Here’s an interesting development. If you have a Gmail account and receive (or send yourself) a Word or RTF document as an attachment, Gmail will now offer you the option of opening it as a “Google document” — which immediately makes it shareable (enabling other people to work on it collaboratively). And it’s seamless. Very neat — and immediately useful for people like me.
Monthly Archives: January 2007
Having trouble choosing your version of Vista?
Well, just check here for enlightenment!
Thanks to Martin Weller for starting my day with a laugh.
Dear Mr. President
An open letter from Michael Moore…
Dear Mr. President,
Thanks for your address to the nation. It’s good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.
Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain’t gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We’ve already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean… bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this — BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!
You’ve got to show some courage, dude! You’ve got to win this one! C’mon, you got Saddam! You hung ‘im high! I loved watching the video of that — just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!
Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you’re in. As Ricky Bobby said, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.
Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you’re out of combat-ready soldiers — so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million — Iraq — is to send in at least 28 million! Here’s how it would work:
The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.
Now, I know you’re saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:
1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where their vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don’t believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them — while they hide here in America.
2. Start a “Kill an Iraqi” Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I’m sure you’ll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.
3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war — and many of them are already trained from having been “embedded!” If that doesn’t bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel…
How we’re feeling
Here’s a clever Web 2.0 application — a site that reads blogs looking for certain kinds of phrases denoting emotions…
At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.
Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.
If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.
If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post’s author. Given the author’s username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user’s profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog’s owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it.
Bill Gates on the Daily Show
I’ve just watched a nauseatingly gooey interview with Bill Gates done by some clueless BBC newscaster on the Ten O’Clock News , so this came as a much-needed antidote — Gates being interviewed by Jon Stewart.
Stewart: “What does the F12 button do? Does it do anything?”
Gates: “I’d stay away from it if I were you…”
Stewart: “Is it a joke button?”
Gates: “…start with F1 and work up…”.
Lovely video clip. Made my day.
Gilding the lily (contd.)
What a wonderful thing it is to have erudite readers. A few entries back I wondered aloud about the expression “gilding the lily”. Now William James has written to say that it’s a misquotation of Shakespeare, from King John, Act IV, scene 2:
To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
Wikipedia, you are the strongest link
That’s the headline some clever Observer sub-editor put on this morning’s column…
There are two kinds of people in the world – those who think Wikipedia is amazing, wonderful, or inspiring; and those who simply cannot understand how a reference work compiled by thousands of ‘amateurs’ (and capable of being edited by any Tom, Dick or Harry) should be taken seriously. Brisk, vigorous and enjoyable arguments rage between these two camps, and provide useful diversion on long winter evenings.
What’s more interesting is the way Wikipedia entries have risen in Google’s page-ranking system so that the results of many searches now include a Wikipedia page in the first few hits…
The box that changed the world
Nice piece by Oliver Burkeman, musing on the container ship that lies beached off the Devon coast…
The fate of the MSC Napoli, still beached off the coast of Devon, serves as another reminder of a fact that dock workers and crew members accept with stoicism, even a bit of pride: ordinary people usually never think about shipping containers except when things go wrong. The Napoli has provoked an environmental crisis (200 tonnes of oil have leaked into surrounding waters), and some unsettling realisations about the eagerness of Britons to help themselves to other people’s belongings. But in disgorging such a variety of cargo – shampoo and steering wheels, wine and shoes, carpets and motorbikes and bibles and nappies – it also offers an inadvertent glimpse into a world we all rely on, yet barely consider. It is no exaggeration to say that the shipping container may have transformed the world, and our daily lives, as fundamentally as any of the other more glamorous or complex inventions of the last 100 years, the internet included…
Lawrence of Jesus (Oxon.)
Just been listening to an absorbing Radio 4 programme by John Simpson about T.E. Lawrence, and was catapulted back to a sunny Saturday afternoon in September 1967, when I made my first visit to Oxford. I wandered into Jesus College (then open to the public) and vividly recall standing contemplating this plaque. (It’s strange how memory plays tricks on one: I’m convinced that I’d seen it in the college chapel, but various online sources concur that it’s in the entrance to the college by the Porters’ Lodge. Must have a look when I’m next in Oxford.)
Translation:
Three years were spent here by Thomas Edward Lawrence who fearlessly championed the cause of Arabia when it was prostrate. This bronze is erected by the young men of Jesus College to preserve his name.
“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars”.
The quotation is from Proverbs 9.1, and is obviously where he got the title of his account of the Arab Revolt during the 1914-18 War and of the part that he played in it.
The Bummer Of Davos…
John Battelle’s at Davos, but has mixed feelings…
Is that nearly every session I attended where I got that unmistakable “Shit I have to post on this” feeling was, unfortunately, off the record. Last night Larry and Sergey sat down with Charlie Rose for an intimate chat at a private event. Off the record. Before that I spoke to a room full of Media Governors – the folks who run just about every major media company in the world. Off the record. Before that, a gathering of influential editors and journalists from all over the globe. Again, off the record….
Just another instance of the nauseating smugness that afflicts journalists who are allowed in to the Swiss gabfest.
Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link. The headline, btw, is Battelle’s. I think he means “The trouble with Davos…”.
Later: Just remembered that I’ve been to Davos once — not to the gabfest but in the summer (June 1978, when I was walking in the Alps). I thought it a pretty nondescript place (see webcam image) compared with some of the other towns and villages in the locality. I bought a pen-knife (Swiss Army, naturally) and a walking stick in a nice little shop. I still have both.
Still later… How come, then, that the ‘off the record’ session with Larry and Sergey was fully reported in today’s Guardian?