you sure do have some great articles. However, when I put a bunch of ’em in tabs, Firefox is lighting up like a pinball machine with all the re-loading your pages do for distributing your adverts. That’d be annoying enough, but all those forced pings to you server to grab adverts I’ll never see is running down the battery in my laptop like the dickens. Wake up to the new web technologies, morons.
Interesting post on life at Google vs Microsoft from a individual contributor perspective
Life at Google – The Microsoftie Perspective « Just Say “No†To Google
The comments are freaky. MS folks piling on this person which seems kind of stupid, because this reads like a love letter to life at Microsoft if I ever read one. I’d like to see this person follow up with a second interview in a few years and see how the Microsoft grind changes their perspective. I never worked at Google, but part of the reason that I left MS was because it was starting to feel like management looked at developers as cogs in the machine. Maybe its worse at Google, I don’t know, but this certainly doesn’t compel me to go work there. Especially as a manager. 100 direct reports! That is insane.
wow, I crashed the tivo!
So our tivo decided to stop recognizing our wireless network AGAIN, so I did the stuff I’ve done before to fix it up, unplug the wireless adapter, reboot the tivo, restart the network, change the wireless setting, then finally voila, it connected and then rebooted TWICE! I’m realizing that the plus side to computer as appliance is that it just works, except when it doesn’t and then you are FUCKED.
hey, my band is playing tomorrow night in Seattle
A rare treat, ’cause we are old now and don’t play out as much as we used to.
Transpacific returns live! June 26, 2007! Playing with Moggs (from San Francisco), Colony of Watts and 1-2 12. At the Sunset in Ballard (5433 Ballard Ave NW) starting at 9pm.
transPacific mySpace page (you know, for the kids)
two more opinions on mega-houses destroying neighborhoods
This one personal, about Magnolia
The invasion of Magnolia by the land snatchers was not a “shock and awe” campaign. Initially, it was gradual — a house demolished here, another there, to be replaced by three- and four-story McMansions. The neighborhood was changing, as all neighborhoods will over time.
I didn’t like it, but I told myself that change is inevitable. It can be good. It can revitalize a neighborhood, but Magnolia as I have known it is being destroyed by land snatchers who seize houses only to demolish them. This change is not good.
In recent years, the land snatchers have become rapacious. In the last year alone, I have witnessed the demolition of at least six homes within blocks of my house. The charming traditional homes of Magnolia, the elegant Tudors and the modest cottages, are now an endangered species. I drive down a street in my neighborhood, looking at houses I have long appreciated, and all I see are possible — no, probable — demolitions.
This one from the editors of the Seattle Times
If you’ve ever had the sun blotted or your view blocked by a house on steroids, you’d understand the unneighborly feelings that a megahome can engender.
Steve, this is what happens when you give a lame keynote
Is Google Going To Buy Apple? | dmiessler.com
With no good rumours to go on, no new hardware, no new iLife, the Apple rumour mill goes into overdrive.
I think this a fairly unlikely thing. Google needs a hardware and consumer appliance manufacturer like Apple needs to get into the catering business. The Google business model is all about making the operating system irrelevant. Everything lives in the cloud delivered for free with some targeted advertising. Buying a hardware company makes very little sense in that world. It’s also a crazy low-margin business. It would drag Google’s profitability down in a serious way.
Dell or Sony makes a lot more sense as a partner if Apple was really an acquisition target.
neato mashup site showing neighborhood growth over time
Trulia hindsight is a neat little mashup between maps and building data, it animates over time showing when houses were built over the last hundred years. (it turns out that most of Capital Hill here in Seattle was filled in by 1930, for example).
Sarcastic Gamer’s Microsoft Surface Parody
John Battelle reaches his Google saturation point
John Battelles Searchblog: Just Asking…
Ive found myself more and more wary of doing things that Id like to do with Google applications simply out of some primal, lizard brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source. Its not that I dont trust Google, its not that I dont like the applications, its that Im worried they might fall to some ill use, out of the control of the current brand as Ive come to understand it today. Or perhaps its deeper than that – I simply cant let too much of my online life run through any one control point, regardless of who it is.
John Battelle wonders the same thing I wondered before, but of course, he writes it better and backs up his facts (damn journalists).
Lets put an end to the 3000 sq ft house on the 4000 sq ft lot
Megahomes multiplying, but how big is too big?
In an area with little land to build new houses, residents are fighting the megahome — McMansions that balloon to the edges of their properties, three-story giants that block views from quaint craftsman bungalows.
Seattle is considering new laws to limit the size of houses replacing those torn down on single-family lots. In Bellevue, residents came to a meeting with city staff Wednesday night to complain of huge homes that block out the sun and “overpower” the neighborhoods.
Yes, yes, so yes. Every time that we see a nice house with nicely scaled houses all around it, we have to do the math in our heads to figure out what a 3 story behemoth next door would do to our views, privacy and light. It’s happened to several of our friends and to us in our last house to a lesser extent. I would also like to see the extermination of the “buy a house, build 4 townhouses” style of development that is also rampant. The city should get serious about zoning to either maintain neighborhoods as single family, reasonably-sized homes, or they should designate neighborhoods as targets for high-density zoning and compensate the local homeowners appropriately. Right now, it is a higgly-piggly where high-density building (houses built to the edges of their lots, town-homes and condo developments are going into the middle of established single-family neighborhoods and destroying them like a cancer from the inside out.