Anabelle Starts to Crawl

Seattle Times: Arts &Entertainment

August 22, 2001
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BOO DAVIS / THE SEATTLE TIMES
August 22, 2001 Strip
A COUPLE OF DOT-GONE GUY STOCK OPTIONS GO TO READER ZACK HANDLEY, OF SEATTLE, WHO CONTRIBUTED TO TODAY’S STRIP. HELP US WRITE THE SCRIPT BY SHARING YOUR IDEAS AT TALKTOUS@SEATTLETIMES.COM OR WRITING DOT-GONE GUY, PO BOX 1845, SEATTLE, WA 98111.

Cranky? It may benefit you in long run

By Joe Burris

The Baltimore Sun

Are you a
forty-something grouch who’s first to shout invectives in a slow-moving
checkout lane? A youngster who mocks your dad’s counsel? A graduate
student known for driving your professor crazy with sardonic verbiage?

Take hope: Today, you might be dismissed as a smart-aleck. In your old age, you might be viewed as smarter than average.

Or at least that’s what Jacqueline Bichsel suggests.

Bichsel, a psychology professor at Morgan State in Baltimore,
recently co-authored a study that invites the conclusion that upon
reaching 60, disagreeable people maintain a higher level of
intelligence than more easy-going seniors.

“These individuals have a higher vocabulary,” she said. “They have a better use of words, a better knowledge of facts.”

It also suggests that those dismissed as grumpy old men and women
are often smarter in some ways than the young. The study’s findings fly
in the face of notions that intellect and memory fade with age, and
that has made it a hot topic in the psychology world.

Coffee as a Health Drink? Studies Find Some Benefits

Coffee is not usually thought of as health food, but a number of recent
studies suggest that it can be a highly beneficial drink. Researchers
have found strong evidence that coffee reduces the risk of several
serious ailments, including diabetes, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

Popular Mechanics

Les Jones – Emergency Supplies

The Mormons

You might wanna print these out cuz the Internets may go dark during the rapture.

Gotuit Media brings you licensed (the stuff that gets yanked from YouTube) video content (news, sports, music, primetime) with monetizing ad wrapping.

Easy, fast and a huge library of entertainment. This is the Future.

Vint Cerf and David Farber on
“What is Net Neutrality?” is available via podcast from the Center for
American Progress: feed (mp3).

I like hearing both sides of a debate, don’t you?

Scott Adams writes:

My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being
run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected
governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it’s true. Otherwise my
survival depends on hordes of clueless goobers electing competent
leaders. That’s about as likely as a dog pissing the Mona Lisa into a
snow bank.

I just signed up with FON.com and got a $5 Linksys WiFi Router. Now I can blanket my lot in Wifi;-)

Update: I just received my FON social router and am officially a Fonero….and now my piece of paradise is blanketed in 54mb WiFi Love!!!

Rating: Highly Worthwhile

I just signed up with FON.com and got a $5 Linksys WiFi Router. Now I can blanket my lot in Wifi;-)

If you haven’t read Singularity is Near, you should. The future is very different much closer than many think.

Ray chats with the public about a few topics in the book here

"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a
cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to
protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to
believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the
consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."

–ABC News correspondent John Stossel (Oregonian, 10/26/94)

Hmmm…

Not quite.

Google, Yahoo! and MSN: Property Size-up

By popular demand, I’ve gone through several Hitwise categories to
compile the table below that shows where Google, Yahoo! and MSN
properties stack up in their respective categories. The percentages
represented in the right hand column are the percentages of visits in
respect to visits to that category.

If Google is really showing this poorly outside of everything except search….why do they FEEL like they are winning so BigTime?

A recent study by Roger Magoulas and Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Research
provided strong data to support the assertion that online access drives
usage of content that is generally not available in print. We compared
sales reported through Nielsen Bookscan for the fourth quarter of 2005 with access logs from both O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online service and from Google Book Search. The result provides compelling support for Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory.

Read the Whole thing…

Now how do we stop thinking about dumb Ajax-y websites and really take advantage of this????

SkypeOut Now Free in U.S. Canada

Somebody over at Vonage must’ve made Meg angry. Very Angry.

update: Om Expands on the story…a tad more useful than Zack’s snark

When I was an college marketing intern at Microsoft in the 90s. They overused one term, i hadn’t heard or used (before then) since Finance class. LEVERAGE.

LEVERAGE. LEVERAGE. LEVERAGE. Every decision from corporate. Every Speech, Billg made. Every sales approach was (and of course is to this day) based on institutional LEVERAGE.

Who is taking that very Microsoft-ian approach now?

Google.

Who else could utilize their BRAND (not technology, I think Yahoo and MSN have comparable algos) and Goodwill to create OneBox.

MSFT couldn’t because they overtly compete with and want to OWN many/all of these product lines. Yahoo didn’t, because it is too consumer focused. Nope.

Google LEVERAGED Brand and Skills into a strong Enterprise Offering. Dont think they wont mash/build/integrate/LEVERAGE further up into the value chain.

Well I knew I was gonna like it and to make a long story short: I love it!

The auto scheduling does not work for me but I am sure they will figure that out soon enough. Just being able to easily (and freely) create, share, & subscribe to an infinite amount of calendars is of course how calendaring should be done. Of Course it should. It is not like MSFT could not have done this 10 years ago…THEY SIMPLY DID NOT.

You don't need me to tell you the game has changed but THE GAME HAS CHANGED. MSFT is truly on its heals as much as any monopolist with a 50Billion dollar bank can be on its heals.

Airset has had this same product for several years but the integration with my PIM (Gmail) trumps all else and I am betting it will for many other users.

Super Comprehensive UI review from Daniel Glazman. I tried to give IE7 a chance but Firefox just BLOWS it away.

I guess I didn’t read the instructions (what’s new) but the Riya uploader distributes much of the photo processing to the user PC (which makes sense economically). For the first two days I was running it on an idle PC with Outlook, Google Desktop, Firefox, AntiVirus…basically all kinds of crap.

WELL, this AM, I powered down all processes except Riya and it is uploading twice as fast. This is a 2.5 yo machine (1.99 GHz Athlon) and we are now uploading 200 5-7MegaPix pics per hour up from 100 before I cleared the system tray.

Why are they doing exactly what needs to be done with Calendaring????

CL2 is closely, very closely, integrated with Gmail. It includes
now-standard web 2.0 features – Ajax, subscription feeds for
integration with iCal and other desktop calendars, event creation,
search, sharing, notifications (including SMS) and more.

It’s also clear from the event creation functionality that Google is
is going to attempt to aggregate events like eventful and zvents do
now. If they combine their event creation feature with a web crawl and
parsing of event data (exactly what zvents does), they will be able to
create a very large events database. From the CL2 Trusted Tester
Guidelines:

More Importantly, why is MSFT & Yahoo not??? Sure there are many start ups out there like Airset, zvents,  30 Boxes many many more….but why use a calendaring apps without email integration? Makes No Sense.

This will be THE tool that gets everyone in my family on Gmail…buh bye Outlook and Hotmail, & Yahoo. The functionality combined with Gmail integration is too much to resist.

Update: Paul Kedrosky says March 15th Release