line of site

Inn-Castle accommodation castles Portugal Spain

steve — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:04:51 +0800

Inn-Castle accommodation castles Portugal Spain

yes, staying in a Castle in Spain or Portugal - that's one I gotta put on "the list."

terms to start using

steve — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:11:44 +0800

genius...i'm so glad this site has supplanted the lolcats phenom.

30 thoughts about flying at 30,000 feet, at 30,000 feet

steve — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:48:27 +0800

I thought it would be fun to do one of these lists on the plane, about flying on the plane and travel in general. It was a fun exercise, and I'm proud of myself, because I actually typed it all into the notes app on my iPhone on the last hour of my flight. I could have done 30 more, so I'll save that for another flight.

1. Use the lav often. You never know when there will be turbulence or you will circle Janesville, Wisconsin for two hours. This is especially pertinent to flying with kids.
2. Flight attendants use coffee for everything. When someone pukes
they throw coffee grounds on it. When someone lays a duece, they put a coffee bag in the lav. Let's hope they don't brew it later.
3. Always be really nice to the gate agent. They can do almost
anything for you if you are nice enough.
4. When flying to Asia, fly a 747 over a 777. Your chances for
upgrade are considerably higher due to more premium seats.
5. Netflix + mac the ripper + handbrake + iPhone/iTouch is the perfect
combo for the frequent traveller. Never take a DVD on a trip again.
6. About 50% of the people in business class drink alcohol on morning
flights.
7. If flying from Europe to London fly to London City Airport instead
of Heathrow. Its cheaper, easier, and closer to Central London.
8. You have to fly a lot to make 1K and its almost impossible without
a few international jaunts. It's not worth it.
9. Most United business class seats have something wrong with them.
Mention it to the flight attendant and they will give you a form to
get a 1000 miles or more.
10. Get a mileage credit card and use it religiously.
11. Use your miles for upgrades, not free trips. The cost difference
between classes is WAY more than the cost of a coach ticket.
12. Apply for an upgrade at the same time you purchase your ticket.
The early bird catches the worm. He who hesitates is lost.
13. Use miles for upgrades on smaller planes, use 500 mile certs on
777s. Your chances for upgrade will be better.
14. When flying internationally you need a higher fare class to
upgrade. It is usually worth it.
15. Fly in the middle of the day whenver possible. It is cheaper and
usually less crowded.
16. Save work you have been procrastinating on for your flight. It is
easier to fly with blinders on and get shit done.
17. Get a 3M privacy screen for your laptop. Don't fly without one.
Your competitor is sitting next to you or behind you.
18. Don't talk shop on the plane. Your competitor is sitting next to
you or behind you. It is a really small business world.
19. When an immigration officer asks you why you are visiting, never
ever ever say you are doing something that will take money from their
economy and give it to an American company. That is the fastest way to
end up with a rubber glove up your ass. You are not there for sales,
you are there to attend training, paying to go to a conference, or
doing something else that is putting big American dollars into their
economy. "Period. Full stop." as they used to say in Canada.
20. The Chocolate everywhere else in the world is better than American
chocolate. A Canadian KitKat is better than an American KitKat. The
exception is never buy Carlos I chocolate in Mexico. It's all sugar.
21. Avoid flying out of LaGuardia at all costs. Fly into LaGuardia,
out of Newark. Won't you ever learn? LGA is on a windy island on the
coast. The runway is too short. Once you get past security there are
no seats and the food sucks. The RCC is small and outside security. Most of all, in my experience, there is a 90%+ chance your flight will be delayed.
22. If you are flying from a city that has hourly flights to your
destination and your plane has equipment problems, go get on the next
flight. Nine times out of ten the next flight will leave before yours.
23. The best combatant for jetlag is sleep. Keep a bottle if Tylenol
PM in your bag and put yourself to sleep. Force yourself to sleep on
the plane. Learn how.
24. This goes without saying but always be super nice to your flight
attendants. It is not their fault the airline screwed you. They are
underpaid and cranky so brighten their day and they will brighten yours.
25. Remember when you used to have to pay for headphones or to use
your own headphones to watch the movie? Yeah, right.
26. British Airways has a middle class that is significantly better
than United's economy plus for about the same price. If you have to
fly coach to London buy these seats.
27. On the return from Heathrow you will get something with your
biscuits called "clotted cream" but should be called "clotted
arteries." It's like butter but clottier.
28. The jetstream is your friend. Flying East is good. Remember your
vector physics.
29. When offered breakfast in business class you will be offered the
choice of "eggs or fruit?" What they should say is "eggs and fruit or
fruit?" You get the same fruit either way.
30. Always always use seatguru.com when booking your seats. It is
hands down the best site for the frequent traveller.

