The new dollhouse
Monday, October 01, 2007
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007
OK, Rewind
Found a way to upload photos to Flickr and Blogger from my Dash with Shozu. We'll see how it goes.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Fun With Wieners
Today we went to the Pet Parade and the Wiener Dog Derby in Soulard.
Much fun was had by all. First we ate at Joanie's Pizza. Then we watched the parade and begged for beads. We proceeded to the wiener dog races and watched a few heats before heading back to the car. On the way I picked up a burnt ends sandwich with potato salad at Fat Toney's BBQ. Yum! I'll be returning soon for more delicious Q. Then we stopped by Union Station so Gail could pick up a gift for a friend. We spent the rest of the afternoon in Gail's office, munching on burnt ends, playing on the computers (she got a new Athlon... mmm flat screens) and talking while Gail did some work. Finally got home in time to get Zoe ready and to bed, and then sit down for some computing and a movie.
All in all, quite a day.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Friday, September 29, 2006
new job == stale blog
Yes, it happened. I let my blog go stale. I also haven't been uploading pictures to Flickr.
In my defense, I have a new job. And I doubt many people are reading this anyway, besides maybe sometimes my wife (hi hon!) and even she's probably bored with it by now.
I also haven't been tagging stuff for del.icio.us as much lately since I got a new laptop.
Oh yeah, I got a new laptop. Dell Inspiron 6400 with 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Core Duo, 60GB HD, WiFi, etc. Pretty nice. I'm running Ubuntu Edgy on it (just dist-upgraded from Dapper) and I have a CentOS VM running under VMware Server (free version) for testing stuff for work.
Oh yeah, I have a new job. We use lots of cool open source stuff. They provided the laptop. Sweeeet. You know you're jealous so just admit it.
OK, so I will upload some new pics to Flickr soon, and I will try to be more diligent about blogging, flickring and tagging.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
reddit experiment
My reddit experiment is going very well. I'll have a full report on it once I have put together all of my observations. Suffice to say that I think this is the key to a better model for a link aggregation community, which may serve as the future dominant paradigm for the web.
Roses
These are the roses my daughter wanted for Valentine's day. We were a little reluctant to get them at first, but we were in the middle of Trader Joe's and she was very insistent in that way that only 4 year old daughters can be. My wife improvised a vase out of a plastic jar that previously held pretzel rods. They are still beautiful and really brighten up the kitchen. I'm not a big flower person but these are really nice to have around, especially because my daughter likes them so much.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
How To Conquer Reddit
I'm the biggest karma gainer on reddit today and this week! I WIN! I WIN! W00T!
Ahem. OK, so anyway, my method is simple. Go here. Click on a link. Then click your reddit bookmarklet to submit the link (if it hasn't already been submitted - most of the best ones will already have been submitted unless you get lucky). Enter a good title (see previous blog post for ideas on that). Rinse and repeat until you rule the world.
If that doesn't work, go here and do the same thing.
Rock on and be righteous to each other, my reddit brethren.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Ben and Alice: Eliminating dupes from reddit
Ben and Alice: Eliminating dupes from reddit
More reddit meta-foo. Good stuff.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
I Am The Complete Anatomy of a Geek
I live this.
Well, close enough anyway.
Just ask my wife.
(Note the conspicuous lack of linkage. If you have anything to ask her, just post a comment here.)
The Cringeometer
The Cringeometer for scientists, developed by Scott Aaronson at the University of Waterloo, is truly a great invention.
Now we just need one for sysadmins, one for programmers, and so forth.
I'll definitely start brainstorming on the System Administrator Cringeometer right away.
Das Analysis: More About The Reddit Model And The Future Of The Web
OK, hubristic enough title for you? Just trying to post reddit style ;-)
Yesterday, I made my first post about reddit. It was received with a warm thud on reddit itself, in terms of the score. But it did elicit some interesting comments and suggestions which I have been thinking about.
Then today, Ben of Ben and Alice posted part of what was missing from my misguided rant. His points are very valid, he expresses them much better than I could have, and for some insane reason he actually gathered evidence to back them up! So you should read what he has to say, and probably look at the reddit post linking to his and the attendant comments, before continuing.
OK, now that you've read that (if you haven't, then DO IT NOW! IT'S NOT A TUMAH!), the first thing I want to touch on is the headline factor. As redditor rnichols so wisely pointed out in a comment on the reddit posting of the link to my original blog post, the "killer headline" is very important in determining the success of a reddit post. So what makes a killer headline in the context of reddit posting? The fourth question on the reddit FAQ, about getting your submissions noticed, is a good start to figuring this out. The only truly important thing I could add to this is: don't change the original title just because you can. If it is clear, concise and sounds interesting when you read it out loud (ideally to a geek audience), go with it.
Now, to be clear, in case you didn't look at all of the comments on my original reddit post: I was wrong about a few things. Not the least of which is that all reddit votes are equal, which in retrospect would have been revealed by taking more than a cursory glance at the hot section and comparing the scores and recentness of posts in relation to their ranking. It's obvious that while the post with the most votes isn't necessarily the top ranked because of its relative lack of freshness, votes with roughly the same freshness are ordered by the their scores. There is probably just some simple algebra going on in the Python code to sort these into their respective slots.
Which brings us to the filtering system. The question is, how exactly does it work? The speculation is that it only looks at things like keywords and URLs. If so, then as Ben so eloquently points out, that isn't good enough. It should at least be collaborative, like the Amazon or Netflix or TiVo systems, and figure out what you would like or dislike based on what other people with similar tastes and interests say they like or dislike. This would be a "killer app" feature to put into reddit. But it would not be easy to implement or maintain. It would cost a lot of developer time and system resources.
So here's the question: will reddit do this? If so, they could implement the same basic approach to handle comments, and they could probably apply the same general methodology to determining how to rank posts in the hot section. The way that would work, as I see it, would basically be to create a recommendation filter for reddit as a whole, with freshness as an added variable in the calculation.
And as I mentioned in my first post on this, if they don't do it, who will? Perhaps Digg, or Newsvine, or even Google? I'm rooting for reddit because they are a cool, sleek upstart in this field. But we all know how that story can turn out. Let's just hope reddit is Cinderella and the future is holding a glass slipper.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Newsvine beta invitations
By the way, I have 20 invitations to the Newsvine beta, so if you want one send an e-mail to newsvinebeta at spif.com with your e-mail address and link(s) to samples of your blogging or other online writing.
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