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November 26, 2005
Best Freeware Utilities
TechSupportAlert offers a list of "The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities", and Metafilter comments add a few more. Great resources to check out over the next few days.
Posted by John at 11:09 AM | Comments (1)
November 11, 2005
A *fun* typing test
Somehow, despite the millions of words I've typed over the past 30+ years, I've never really mastered touch typing. I still watch my fingers as I type. Yet I can type over 50 words per mintue, so it's never really been much of a problem.
This little game/test will expose such weakness in a heartbeat. You can't watch both keyboard and screen once the letters get moving. As a bonus, you are blowing up the letters, which feeds the videogame destruction monster that lives inside all males, and there are bombs flying in which add to the fun.
The high scores are all over 1000 and I'm struggling to break 100.
Posted by John at 10:52 AM | Comments (2)
November 09, 2005
MS Visual Studio Express - free!
Microsoft is offering Visual Studio Express for free. The license is free forever, but the free download will only be available for one year (until 11/6/06).
Posted by John at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2005
Fortune Cookies
We had Chinese food today, from the best Chinese place in Marin County, and it was delicious, but now it's several hours later so, predictably, I'm hungry. I went looking for a snack and there on the counter was a bag with three fortune cookies left over. I had already had one with dinner, which told me:
You are a man with many talents.Yes, another fortune cookie would be good - not too many calories in that, after all, it's just a sweet cracker. But I paused before I broke it open and thought, "I wonder if it's bad luck to read two fortunes in one day? What if they conflict with each other?!" Hahaha. I shrugged it off, broke open the cookie and read:
Your luck has been completely changed today.No, wait! Most of luck has been good. What does that mean? Am I a man of many talents or a talentless hack?
I know, I thought, "I'll open another cookie, and that will settle the question." That's exactly what I thought. "That will settle the question." So I opened up another cookie and read:
Ignorance never settles a question.There's another cookie left on the counter, but I'm not touching it. I'll just leave it there, waiting like a bomb to go off on the next unsuspecting person.
Posted by John at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
"When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"Well, then you would have a mechanical Turk. Welcome to the world of artificial artificial intelligence.
Posted by John at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2005
Oodle for Local Classfieds
Oodle, a search engine for local classifieds, said on Tuesday that it has launched in 23 new markets, including such cities as Baltimore, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Orlando and Pittsburgh. The company now operates in 49 metro areas, San Francisco included.
Posted by John at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)
