Righteous

This is an awesome post on Engadget. The ASCII art is worth the click alone.

Google Yawn

Well, Google has released their instant messenger. I hope trillian has a plugin soon. I guess that it is pretty close to Jabber. At any rate, I, being the good netizen I am, downloaded it and installed it:



I guess I'm really more interested in them integrating it with Hello. Then getting Picassa and flickr (or their own photo sharing site) integrated. Although I'm sure the IM client is great, there isn't any pop in there for me.

I think I'll write about the new desktop search from Google a little later, after I've used it a bit more.

Backpack, Basecamp, and Tiki

So I have been a proponent of tikiwiki. A super-charged-with-features wiki. I use it for my website. However, lately I've been letting it die a slow death. Why?

Well, for one, its really quite hard to use, except for the wiki part. The rest of it, I guess, it Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is here, and its cool. As I mentioned earlier, I'm on to flickr, del.icio.us (and myweb), blogger (which is dangerously 1.0), and now perhaps basecamp or backpack.

These things are just so much easier to use! For instance, tiki has trackers. They're basically a to-do list. Of course, it being tiki, it has all kinds of things you can do. All of these extra features get in the way of me actually using it for a to-do list.

Anyway, I've taken it as a strong personal lesson. Design matters. iPods rule (I wouldn't know first-hand). I use gmail now instead of the other 12 e-mail interfaces I've used.

Corey

Negative Information - how can we even know that it exists?

From Good Morning Silicon Valley:
Many of you will swear you've already seen this phenomenon in your own lives, but apparently it can occur only on the quantum level ("quantum" being Latin for "everything you know is wrong ... and/or right ... or not"). The phenomenon is "negative information," and researcher Jonathan Oppenheim does a yeoman's job trying to explain it in terms you can almost wrap your mind around (a familiarity with "Wheel of Fortune" helps): "What could negative information possibly mean? In short, after I send you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world. In the quantum world, we can know too much, and it is in these situations where one finds negative information. Negative information turns out to be precisely the right amount to cancel the fact that we know too much."

How do you manage an empire with no written language?

This is a facinating discovery. Those baffling tangles of knotted strings discovered among Incan artifacts? Bureaucratic paperwork, apparently.

The Incas didn't have a written language, yet they ruled most of South America. One of the greatest mysteries of the Incas has been what "khipu," basially knotted strings and rope were used for.

Argh, almost over.

PICT0001
Originally uploaded by coreyt.

The flooring is back down. Well, the new flooring is down. Now, so I could save a couple of bucks, the baseboard needs to go back on. Wish me luck.

One cool thing about flickr is the ability to add notes on the picture itself. Click on this one to get into the flickr interface and see what I mean.

Argh, continued...

PICT0010
Originally uploaded by coreyt.

So the floor has been pulled up, and the water mopped up. (There was more than we thought.) Next step was to use some (lots of) Tilex Mold and Mildew cleaner to clean the floor really well- we don't want either of those waiting around for next Summer.

Then I setup a (new) dehumidifier to make sure there was really no moisture there... and finally I pulled the floor up a bit and pointed a fan under it to make sure we were doing our best to *not* have water under the floor anywhere.

OurHouse-NoHouse with roads

OurHouse-NoHouse with roads
Originally uploaded by coreyt.

On a lighter note, you can see what our development looked like before there were any houses.

Arrrgh

Well, as implied earlier, we had a problem with water. Turns out it made its way under the floor in the kitchen. And perhaps further. We're pulling up floorboards to find it all. Then it has to dry. Then we'll put down new floorboards. Ugh.

...and I drive a Pathfinder

An interesting new clip today mentions that men who have their masculinity challanged are more likely to want to drive SUVs (no other automobile was preferred like the SUV was), and they were more likely to suport the Iraq war.

"Those who had their masculinity threatened also said they felt more ashamed, guilty, upset and hostile than those whose masculinity was confirmed," quotes Yahoo.