'listen to what joe is listening to/last listened to'
ah - this does exist, I didn't know if it did; on last.fm you can listen to any other user's library radio. Too bad most of my friends don't use last.fm.
Actually, it doesn't work that well - it seems to try to load the entire library before it starts playing any one song.
...Second things first: Google Plus is too all-encompassing and controlling. I can't get a feed to publish elsewhere, or hack at, or stream, or store as text. Anything I write there lives ONLY in Google Plus, it seems, and can be taken out only manually.
And I'm not sure I want to write primarily for my friends. If I wanted to tell my friends something, I'd send them an email. If I have an idea to share, it seems cleaner in some way to publish it anonymously - or at least without notifying my friends - so that it stands on its own merits, and the reaction to it is not muddled up with relationships and niceness. Besides, if the writing is both honest and personal, it may relate to people my friends know or would recognize, and that is the last thing I would want. Unavoidable, perhaps, but not desireable.
Postscript: Google Plus may open itself up when the API is launched: http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/06/google-plus-puts-out-a-call-for-developers.php
...I've been wanting to start this site for years, finally doing it. Its not themed yet, but a bit of content is there: bTeaching.com - everyday ideas for learning and teaching. The idea is to capture teaching ideas, large and small, and relate them to subjects, age groups, philosophies, etc. Its not as formal as lessonplanet, the ideas can be informal descriptions of games you can play in the car as well as more detailed teacher-style plans. Its intended as a resource for parents, teachers and older kids, but not as a fully fledged curriculum source.
Check it out, and feel free to add ideas!
...I despise typeahead options. In conversation with a friend, it would drive most people crazy if their friend kept finishing their sentences for them, or worse providing them with options! Yet we program computers to do this to us. Nothing disrupts my train of thought worse than suddenly being reminded of the last seven things I was doing when I typed the same letters. Today I had a question for a friend. As soon as I type the word 'question', gmail suggests all sorts of questions I could ask her that I've asked other people in the past - none of which has anything to do with the email I wish to write! And yes, I do turn off typeahead in all my desktop applications but cannot in otherwise highly useful web apps such as gmail. Ah well - at least we can still rant.
...Check out http://tucson.devcoop.org, where me and a few friends are kicking off a new group of indie developers who get together to check out each other's stuff. I like having collaborators but can't stand meetings, so this is an 'unmeeting' - bring your laptop and plan to get a bit of stuff done while there. We'll have a short presentation too: Dave Parizek will talk about Google App Engine. I don't know anything about it myself but it sounds cool.
Oh - and the (un)meeting? Wed Jan 27 at Himmel Library @ 6:30 PM.
..."I've learned that big projects have three stages: fantasy, dream and plan. The fantasy stage is all in your head, obviously, but eventually you decide you're ready to get a little bit more real. The dream stage is where you actually start thinking about the project in practical terms. After the dream you start planning and doing, and that's when reality strikes. You never succeed in fulfilling a fantasy, almost by definition, because its's just a fantasy. But the fantasy is what catches the imagination and provides motivation." -- Ugo Conti, in an interview by Todd Lappin for MAKE Magazine.
...Much has been written about the impending demise of journalism. No doubt, papers and magazines are in trouble, and with them the usual revenue stream of the professional journalist.
Ellen Goodman wrote a recent column in which she made a great call that crowdsourcing leads to the basing of facts on opinions, instead of opinions on facts. There is truth to this. The famed 'many eyes' approach of open source software works best when all the eyes are dispassionately looking for truth, and not spin.
I believe though that journalism has a fascinating future. The key is trust, and for readers to be able to make informed judgements. Goodman pointed out that there seems to be no consequence for bloggers who make things up. Some consequence exists, in that other bloggers may write about their lack of veracity, and individual readers reduce their trust level, but it doesn't reduce the number of links to the lying blogger's page and thus does not reduce their PageRank, which is essentially Google's level of trust that they have something useful or interesting to say.
The web may need an explicit TrustWeb, where users and webmasters/bloggers can state their level of trust in
...One of the holy grails of programming is the ultimate personal organizer, that place where you can put all your stuff and find it exactly when you want it. In some incarnations it knows what you want before you do; in others its a passive but perfect file cabinet.
Many efforts underway to create the beast are focused on it as a web 2.0 or 3.0 application.
However. To be a really great organizer, the beast has to be FAST. Really fast. Like, no typeahead loading delays, no popup windows, no round trip time, no being down when my Net access is down. The speed should be like the best of the old DOS apps while the feel should be like the slickest and least intrusive modern software. It also has to have large amounts of my personal information stored privately and instantly.
Can this be done in right in a web browser? Ideally it should also have access to my email, and my hard drive. It might be web-enabled, but maybe it HAS a web browser rather than BEING a web browser. I want something like Klipper on massive steroids. Remember everything I highlight, plus all my
...The real telecommute jobs are often found squirrelled away in forums specific to certain frameworks or languages. Here's a few that are useful to check:
StackOverflow telecommute jobs are high quality and posted often Dice telecommute jobs if you like big companies that can afford Dice http://startuply.com if you prefer startups (click on 'advanced search' to filter for telecommute only) http://jobs.perl.orgAdaFruit Job BoardPython job board tends to be in Europe jobs.rubynow.com 37 signals job boardcrunchboardhttp://telecommutejoblist.com (extracted from craigslist) DevShedCodeIgniter Job Board (PHP) Drupal JobsWordPress jobs
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