Michael Dales has a wonderful picture on Flickr that he took at the Canadian War Memorial.
All the Microsoft news that’s fit to print
Microsoft had a busy week at its Professional Developers Conference, and announced lots of new developments — in addition to Azure. ArsTechnica has a useful roundup.
Recession is no time to abandon innovation
I was struck by this quote in an interesting NYTimes piece:
“In the middle of the 1970s, when we were having a big economic downturn, both Apple and Microsoft were founded. Creative people don’t care about the time or the season or the state of the economy; they just go out and do their thing.”
Google pays peanuts for pole position
This morning’s Observer column…
Is there such a thing as a ‘win-win’ situation? Journalistic cynicism says no. What the phrase usually means is that some people get more than they deserve and others get less – but not so little that they scream blue murder. The big puzzle about the ‘ground-breaking settlement’ announced last week between Google and its legal opponents, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, is whether it really is – as all parties claim – a victory for everyone…
The Bookseller magazine picked up on this piece and posted a good summary.
Palin’s energy policy
Lovely cartoon in current issue of the New Yorker. It shows a lot of glum airline passengers thronging a departure lounge. Outside on the tarmac can be seen lots of grounded planes. There’s a notice saying “Please be patient. We are drilling for fuel.”
It’s starting
Spotted in Cambridge today. Naturally I checked to see what he was reading. The book was open at a chapter entitled “Fatness is Happiness”.
What did you do yesterday?
TechCrunch snippet about a kind of retrospective twitter service.
Memiary, a site built by developer Sid Yadav over the course of a weekend, is looking to help you remember what you’ve been doing with your life. The site is a micro-diary, offering a private place to fill in your thoughts and takes only a minute or so to fill out every day. Blogging fills this role well enough for many people, but most of us aren’t comfortable with sharing the most personal details of our day-to-day lives with anyone who stumbles across our webpage. And most of us simply don’t have time to fill out longform diary entries, so the short text snippets work well.
Getting started is simple: enter an email address and password, and you’re presented with five text fields asking what you’ve done today. Fill those in, click the checkbox next to each one, and you’re done. Each of those daily activities is saved in a log, which can be browsed through later. At this point the site is very barebones (understandable because of its short development time), but I’d like to see more ways to input my daily activities, such as through a SMS message…
Editorial endorsements
The Economist has made up its mind. I’d forgotten how it ‘voted’ in 2004 and went to check in the archive. Turns out that the magazine had anticipated the question and provided a page on previous endorsements.
Here’s how they went:
2004: John Kerry
2000: George W. Bush
1996: Bob Dole
1992: Bill Clinton
1988: No endorsement
1984: No endorsement
1980: Ronald Reagan
The only thing that’s slightly weird is the standfirst on this year’s endorsement. “America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world.” Er, does that mean that electing a 72 year-old unstable ignoramus with a VP who couldn’t locate most countries on a map would be a safe bet?
I love the Economist. Its journalism is terrific. But its editorial line is often potty.
Late flowering
Halloween
Seen in a student cafe this afternoon.