Michaewa

Slingbox is a device that “place shifts” your TV connection to the internet - meaning you can watch and control your home PC via any computer connected to the internet.

As if I needed more means to be distracted…

Google recently introduced a new service called Sitemaps, which is a way to offload some of the work that Google’s crawl does onto those who want to be included in the index. It relies on an XML file containing the files in your site, and the good part is that you can update it to include information you want about the location and change frequency of pages in your site.

Everything I operate is currently at a webhost which doesn’t allow me to run scripts on the server, so when I first heard about it a few weeks ago I didn’t pay much attention, thinking it would be more trouble than it was worth to create all the XML files by hand or develop a script to generate them periodically.

I found a free tool today that allows the auto-creation of the files based on the URL.

A benefit of this (aside from potentially speeding your way into the index) is the ability to view reports from Google’s perspective about unreachable URLs, which pages are indexed, etc.

Saturday some old friends came to visit, and we spent the day on Saturday behaving like tourists in our own city. Despite living here for six years and doing my fair share to keep them in business, I had never taken the Boulevard Brewery tour.

Very enjoyable tour and inspiring to know that one guy who really liked to make beer has made it into the top 25 largest breweries in the US. The tour was that much more enjoyable due to the fact that our guide was proudly quaffing a porter while we made the rounds.

I asked about acquiring a keg at the end of the tour, and to my amazement, he suggested that I simply pay the $10 deposit and hang onto it. Don’t tell Mr. Wizard about that.

I love package tracking via UPS…for some reason it heightens anticipation of packages to see exactly where they went and when they went there.

Now…I did some looking for this but didn’t see anything initially. I would love to see a graphical display…e.g. overlay the progress on top of a Google Map or similar.

Please begin immediately and keep me posted on your progress.

Congratulations, Fran Oshmyansky, Denver Real Estate Colorado Relocation Homes guru! Your website is a clear example of what can happen when Front Page falls into the wrong hands. View for yourself, gentle reader!

This is my first attempt at slander optimizing…in an attempt to out Fran Oshmyansky Fran Oshmyansky, I am going to make this post keyword rich and dense so hopefully one day Fran, the Real Estate Relocation Specialist in Denver, Colorado will stumble across this post while googling herself.

I’m guessing Mrs. Oshmyansky is not terribly computer literate, but in the event that she does search for her name in a moment of vanity, perhaps she will come across this post to get a little ‘tough love.’

A few highlights of Fran’s Denver Colorado Real Estate site:

• A classic name - Honest Realty. Just in case you had any doubts after looking at her stunning photo, you could rest easy knowing that Fran was an honest Realtor - if you don’t believe her, just ask her!
• In case you were worried about pesky closing costs, please note that Fran will “pay ALL of your closing costs saving you thousands of dollars in a process.”
• Special notice for those relocating to Denver…in the words of Fran, “You’ll Save Time And Money By Working Me.” Sounds tempting Fran!

This simple, beautiful, and terrifying device is perfect for nervous nellies everywhere.

What’s next? A couch that you can lay inside and drive away (think: car conversion in Batman Begins) in case your house is burgled?

Google recently released Desktop 2, a new and improved version of their desktop search application, which pulls together a lot of thier miscellaneous features.

I just installed yesterday, and while the interface is a bit busy I think it will be nice with a little tweaking. It provides for an entirely new level of distraction, when in sidebar mode you have ever present:

• Your new emails in preview
• News stories
• Random maps
• Weather
• Google Talk interface
• and much more

The idea is not terribly new, AOL has had most of that functionality in their buddy list for a while, but somehow it seems more welcoming when it comes from Google. Especially nice for me are the scratch pad, which is just like ’sticky notes’ in Outlook, but without the bloat of outlook running in the background, and Todo - a simple to do list interface. I imagine in order to get any work done I’ll strip out most everything but the Todo list and the scratch pad, but it is fun to shop through the 3rd party plugins out there. As expected there is one to control iTunes and display album art, and a host of others as well.

Great series of photos outlining how the process ’should’ work. In the past 7 or so years I’ve never seen one follow this process…whose fault is that?

I know I’m late to the game on this one, but I drank the MSFT kool-aid for many years and felt like IE vulnerabilities applied to everyone else and that I needn’t worry. Then I started using Opera for their mail client, which makes Outlook look pretty silly. I put up with the fact that many sites don’t fully support Opera, and some don’t support it at all. I would switch back to IE on those occasions when I just couldn’t slog through with Opera.

As Ryan was talking about going to the darkside I spent some time exploring Firefox in more detail, inspired in large part by Paul Phillips (who is a lot of fun to read, if you have some spare time).

I just pulled down most of the extensions he mentioned in his post and a few others…again, I know I’m probably about 18 months behind on this ‘discovery’ but some of these things seem like giant leaps compared to my browsing experience which had remained largely unchanged for years.

• Integrated media controller in browser toolbar, hooked up to my iTunes. This one is called FoxyTunes
• ForecastFox, which reportedly had a lot of bugs, but works fine for me. This one puts a little 3-day forecast in the lower right corner of the browser toolbar. Mouseover for current conditions, etc.
• Customize Google, which is a cool idea but not terribly useful. It edits Google results on the fly to include additional links, suppress ads on the right side, etc.
• The big winner though is AdBlock. This, in conjunction with a ready-made filter, clips all the ads out of pages rendering them infinitely more presentable, especially on some of the more profiteering sites.

I had a friend in college who was an Engineer. Engineers are not like normal people in many strange and wonderful ways. Said individual found it shocking that each time we used our microwave, we set it for 1:30 to cook ramen, 2:00 for CJ’s VO5 hot oil treatment, etc. and let it run down to the buzzer.

His approach was far more…efficient. He set the timer to 99:99 and simply did the math each time, that way he never had to reset the timer, just pop in his popcorn and hit start. I pointed out that one disadvantage to his approach is that it left the door open to significant risk if you got distracted during the cooking time. He muttered something about the pickle matrix and wandered off down the hall.