It's warmer in Chicago than Mountain View

steve — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:41:25 +0800

I always check the weather when I go to Mountain View so I know what to pack - usually it's short sleeved shirts. Jeez - this just isn't right. This is January for chrissakes.

Next summer I'm planting an orange tree in my backyard so I can get a jump on this Global Warming trend.

Samsung's new plasmas have an RSS reader

steve — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:43:45 +0800

I remember getting laughed at a year ago or so when I said something to the tune of "someday your refrigerator will have an RSS reader built into it". Well, this is one step closer:
Samsung High End Plasma: Series 7 Getting Ethernet and Amber Tinged Frames

testing DSL reports

steve — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 04:27:08 +0800

cheap HDMI cables

steve — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:12:17 +0800

A tip for those of you looking for more HDMI cables - don't pay $60 for a cable at Target or BestBuy - get one from buyextras.com for under $10.

I just got a shipment in and they all seem to work great with both my XBox 360 and HD-DVD player.

Feed publishers and signal to noise ratio

steve — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:43:00 +0800

I think one of the things that is most challenging for feed publishers is getting the signal to noise ratio right for their subscribers.

This is tough, because, it's your feed, you want to publish whatever the hell you want to make available about yourself, but some of what you consider signal about yourself, some subscribers will consider noise.

This seems to happen mostly when an social feeds (of any sort) are spliced together with non-social (public broadcast) feeds, mainly because there is never a perfect intersection of the two groups that are subscribed to the feed.

I've seen it a lot with FeedBurner publishers who use our splicing service to put in flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and then end up yanking them out. It turns out that some people who read a publisher's blog don't really care that much about their family pictures unless they know them well personally or that's what they normally write about anyway. Some subscribers don't want to get all excited their favorite blogger has a new post, just to find out it's a new set of del.icio.us links.

The same goes for putting ads in feeds. Too many ads raises the noise to signal ratio, and people get annoyed. Feed items as ads (that is, when a new post is added as an ad with a [ad] tag or such and no additional content) adds even more noise, which is a good reason you don't see that many implementations of items containing only ads. It's why we generally don't recommend publishers embedding an ad more frequently than 1 every 3 or 4 posts unless they write page-length posts every time.

The more original and valuable your content is (the stronger the signal) the more you can get away with splicing in other sources (the more noise you can put in your feed) while still growing subscribers. This seems pretty obvious, but it's hard to get right.

Those are all mixes of published content with other media spliced in, or when a message that is more synchronous is mixed with with something mean to be asynchronous, but I also think this happens with like media and synchronousity as well.

For instance, I am generally not a fan of people being able to set their Facebook status from Twitter. I wish I could only see status messages set from Facebook itself. Why? Perhaps it's stupid but for me, Twitter generally adds a lot of noise when introduced outside the Twitter network. People don't have the same intent when sending a tweet as when updating their Facebook status - even though these functions seem exactly the same - they are two separate networks of people with different functionality and feel. Something about Twitter inside of Facebook isn't right. I'd like to keep these networks separate, but that's just me.

I've thought about this a lot, but my impetus for writing it is Russ adding his twitter messages to his feed and subsequently removing it. He asks why it annoys some people. For whatever reason, the noise to signal ratio got too high for some users, and they wrote in asking him to unsplice the Twitter messages. I can see this - Russ is a great (and entertaining) writer - and although he always puts a lot of personal information in his posts, it's the entertaining commentary and insights that make it interesting. If you are someone like me that only reads feeds on a mobile device, it doesn't take a lot of noise for me not to want to retrieve the next ten posts just to get past Twitter messages. Now, I may choose to follow him on Twitter, but I would consume those messages differently than his blog feed. That is perhaps on a different device, perhaps at a different time.

So what do I like as a subscriber? Because we're currently lacking an easy way to for a subscriber to easily filter some items from feeds and not others in their feed reader, I currently prefer it when people provide separate feeds for their separate networks so that I can pick and choose them. This isn't universal, and there are certainly exceptions, but I find it to generally be the case.

