Tasting Windows Vista
If you happen to be on a Microsoft campus sometime soon, you can actually taste Windows Vista. While visiting the Mountain View branch of MS last week, I got to sample the flavor of the next generation of Windows.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment August 13, 2006
Wine and Tea May Protect Hearing
My hearing is high on the list of things I'd like to keep, in spite of owning a loud rock club in the past and going to bed with ringing ears during my teenage years spent drumming. According to the Scottsman, antioxidants in red wine, green tea and aspirin may help protect hearing from damage and prolong hearing into the years where loss due to age becomes more likely. Dr. Jochen Schacht of University of Michigan is quoted in the article as saying, " I wouldn't say it is proof for antioxidants, the jury's still out on that. But it certainly can't hurt to increase the amount of green vegetables, red wine or green tea that you consume." So do as the good doctor ordered and enjoy a glass of wine.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment June 08, 2006
Funny Email Autoresponse
This is the funniest email auto-response I've seen in ages:
"I have abandoned my family leaving my wife, dog, furniture, and computer behind. I will not have access to email to read neither respond."
Maybe not so funny for the wife and dog, but I can only assume it's a joke.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment May 31, 2006
Nightowl to Morning Person the 12 Step Program
When I lived in Iowa, I often stayed up until 2 or 3am every night because that's when I got sleepy. Living in Seattle, that's switched to Midnight or 1am most nights, which is pretty consistent considering the timezone shift. Steve Pavlina has been doing some experiments with sleeping and also getting out of bed earlier. I'm not entirely convinced getting up early leads to more productivity, but he might be on to something. Steve's not a specialist in the area of sleep, but I think he still may be on to something. He's also got tips about getting up when the alarm goes off. One tip for early rising he fails to note is having kids. There's nothing like a four-year-old standing next to your head saying, "Wake up" to prompt you to get out of bed.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment May 29, 2006
Neighborhood Black Bear
Living about half a mile from Interstate 5 in the middle of suburban Seattle, I don't really expect to see much wildlife. Sure we get crows, pigeons and squirrels, but there aren't even rabbits in the yards here like we had in Iowa. Turns out there was a black bear in Ravenna this morning, less than a mile from my house. If it really came south from Shoreline like the speculation suggests, it might have even strolled down my street. I don't remember hearing about bears in the city last year, so I'm not sure how common this is. Apparently that's bear number 33 or 34 cited in Western Washington so far this spring. KOMO has the video.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment May 21, 2006
Rat City Rollergirls
Robin and I went to a Rat City Rollergirls bout for the first time last night, thanks to some help from Throttle Rockets captain Darth Skater. I know Darth's alter ego in the tech world and she's been trying to talk me into checking out a match for at least a year. If you live in Seattle, or if you have a roller derby league in your city, check it out at least once; roller derby is like crossing a punk rock show with a hockey match. Lots of fun and lots of safe violence. The women skate around a track with two lead skaters called the pivots, a set of blockers and a jammer for each of the competing teams. The jammers try to break through the pack and then skate past as many of their opponents as possible before the current "jam" is called off. Along the way, the two combating teams try to knock each other down with both legal and not so legal maneuvers. It looked like there were about 1000 people in attendance at the recent match, which says to me with a little word-of-mouth this is something on the verge of being HUGE!
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment May 21, 2006
Elbow Live From Seattle's Triple Door
I only recognized one of the songs played by Elbow at Seattle's Triple Door when they played a KEXP event on Tuesday. They sound a little like a cross between Coldplay and early U2, although they've definitely got their own distinctive sound. You can see the photo collection on Flickr:
You can get an Elbow track as part of Volume 12 of the Music That Matters Podcast from KEXP.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment April 13, 2006
Motricity BET Busta Rhymes and CTIA
The best parties will always be the ones I'm not invited to, which is exactly why I made it my mission to crash the Motricity / BET party at CTIA Wireless 2006. Busta Rhymes headlined an evening MCee'd by Doug E. Fresh with star cameos like Magic Johnson. I spent parts of the night with a ringside seat as evidenced by the video below, but also had the chance to hang at the bar with one of the opening acts (who were generally more interested in the eye candy hired for the party). The other part of the night I was hanging out with the guys behind PocketGirls.com, who happen to be fans of Chris Pirillo. The party list at CTIA this year is lengthy, but CES 2005 still gets mad props for the Rock-a-fella Records / AVN party featuring Kanye West. Photos of Busta Rhymes and Doug E. Fresh are available on Flickr.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment April 06, 2006
Seattle Filter Magazine Party
On Monday night I attended the Filter Magazine Party with Bre Pettis of I Make Things fame. I've been to a few swanky parties in my day and this wasn't one of them. Walking in the door we were instantly hit with an overwhelming sense of corporate schlock. Get your picture taken in an economy sized Honda? Are you serious? The shrinky-dinks were a nice touch, but not exactly something a 21+ crowd typically looks for. 500 microbrews in the naked city and the best Filter could do was free Miller Lite? No one appeared to be having fun. Where was the decadance that should go along with a rock party tied to what's supposed to be a trendy magazine. For their part, the bands sounded awesome, with Aqueduct providing the backdrop for one of Bre's Meta-photo shots and Pretty Girls Make Graves headlining the evening.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 30, 2006
