Month: November 2007

60 Minutes on millennials

Are you really telling me that 20 somethings don’t know how to use a knife and fork? (Are they potty trained yet?) And they really want managers to write gold star notes to their parents? And they really want to see their managers in the dunk tank at the summer picnic? Dunk tank at the summer picnic?! Yeah, that’s totally what kids are into these days. What on earth is this story talking about? The unfortunate part: 60 Minutes is like catnip to old people and many of them probably bought into the whole piece. More fuel for the “these darn kids today” fire that older generations seem to love so much. “The greatest generation” is always the one that’s about to die.

MTA Wifi

woo. not sure what the MTA has to “test” wifi for, but if we’ll get wifi in all stations.
2012-09-26: Free WiFi in the NYC subway? You could probably outfit all 200 underground stops for 20m and then put a captive portal on it for millions to enjoy per day. Or make them solve captchas: an underground workforce gasping for bandwidth.
2012-09-26: Free Wifi in the NYC subway? You could probably outfit all 200 underground stops for 20m and then put a captive portal on it for millions to enjoy per day. Or make them solve captchas: an underground workforce gasping for bandwidth.

Dumb Startups

ChaCha is a bad idea that has been poorly executed. In a sea of dumb startup ideas, ChaCha stands apart as more awful than just about all of the rest. And that didn’t change with today’s funding news. They simply went from being a bad startup, to a well funded bad startup.

this is why i keep reading TC. apparently chacha is the pride of the midwest media, too. fits.
2017-04-19: nice indictment of the tech industry:

Juicero is basically a $400 machine that squeezes a bag so you don’t have to. But it’s internet-connected! Isn’t that awesome?

Gmail Migration

we’re excited to announce the new Google Apps Email Migration API, which can move email from anywhere – not just IMAP systems – to the Premier, Education or Partner Editions of Google Apps.

excellent, now you can wean organizations off of outlook / exchange with importers.

Climate Change Escapism

Of course, such thinking is absurd; thinking that flooded cities and continent-spanning droughts and forest fires will simply be a convenient way to escape your mortgage payments is ridiculous. Viewing famine, mass extinction, and global human displacement into diarrhea-wracked refugee camps as some sort of Outward Bound holiday – on the scale of a planet – overlooks some rather obvious downsides to the potentially catastrophic impact of uncontrolled climate alteration. Whether you’re talking about infant mortality, skin cancer, mass violence and rape, waterborne diseases, vermin, blindness, drowning, and so on, climate change entails radically negative effects that aren’t being factored into these escapist thought processes. But none of those things are depicted in these images.

he makes the good point that it is better to scare breeders with “your kids will drown” than to show them submerged manhattan for them to use their SUV less.

I Want Sandy

IWantSandy is an email-based automated personal assistant that has just opened up for public signups. I’ve been using Sandy for a couple months now, and she’s fast becoming indispensable for my life. All you do is CC your personal Sandy address on your mail and throw in keywords, like “Sandy, remember that this is the grocery list” or “Sandy, remind me to follow up on this with Fred on January 1, 2008” and the Sandybot will file away all your minutae for you. Sandy emails you with reminders

this looks really cool. who will acquire them first?

Blogs Meet Forums 2.0

MTCS is about rescuing the huge parts of the web that are still suffering under circa-1997 technologies. I call it the “Dark Web” — all these conversations that are taking place on bulletin boards, forums, and message boards, but they don’t have any of the usability or identity benefits of modern web technologies. And that’s leaving aside niceties like good URLs (for Google indexing) and tagging and rich media support. I mean, you just don’t see a forum where you can easily upload video or audio assets, for example.

i attempted once to wean people off their 1997 era forums. what a wasteland. still, remarkably resilient, just like hotmail.com