I think this will change over time, especially if things like cookies are ever introduced into feeds or even better - more regularity (or a defacto standard like a namespace extension) is put into item sources so that feed readers could better sort and filter feed items.

Happy New Year!

Great Soccer Sunday

steve — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:43:27 +0800

if you are FSC and GolTV enabled, don't miss this Sunday:

Inter vs AC Milan in the morning on FSC and Real vs Barça in the afternoon on GolTV. Yum.

Picasa on the iPhone

steve — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:30:06 +0800

Wow this is really cool. It should ease my migration away from Flickr (which I haven't used in ages).

Official Google Mobile Blog: Picasa Redefined for your iPhone

the Art of United.com

steve — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:44:00 +0800

Most Chicagoans who travel have a love-hate relationship with United Airlines. If you want to go anywhere, you pretty much have to pick United or American, and American is a little too "Red State" for my tastes. Last time I few American, I sat between someone reading "Ammunition Magazine" on one side and retired war hawk who spoke like the boot camp sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket" on the other. Never again. At least until they have wi-fi on the flight.

At any rate, one thing I like about United is the illustrations on their website (a website on which I spend a considerable amount of time, unfortunately). The friggin' creep me out, and they're great!

Here's a few examples:

It isn't quite as creepy out of the context of the website, but they remind me a bit of the art in the movie The Wall and others of bastardized Renaissance paintings.

It turns out a lot of it is created by some of the New Yorker illustrators such as Charles E. Martin although some of the articles that talked about this were a bit dated, so I'm not sure that's still accurate.

The Docklands, London

steve — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:42:07 +0800

Really, I just wanted to test out some Picasa's embed features, so here are some nice pictures of the Docklands, in London. It's way the hell out there but made for a nice morning run.

Gibson Robot Guitar

steve — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 02:39:15 +0800

Gibson Robot Guitar

$2499, but pretty cool. Tuning a guitar isn't that hard, but changing between "standard" and "alternate" tunings is kind of a pain. Gibson has used some cool technology to solve this problem. I must say, the cool blue and marketing around this guitar on some tabs sites sure caught my eye, so I had to go check it out.

This has me torn. The "purist" in me doesn't like this too much, but the gadget-head in me says "cool."

Make your own McDonald's hamburgers, but why?

steve — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:57:34 +0800

Supposedly the recipies from Mac D's

Don't they cost like a dollar, and wouldn't the ingredients cost more? And do they really put MSG on their burgers?!

AppleInsider | Ultra-portable Apple notebook to splash down at Macworld Expo

steve — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:14:34 +0800

AppleInsider | Ultra-portable Apple notebook to splash down at Macworld Expo

This is one rumor I really hope is true. My MacBook is way too big and heavy, and my MacBookPro is friggin' gargantuan. Actually, I don't care so much about screen size, a big screen is great - higher res the better, but the weight and thickness (or lack thereof) are really really important.

Please Apple, deliver this soon. I'll have my pre-order ready.

for the real ping pong pros...

steve — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:03:59 +0800

Ping Pong, what some might call table tennis, has become all the rage at work. But between, my lackluster playing there, combined with a complete ass kicking at a resort in Mexico last week in a recreational tournament, I wonder how could I become better.

I mean, there's always the Barry Bonds/Jose Canseco pills and shots, but aside from that, what does one do to get a leg up?

Get a better racket?

Nah, that's no fun - everyone should have the same equiment.

How about practice? Maybe... TotalTableTennis seems to have some good practice machines for ya:

This is a serious sport!

Death-toll rises from Uganda's Ebola outbreak | Top News | Reuters.com

steve — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 04:33:11 +0800

Death-toll rises from Uganda's Ebola outbreak | Top News | Reuters.com

Ebola is now on it's fifth strain. So, this amazingly scary virus is just going to keep mutating until it figures out how to really spread itself. Great.

Official Google Blog: Tracking Santa, then and now

steve — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 03:09:12 +0800

Official Google Blog: Tracking Santa, then and now

Wow, awesome, I never knew this is how NORAD Santa Tracking started.

Add the Gadget

I swear, working at Google, you run into people with interesting ties like this every day.

It Figures

steve — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 03:04:30 +0800

Today I went took my son to skating lessons - and right in front of the door, someone had left an unattended GMC Jimmy running, pumping gas out of the exhuast. I came back about 15 minutes later, and it's still there chugging away at the gas, no one in the car.

They had a Bush /Cheney '04 bumper sticker. Mystery solved.