DIY Tripod Top of Technorati
In July 2004 Gizmodo and Engadget featured a tripod mount for single serving soda bottles (aka the 20oz and 24oz bottles here in the U.S.). I saw it and decided to make my own. Almost two years later its in the April 2006 issue of Popular Science and hit #1 on Technorati's Top Searches (see image below). I guessing this is in part because Popular Science misspelled my domain name as jakeluDDington.com instead of the proper spelling with a single 'D'. Not to mention they linked to the main page of the site instead of linking to the actual Bottle Cap Tripod article. At the end of the day, I think it's cool that I made it in to PopSci, but I really need to work on that whole spelling thing. 219 entries in Google, mostly made by people that know me, all spell my name wrong.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 20, 2006
Mike Furir Sucks
I don't know who Mike Furir is, but I'd love it if his commment spam crew would stop bombarding my server with links to his site. 1) the comments are moderated so I'm deleting them and 2) your methods are pointless because the only thing ranking for your name in Google is all the comment spam. If the spamming was working, your site would be #1 for your name not the blogs where you're comment spamming. Get a clue.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 08, 2006
Memeorandum and Fake Relevance
I screwed up. As Gabe points out in the comments, Memeorandum did feature the Scoble post about his quitting Memeorandum on Sunday. I searched for it on their site and didn't see it, which is probably in part because there's no real search feature. Still I should have done a better job of tracking the link down before I complained.
As a result, I'm changing the title of this post from Memeorandum and Fake Transparency and rethinking some of what I said, because Fake Relevance hits closer to my point. Scoble speaks fairly highly of Memeorandum's ability to dirve traffic, so I'll assume that it does. The Alexa ranking (for all the flaws in that benchmark) certainly suggests Memeorandum gets tons of traffic. Where that traffic goes is anyone's guess.
I say fake relevance for the same reasons I made my original post. At the time of the first writing, the top story on TailRank.com was the post made by Robert Scoble about taking a break from Memorandum.
At the time I mistakenly thought it wasn't on Memeorandum. Gabe pointed me in the right direction, but I'm failing to see how Memeorandum accurately tracks the discussion because there are only 4 posts discussing the story. As of the current date stamp on this post, TailRank now shows 32 different sites linking to the Scoble post, which doesn't even include this post. Further analysis might reveal more links. Heck, even del.icio.us finds 5 people who found it bookmark worthy.
Curiously, the topic shows up nowhere on tech.memeorandum.com even though similar topics frequently bubble to the top on both services. While I'm sure Memeorandum is currently reeling from losing their biggest cheerleader for a week, I don't think filtering the conversation to avoid negative comments is the way to deal with it. The top story on Memeorandum as I write this is certainly more interesting, with coverage of the proposed merger between BellSouth and ATT, however, I find it hard to believe Scoble doesn't rank anywhere in the list considering he frequently finds himself in the top 10 stories.
As Gabe states in the comments, he makes no claims of transparency in relation to Memeorandum, so my accusation in that regard is certainly unfair. At the same time, it would be interesting to know what metrics are used in determining what gets included in Memeorandum's listings because updating quickly is not the best determinant of useful information.
I personally find the stories on TailRank consistently more suited to my own reading tastes than what appears on Memeorandum, particularly because Memeorandum skews toward featuring the same bloggers over-and-over. At the same time, I think Robert may be taking this to the extreme. TailRank is my litmus test for what's going on in the blogs, my feed list serves the purpose of discovering things I won't see everywhere else. Memeorandum could easily serve the same purpose, assuming they aren't filtering their echo chamber of any potential negative reference to Memeorandum. Like most of Web 2.0, the transparency seems to getting a little opaque. although it's hard to find breaking news when there's only a few channels for getting it to the front page.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 06, 2006
Secret Passage in Your House
I was quite impressed with the secret bookshelf created by a resourceful Australian last year as a DIY solution to making room for more books and hiding an ugly closet. Gear Live just pointed me to a company specializing in all kinds of secret passageways for the home. DIY solutions start at $1,500 with installations costing in the $10,000 range. Not sure my landlord would take kindly to installing a secret passageway in the house but before you build, this is the kind of feature everyone should want to consider.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 06, 2006
400 Million Phones in China
According to Digital Media Asia by way of China Herald, the Ministry of Information Industry China is reporting over 400 million cell phone subscribers in China. I think everyone's watching the wrong market in that whole Yahoo, Google, MSN desktop search thing. Cell phone apps are already the bigger market.
Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 06, 2006
Passing 8th Grade Math
I caught the 8th grade math quiz on the Bruner Blog. Almost 20 years later, I can still pass:
| You Passed 8th Grade Math |
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Continue reading... | Posted by Jake | Make a Comment March 06, 2006