For some time now, I’ve been dealing with Boston commuter traffic, relying on TV and radio traffic reports. For the life of me, I couldn’t find a website that gave up to the minute status information. Well, I found one. Sweet.
This is a strictly opinion piece and I have no inside knowledge as to Google’s plans.
I think Google may have hit on a great idea when they designed Gmail and the way in which their “beta” distributes Gmail addresses. It may be too short lived because of attempts to circumvent the system.
Perhaps one of the most prevalent problems with free email addresses is that it takes minimal effort to get that account. As a result, we get AOL syndrome. There are too few string combinations to go around. Instead of getting simply “derik” as one’s login, you’re forced to come up with an obfuscated version, with the most obvious one being attachment of numbers to the end of it (such as one’s birthday). So, instead of “derik” you’d end up with “derik112881” (please send presents).
This site has successfully reached the number two slot in Google’s search engine when looking for “Derik“.
Of course, this still makes me a girly man in comparison to Derik Farnsworth – IFBB Professional Bodybuilder (who is #1 sadly).
Some day my muscle bound friend….
Another good way to waste one’s time is to play with Googlefight. Type two things, and using Google, it will proclaim the winner.
Neat, now how does it do that?
Google spits out approximate matches for any query (you know, 1-10 of about some number). One method would be to parse this from Google’s pages. That’s a kludge though which may break.
A better idea? Use Google’s SOAP interface once again (just as I did for my Google cache utility, and as I will use for my custom search interface). One of the results fields is this value. This can be captured quickly and compared. Part of Google’s appeal for now and some time to come is the fact that it not only has a great and accurate engine, but it supplies all imaginable information to third-parties. That may be it’s saving grace as monsters such as Yahoo! come charging like a bull.
Slashdot | Ballmer Says iPod users are Thieves
I think this speaks for itself. Ballmer is crying that the iPod and iTunes Music Store are doing so well. boohoo
It’s week four of the football season and the Patriots are back from their bye-week. Here are my predictions:
New England vs. Buffalo Philadelphia vs. Chicago Washington vs. Cleveland NY Giants vs. Green Bay Oakland vs. Houston Indianapolis vs. Jacksonville Cincinnati vs. Pittsburgh New Orleans vs. Arizona Atlanta vs. Carolina NY Jets vs. Miami Tennessee vs. San Diego Denver vs. Tampa Bay St. Louis vs. San Fransisco Kansis City vs. Baltimore So far, my record is 11-3.
I haven’t been posting too much lately because I’ve been spending nearly all my time for the past two weeks serving as a juror in Worcester. It’s over (finally).
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but let me make this clear, after two weeks of it, I can safely say I’m ready for the guaranteed three years off. I’d be a little more verbose about the experience, but I feel like it’s not entirely appropriate to post all the details onto the web.
After months of being derided for a relatively small amount of space (100 MB of iDisk space, 15 MB of mail space), Apple has finally bumped up the space for .Mac to 250 MB combined (which you can allocate in any way you see fit).
I’ve been waiting for this for some time now. I use a .Mac address as my main one and some other services for other stuff. The main reason for this was that 15 MB wasn’t enough to keep all my mail for all time on the server. As a result, I use Gmail for all my mailing lists. Now I can rethink this and maybe use one address for everything.