It's just as bad as they say on the news! Only worse! Your house will freeze! Your pets won't make it! Property value will go down! Taxes will go up! You might even lose your job! |
If you live in Austin, and noticed that you felt like total crap today, I might know the reason why. My wife and I usually keep an eye on the various pollen counts, and we're pretty sure the cedar count is usually around 100. That's more or less "normal" according to News 8 Austin's website, which groups tree pollen counts into these ranges:
A few weeks ago, it was around 1,000 and many people (including myself) complained and dragged around all day. Once you start paying attention, you'll quickly notice a strong correlation between absurdly high pollen counts and lots of co-workers calling in "sick" (can you call in "allergic"?). Today, the cedar count hit 3,617 (again, from News 8 Austin's website). You'll notice that the cedar pollen count today is somewhere on the order of 30-35 times higher than normal. So yeah, if you feel/felt like crap today, you're probably allergic to cedar. Welcome to the club. |
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According to this New York Times article (Phone Shows Apple's Impact on Consumer Products), the new iPhone will not allow 3rd-party developers to write their own software for it. Yes, the iPhone runs OS X, but nobody outside of Apple will be able to write applications, extensions, add-ons, widgets, or anything else that you can normally do with OS X. Is this a huge problem? Probably not, especially if Apple's bundled applications meet users' needs. But I was personally very excited that non-Apple developers would be able to write little applications for the phone. Over the years, many little utilities, features, and extensions that are part of OS X (or previously Systems 7, 8 and 9) started their lives as a small project written by one person, and over time it caught Apple's attention enough to pull it into the OS. That's not gonna happen with the iPhone. And I know it's not a huge problem, maybe more of a minor bummer? “We define everything that is on the phone,” he [Steve Jobs] said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.” |
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This is one of the funniest things I've ever read... The Horror of Blimps |
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Excellent write-up about Vista this week: Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista ... |
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I've recently been interested in how Alexa Traffic Rank works. They keep data over time and maintain a website ranking system for millions of websites. At any point, you can see how a particular website is ranked and see changes through time. For grins, here is the Alexa page for my domain. At some point a few months ago, my site had a ranking of about 3,600,000. So according to Alexa, there were 3.6 million other websites that were more important than mine. Oh well. But in the past few weeks, my ranking has gone crazy. My overall site rank is now somewhere above 220,000 (the current 1-week average says 220,201, but it used to be higher, so the assumption is my actual "right now" ranking is higher than 220,000). Anyway, my Traffic Rank improved more than 10x. What does that mean? Apparently, not much. The most important detail is how Alexa gathers traffic data. They do so when users install the Alexa toolbar inside their browser, and it silently gathers web surfing data over time. So for starters, we're looking at a cross-section of all internet users - namely, only the people who have this toolbar installed (and that means only Internet Explorer users, so the cool Mac and Firefox users don't count). This raises some important questions. How much does the Alexa user community represent all internet users? Does my site really "matter" if Alexa says it does? Contrast this ranking system with Google's Page Rank and an important difference pops up. Page Rank is a function of website relationships (site A points to site B, that's a relationship), and has nothing to do with what a user does (or what their browser choice is). That is, Page Rank works off of the website content itself, whereas Alexa Traffic Rank works off what users click. Presumably, you could have a website with nothing on it (literally a blank page), but if enough Alexa users click on that website name it would receive a high Traffic Rank. So what would that mean? You could have a Page Rank of 0 (really low) with a Traffic Rank of 200 (really high) for a website that has absolutely no value to the world. I'm tempted to devise a plan to drive traffic to blank web page with the sole aim of skewing Alexa ranking data. So while it's exciting to see my Alexa rank jump way high, it doesn't seem to mean much. |
Do you want the Gran Turismo 4 Game Completion Checklist? |
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It's a new year, and for the people of Romania and Bulgaria, today is a very special day - today is the day those countries officially became a part of the European Union. It's interesting to see the EU continue growing and more countries adopt the Euro as their official currency. There is a great deal of promise in the vision of a grand unified Europe, but each member still has many of the same challenges that existed before. By no means does admittance magically solve your problems. Things take time to change. What we now call the "European Union" was originally started as the "European Coal and Steel Community" back in 1952. Over the years, it has increased in size six times, and the sixth increase officially occurred today with the admittance of Romania and Bulgaria. The EU is now 27 members strong and represents about 500,000,000 people. The BBC put together a nice page showing how the European Union has changed over the years. Check out the EU expansion page. Here is another article: Romania and Bulgaria join the EU |