I thought you said this thing was fast!?

steve — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:02:20 +0800

Wow. We just did The Kessel Run, that is, SFO-ORD, in 3 hours 6 minutes.

I fly back from SFO a lot, and that's a record.

Uncovered: Evidence that Mac OS X could run Windows apps soon [ars technica]

steve — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 08:52:17 +0800

Uncovered: Evidence that Mac OS X could run Windows apps soon

I like Ars Technica, but even if this is true, I'm not sure it really matters. Most people I know try Parallels or VMware just to ween them off of Windows, then after a while, they stop using Parallels at all except for when they have to. ( I still use parallels to occasionally run Yahoo! Music) but I think I'll convert 100% to Rhapsody when my subscription runs out.

IE7 over Parallels might be the fastest browser on the Mac (try it, if you don't believe me) but try running IE7 over Wine over X, and you will see just how sucky of an experience this is:

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/11/30/run-ie-on-your-intel-mac-if-you-absolutely-have-to/

( I tried it and regretted it - don't waste your time).

The one thing I would love compatibility for is full-screen games. I just bought another copy of Civ IV yesterday for the Mac after giving up trying to run the Windows copy over Parallels.

Watching Football in Mexico

steve — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:11:16 +0800

A couple of interesting things about watching American Football in Mexico:

1) They love the Miami Dolphins in the Yucatan. Dan Marino is their immortal hero.

2) ESPN broadcasts football like they broadcast soccer - nothing on the screen but football and the score. No graphics crashing in on every play, no overlays with lines of scrimmage and first down markers, no tickers, no nothing. Naked football, just like we when we watched Doug Flutie beat Bernie Kosar on Thanksgiving so many years ago.

Cutbacks: VeriSign ends quest to obscure corporate mission

steve — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:49:53 +0800

Cutbacks: VeriSign ends quest to obscure corporate mission

Jeez, what? you can't build a business on mobile banking? Verisign has made pretty much every mistake that one of my previous ~~employers~~ acquirers 724 Solutions did.

Mistake 1. Assuming you could build a business off mobile banking. never let banks be your clients. ever. ever. Trust me. don't even think about it.

Mistake 2. Thinking you can build a business off a mobile architecture. Architectures and middleware are commodities and/or open source candidates.

Verisign thought they could do that even though all others failed.

Don't get me wrong - mobile is super important and there is still a ton of upside, but only in the context of applications that have a wider throw. If you can do it with with a small cost structure and provide a killer service than it works ( e.g. i like russ' mowser for these reasons, though he probably needs to expand beyond a one-man-band).

But man, I see verisign and think...suckers!

Radiohead: comScore totally inaccurate - - mathewingram.com/work

steve — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 01:10:53 +0800

Radiohead: comScore totally inaccurate - - mathewingram.com/work

I totally side with and believe Radiohead on this one. In every experience I have ever had with Comscore - their measurements are never anywhere close to actual measurements I've been able to do. I generally disregard all data reports from Comscore.

ESPN - Eight games into career, Peterson owns single-game rushing record - NFL Football Recap

steve — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:05:35 +0800

ESPN - Eight games into career, Peterson owns single-game rushing record - NFL Football Recap

Boy, what is it about the Bears that sucks the life out of every player? Adrian Peterson looked today like he did on any run of the mill Oklahoma game when he played for them. On the bears, he would go 3-5 yards and fall down.

Remember David Terrell? The guy barely dropped a pass at Michigan, and barely caught one with the Bears. The list goes on and on...

Vodafone 3GSM - powered by FeedBurner [My Web 2.0]

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:50:24 +0800

Industry News - Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions [My Web 2.0]

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:48:00 +0800

PS3 vs Xbox 360 - a developer speaks from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog [My Web 2.0]

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:28:14 +0800

http://feeds.feedburner.com/amazonassociates [My Web 2.0]

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 01:47:09 +0800

The Envelope, Please [My Web 2.0]

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 04:13:18 +0800

Guildhall Information - SMU videogame developer program [My Web 2.0]

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:44:14 +0800

Freakonomics Blog - powered by FeedBurner [My Web 2.0]

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 12:13:12 +0800

Feedburner Is Becoming An Advertising Giant [My Web 2.0]

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 04:44:09 +0800

Vitamin Interviews » Steve Olechowski [My Web 2.0]

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:11:50 +0800

Xbox 360: The wheel keeps on turning [My Web 2.0]

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:19:02 +0800