half bottle of Coors Light and wobbled his way out with a hearty "fuck this".
Last night while lounging on a friends balcony watching the city blink away below, a buddy messaged me and said I should meet him on a patio near my place for a night cap a little after midnight. I made my way over and we staked out our chunk of patio enjoying a cool summer night and casting pointed looks at the bartender who was studiously ignoring us. We opted to belly up to the bar to order a few and while we were there we were dragged into some idle chat with a local barfly who followed us back out onto the patio and invited himself to have a seat.
Being more or less friendly fellows and no stranger to the desire for idle drunken conversation we traded banter with him and inside jokes with glances at each other, when a fourth decidedly shattered man concluded that it would be in everyones best interest for him to join our table too. "Look how beautiful you are!" he declared to the lot of us after shuffling zombie like through the bar and hurling himself with gusto at an empty seat.
He was more or less unable to form a coherant sentance, so he stuck to laughing when we did and uttering the occasional "muth-fuck" of agreement after a break in conversation. "That's a really nice watch", said the first interloper to the shattered man.
"One of you three buy me a beer!", responded the shuffling drunk.
"I'll buy you a beer for that watch", says the first drunk while my friend and I share an amused look. The shuffler struggles out of his watch and hands it over, and chatty drunk straps it on clearly pleased with his good fortune and wanders up to the bar to pay the shuffler.
As soon as he's out of earshot the shuffler suddenly regains the power of speech and tells us "That watch cost me seven dollars, and there's no WAY that girl is gonna serve me". Then tangentally, "I'm queer eh guys, you're cool with that huh?" We assured him he was still welcome at our table and watched with amusement as he accepted his beer from the chatter and proceeded to sip his brew and hit on him with wild abandon, codling his arms and patting him gingerly on the face.
Deciding this was more than he'd barganed for the chatter took his new watch and ambled out making some muted declaration of heading home to smoke a bowl. Which left us with the dejected shuffler who presently inspected his warm half bottle of Coors Light and wobbled his way out with a hearty "fuck this".
7.06.2009
death and microsoft taxes
After unloading my 13" macbook earlier this year I've been paying close attention to the subnotebook / netbook space to see what offerings might be available to supplement my on the go computing needs. I recently placed a pre-order with a local distributor to get my hands on one of the new Intel Atom + nVidia ION subnotebooks which should be out sometime this summer.
It seems however that Microsoft has reached is gnarled and grizly arm into my nurge to hold me back! Intel, in keeping with their long standing tradition of bending to the Redmond whim have endorsed some sort of marketing based sales strategy that denies reduced prices to OEM's who go outside their spec limits. Basically this means that because some vendors have opted to use cheap Intel hardware to build small devices with screens and (*ahem* non-Intel *cough*) graphics chips capable of playing 720p HD video Intel is cutting them out of the preferred pricing circle and charging premium rates for their chips. This of course has pissed vendors off and seems to have delayed my sweet geek toy joy.
But not only is my new toy running late, it's now going to cost extra for an OS I don't want or inted to use because of a hardware feature that's a selling point to the consumer.
Yay!
It seems however that Microsoft has reached is gnarled and grizly arm into my nurge to hold me back! Intel, in keeping with their long standing tradition of bending to the Redmond whim have endorsed some sort of marketing based sales strategy that denies reduced prices to OEM's who go outside their spec limits. Basically this means that because some vendors have opted to use cheap Intel hardware to build small devices with screens and (*ahem* non-Intel *cough*) graphics chips capable of playing 720p HD video Intel is cutting them out of the preferred pricing circle and charging premium rates for their chips. This of course has pissed vendors off and seems to have delayed my sweet geek toy joy.
But not only is my new toy running late, it's now going to cost extra for an OS I don't want or inted to use because of a hardware feature that's a selling point to the consumer.
Yay!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)