Many days I have nothing to blog, so I don’t. Usually when I have something to blog, it’s hard to know what post to start with. Officially, I don’t care who reads or not, but I still feel obligated to be interesting. As a writer, you want to grab people with the first thing you say, so they want to read the second sentence, then the third, and ultimately suck them in so they read your whole post. If you’re good, maybe they’ll come back or even click on some of your related advertising. I don’t care about the money because I couldn’t even miss a week of work with what this blog has paid in my lifetime. Mostly, I try to entertain. Sometimes, I try to provoke thought. And occasionally, I try to antagonize because I’m spiteful like that.
Today, I’ll start with something I find interesting, and a few others will find interesting, but most of my readers won’t give two shits about. In London’s Farringdon Station, a remarkable thing happened. A station worker was reprimanded by his supervisor for not communicating well enough with his customers (passengers). The results are fantastic. There’s the news story which focuses on the fact he suggested the passengers kill themselves (not seriously), and one intrepid passenger even managed to record a bit with his mobile phone. I find this interesting because (1) it involves a subway — the tube in this instance, (2) it involves an unusual reaction by an employee to his supervisor’s reprimand. Honestly, this story is funny in a very quirky sort of way. But few of you will ‘get’ it and that’s okay because it’s here because I like it. If someone else likes it, that’s good too. If not, I’m okay with it.
A Day in the Internet is a great graphic which puts things in perspective. Each day: 210 billion
emails, 5 million tweets, 3 million photos posted on Flickr (that’s 41 petabytes of data or to put it another way one petabyte can hold 500 billion pages of text, and 5000 petabytes will hold every word ever written since the dawn of time), and so much more. This is a fun exercise in numbers that are beyond the comprehension and visualization of most people. Perspective is important. My first hard drive was 10 Megabytes. It cost $999 and was called the Sider II for the Apple II series. I thought I’d never fill it up. On my current 4.5 TB of storage, I have single files that are larger than 10MB. My 2TB drive was under $200. I have under 2TB remaining of storage out of the 4.5TB. A decade from now, I’m sure I’ll be writing about my 1PB drive and laughing at how I thought I’d never fill up the 1TB drive. If you dig through my blog, I did indeed make fun of that first 1TB drive I bought not very long ago.
I have to thank Dave Higgins for posting this to my message board. Have you ever seen silent monks singing Hallelujah (Handel’s not Cohen’s)? Hard to believe but here it is
This is one of the most awesome videos of all time in term of just being clever. You will be amazed at the creativity of the kids who did this. It’s amazing how petty some of the idiot commenters are. I suggest not reading them.
I love Lego® and so do you. So does everyone. I haven’t owned any in three decades or so, but I still like to play with them. I never bought them because, well, I never can get kits made the way I want with the parts I want. Along comes this software which Lego themselves have produced (Mac and PC). First, you can play with Lego on your computer to your heart’s content. For free. Forever. But if you build something you really like, you can get a custom Lego kit with your parts delivered to your door. And there are extra colours, and parts, and damn it’s fun and addictive. I’m going to try and build a subway or something and then order it and try to re-create it.
Google Maps. I’m sure you all have used it at one point or another. You’ve probably searched for a company or a restaurant. The company where I work is listed, and we even keep our listing relatively up to date which is more than I can say about many companies. I really never kept specific track of it, lumping it all in with standard Google traffic. It is cool because there’s click-to-call where people can call right from the listing. Today we got a letter in the mail from Google.
It came with a very awesome window decal, now on our reception window, and the letter. The letter has been edited to remove some personally identifying details but is otherwise unaltered. Getting real mail from Google is weird and cool at the same time. Being named “A Favorite Place” on Google is very cool. I’m not sure how they determine it, but it’s not on traffic unless nobody clicks through on Google Maps. I suspect it’s by business category. (Speaking of Google, the Google Phone rumours continue with the new one that the phone will be distributed by Google leaving out the mobile people all together.) Our page still uses MapQuest by default, but we do have a link to GoogleMaps now.
* Fact check here: http://www.whatsabyte.com/