Philonoist.net

Fastr is a game based off images from flickr: basically, you compete head-to-head to come up with the shared tag for a set of flickr images. The images are on the small side, so you spend a lot of time squinting into the screen, saying “What is that?”

Apparently there’s no one to play with most of the time, which is sad because this is such an awesome idea. An awesome idea that would really extend well to a certain movie site that doesn’t have an open API yet. Yes, IMDB, shame to you.

Technorati Tags: fastr, flickr

The New York Times has a new blog focusing on air travel. Today’s opening post reminded me just how good things are at the airport and in the air.

In my parents’ youth, after all, plane travel was a thing for the rich few. Starbucks outlets in the terminal; e-mail at 30,000 feet; frequent-flier programs that allow you, as I have done, to fly free to Easter Island, Paris and Cambodia: What is it, exactly, that makes us think that we should complain about sitting in a seat and being taken around the world?

Hear, hear. I’m not flying this holiday season, but I’m definitely going to think about this the next time I traverse those friendly skies.

Technorati Tags: new york times, air travel

…and they didn’t even get to make a sale.

I flew to North Carolina last week to spend some time with my family in their new house. They’ve only been there about a month, so as you can imagine there are still a plethora of boxes that need unpacking. Including the one with all of my Mom’s cookbooks.

It wasn’t a huge deal for Thanksgiving, since there’s really only one holiday recipe in my family that comes from a cookbook: the pumpkin pie. Instead of the “normal” pie, we make a chiffon pie, which, due to using a meringue, is lighter and airer than its normal cousin. It’s one of my favorites and, as my mother can tell you, among the most difficult to pull off: one heavy-handed moment with a spatula can deflate the egg whites and liquefy the pie. Digging into a pumpkin pie soup is a pretty crummy end to Thanksgiving day.

Rather than rummage about for the cookbook, we decided to use a recipe from the Internet, but as our night-before preparation time approached, we became skeptical of the ingredient list. The basics were all there: 3 eggs, some brown sugar and gelatin, but the spices didn’t seem right. We could glean from my mother’s pantry that some combination of allspice, ginger, and cinnamon were used, as they were the ones she’d brought to the new house, but we couldn’t remember exact proportions.

We were about to give up and use the internet recipe (which after examination was off because of its use of nutmeg) while I was Googling various variations of the name of the recipe. Then it hit me: we knew the name of the cookbook!

It was a long shot at best: the cookbook was published by the Junior League of Tampa, Florida, and hardly a Dan Brown bestseller or Oprah’s book club selection. But lo and behold, not only did Amazon.com have it in stock, but it was text-searchable!

For the truly concerned: search “Peerless Pumpkin Chiffon Pie” and see the recipe. Best part: the pie turned out perfectly.

I’ve long been thankful for Amazon’s “Look Inside” and “Search Inside” functionality. It’s an excellent feature that partially solves the “look but don’t touch” problem within online retailing: I’ll never be as satisfied by skimming the excerpts as I would loitering in Barnes and Noble reading, but it comes pretty close. I might just buy a book off my Amazon.com wishlist this week to say thanks.

Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving, amazon.com, cooking, pumpkin pie

What an absolute crock of crap:

“Next, below, is what President Lincoln could have said, if he had
decided that his speech was not only for Americans, but targeted the
whole world. With this Globish wording, his impact would have been
greatly improved.Anglophones can hardly feel the difference. Non
Anglophones observe that they understand better. This is the main
purpose of Globish.”

Our fathers came to this land eighty seven years ago. They brought to
this land a new nation; it was formed in freedom, and was committed to
the belief that all men are created equal. Now we are involved
in a great civil war; it is testing whether that nation or any nation
so born and so committed to that idea can long live. We are
meeting today on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to give
a small piece of that field, as a final resting place for a number of
our sons: those who gave here their lives so that that nation might
live.It is completely fitting and right that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not give– we can not commit — we can not make holy– this ground.The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have made it holy. They
have made it, far above our poor power to add or take away. The world will little note, and will not long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.It
is for us the living, rather, to be committed here to their unfinished
work; the work so greatly brought forward by the people who fought here.It
is rather for us to be here committed to the great task remaining
before us — that we take increased commitment to that cause for which
these honored dead gave the last full measure of commitment — that we
here highly decide and declare that these dead shall not have died for
no purpose — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not pass away from this earth.

Oration is more than words, more than language, meaning or tone. Excellent oration commands – and draws power from – audience and timing. Without being fawning of Lincoln, it’s clear he knew his audience: he spoke that day not to the world, not to the nation, but to those war-tired survivors who congregated on that field. His words would surely have been different had he spoke from the steps of the White House or after the close of the war.

The Gettysburg address has long endured not because of its global appeal, but because of its national and local. Any attempt to improve or alter his speech would result in a product that omits the timing and the audience, because we cannot view – we cannot lay claim to – those times and those people. Such an alteration would, like the above, ultimately seem hollow.

Technorati Tags: Globish, Gettysburg Address

Looks like it’s a rough day across the Atlantic. “Suitable Node” errors occur when there’s a problem with the ExpressionEngine database, and are repaired through a reoptimization of database tables.



Edit: Obviously, BBC News is back up, within mere minutes of going down. I was more interested in their lack of graceful error handling than their lack of database management skills.

Technorati Tags: Suitable Nodes, BBC

From the LA Times:

“When they ignore Veterans Day and Memorial Day, I think they’re telling us something about the way they view America,” said Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily.com, a conservative website that has criticized Google’s logo decisions.

Boo hoo hoo, WorldNetDaily.com. You’d be in a position to talk if your website was full of American Flag GIFs and weeping bald eagle JPEGs. Instead, your website is full of 1997-era GIFs that just make me weep.

Technorati Tags: Google

It’s been a while since I wrote about something truly awesome that adds value to my life . I’m reversing the trend today with Expensr, an excellent finance webapp that helps keep track of finance records online.

Now, it may not be mint, the oft-buzzed about web application that took top honors (and a healthy chunk of change) home at this year’s TechCrunch 40. Mint, in my opinion, is for those who are totally fearless about merging automatic screen-scraping and finance: a lack of online banking APIs (for obviously good reasons) makes you wonder about mint’s long term prospects.

While Expensr doesn’t have the automatic transaction downloading bells and whistles (…yet), it’s still a very snappy location-independent way of keeping track of how much I have in my accounts and how much I’ve spent this month. There’s plenty of other features that a good web2.0 app should have: community-centric, a blog, and founders who get back to me on bugs and feedback within the day, but it’s the relative ease-of-use and charting features that keep me coming back instead of jumping to Excel or Money.

And it’s free to use, of course.

Technorati Tags: Sweetness of the Day

From Brandeis University’s Library and Technology Services:

Second, we develop the “vaporware” that allows robust and maintainable interaction between core systems like PeopleSoft, myBrandeis, library systems and others.

How’s that for some marketing?

Technorati Tags: Software

From Variety

It plans to turn “The Office” into a humorous game in which players have to handle jobs and play pranks at Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch.

Wow. There’s only so many ways to make a stupid.

Technorati Tags: The Office, Sellouts

From NPR:

Phoenix is the city most at risk for identity fraud, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Their new survey shows writing a check is not safer than banking online because of a scam called “check washing.” The thief erases the ink on a check and fills in whatever he wants.

Fairly obvious, but it doesn’t mean you should never write a check. Only write checks to people and companies you trust (making a photocopy of the check if you can), and for other transactions use credit/debit cards.

If you’re making a deal with another person (say, for items from Craigslist), be sure to use cash.

Technorati Tags: finance, identity fraud