Yesterday I was listening to a public radio story on The California Report. I gritted my teeth as the announcer thrice referred to horned toads as lizards. I like to think that public radio folk are reasonably bright and that they proof-read stories, and so when a friend called, I asked, “Are amphibians lizards?” Well, amphibians aren’t lizards, but then horned toads are actually misnamed short-horned lizards.
This afternoon I read the following from the June 6 issue of “The Week” with glee:
“By lucky chance, astronomers were peering at a galaxy 88 million light-years away when they witnessed the initial blast of a star exploding into a supernova–the first time that rare stellar event has been seen as it happened.”
Though, for all I know, perhaps astronomers have figured out how to observe things without being limited by light-speed, and we’ll be able to watch the supernova explode again 88 million years from now.
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I was trying to hack up a little search box to access the local Google search appliance. I know you can search with a query like “foo site:example.com/docs” but I wanted to pass site: in as a form parameter. Here is an example of how to do that:
<form action="http://googleplex.example.com/search">
<input type="text" name="q" />
<input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="example.com/docs" />
</form>
So, where you might use site: in the search field, you use as_sitesearch as a hidden search parameter. I figured this out by squinting at the Google Advanced Search page.
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The first time we endured layoffs at Tellme the ops team went out for burritos on the company dime. Out of a sense of mourning, my colleague ordered their largest burrito. It was the size of a baby. This was on a Friday in Mountain View.
Joe claimed to have polished off his burrito in two days.
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There was another aftershock in Sichuan today. More people dead and homeless. A big part of the original tragedy is that kids were at school, and many of the schools collapsed, and there are a lot of grieving parents, and questions as to whether schools were built properly.
Now, a little reminder of how different it is to be a subject of China’s government compared to what I take for granted:
“According to a new regulation issued by the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Commission, families like Wang Xuegui’s that lost their children or had children disabled in the earthquake are permitted to give birth again.”
I recall a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where they do what must inevitably happen on a long-running hit TV series: have a bunch of women giving birth at once under stressful circumstances. Worf finds himself assisting a woman in labor, and following instructions, he asserts, in a confident, commanding tone, “you may now give birth!”
“You may now start over at having a family.” That is some hard re-building.
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O’Reilly has some fun and insightful reading on the whole Microsoft-Yahoo! drama. The idea is that instead of chasing the competition because you have “penis envy” and spending your time and energy re-inventing what someone else already kicks ass at, you should figure out what awesome new things need to be built, and go do that instead. Yahoo! shouldn’t waste its time on search when what it is really good at is building a great media portal and user experience. Similarly, Microsoft should probably focus on building better network-enabled user software.
“So, my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn’t.”
I kind of figure that building search is a waste of Yahoo!’s energy, and that if Microsoft wants to ditch their own failed effort and give Yahoo! a chunk of cash for its also-ran technology, well then hooray for Yahoo!
I was also reading about Sugar, which I have gotten to play with on the OLPC XO-1. It is somewhat frustrating to deal with because I really really really like having access to the file / folder metaphor for tracking my work. I do like the “history” interface to “activities” via the Journal, and the built-in collaboration, although I have not had a chance to actually “collaborate” with any one, seems like a really big win–the sort of thing that has a lot of potential not only for education but in the office environment that we adults use as well. It is too bad that collaboration via shared applications is such an under-developed idea. That strikes me as the sort of thing that ought to be within Microsoft’s grasp to run with, and a nice answer to the Google “spreadsheet in a web browser” mentality.
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NPR happened to have a couple of reporters in Sichuan when the earthquake hit. The other day I heard this story on NPR. It is a story of one family bringing in an excavator to try and recover people from the rubble. It is very touching and emotionally difficult to listen to. The reporter’s voice is choked up and failing at the end of the twelve minute piece, which concludes with a great deal of heartfelt wailing and people setting off firecrackers for the dead. The government is estimating 50,000 dead. Horrible horrible news. you can read the contents of the NPR story on the reporters’ blog.
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From the L.A. Times:
SAN FRANCISCO — — The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.
Awesome!
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As seen on Judah:
Do you see a sign “Leave your
junk here”? No you don’t see
a sign “Leave your junk here.”
Do you know why? Because this
corner is not a junk yard. Try
putting your crap in a garbage
can.
There is a certain practice in San Francisco of people disposing of unwanted stuff by leaving it on the curb. Alas, for stuff that nobody wants, that means crap piling up on sidewalks. Someone expressed their disapproval in the form of an homage to Quentin Tarantino.
I couldn’t agree more.
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I had started with the lines of a womans face, and how her hair flows in a way that conveys motion, then played with the idea of scan lines. Food for thought, anyway.
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The Ubuntu upgrade broke printing. Among other things, it removed my canoni250.ppd file. I struggled with it to no avail. Then I went back and pasted the commands in from last time and now it all works.
Yay.
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