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Interesting way to run a store & survive at that
'The shop's front door was shut tight. The little "Will Return At" sign that was attached to it was of no help — its clocklike hands were conspicuously missing.
It was another business day at the Never Open Store.
At a time when vacant storefronts and "For Lease" signs dot Melrose Avenue, Stephanie Mata's tiny shop is doing just fine, thank you.
The Never Open Store is open only when Mata feels like unlocking it and allowing shoppers inside.
Those who do get in are intrigued by the merchandise that fills every cranny of the 245-square-foot shop.' -
Pathological leaders & their problems
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Very pretty. Gives you a feeling of standing all alone in a vast environment at times.
Author: Aditya
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links for 2009-12-16
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Lady & the Tramp vs Hot Shots 2 (Part Deux)
Remember the classic restaurant scene from Lady and the Tramp set to the track of āBella Notteā?
And hereās the āinspiredā scene from Hot Shots 2:
Things do seem very easy to compare & contrast with youtube, donāt they?
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links for 2009-12-15
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Right from Obi Wan & Yoda to Transformers, the geekiness universe visualized.
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The current leader will always try to control growth, and thus slit its own throat. Call that Gates' Law, because he both discovered it (as it applied to IBM) and fell victim to it (in his struggle to control the web).
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'Using a male pseudonym when you're a woman isn't anything new. Writers have been doing it for centuries. George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen. Even the Brontƫ sisters, championed today, wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell back in their time.
Why did they do it? To have their work accepted, because women weren't supposed to be writers. Their work had a much better chance if their audience didn't have to get over initial skepticism that a woman could write at all, much less do it well.' -
Text of a speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class. Includes his experiences like painting a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of the dorm room.
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Now you know what to do & how to do it. Wonder whether they'll come out with the perfect automated pizza cutter next…
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Leveraging word of mouth & an incentive driven system to maximize impact
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'Rainmeter is a desktop customization platform. Through Rainmeter, you can enhance your Windows computer at home or work with skins: handy, compact applets which float freely on your desktop, much like Windows Sidebar gagdgets, or dashboard widgets for the Mac.'
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A very handy list of freeware tools, including Win 7 shortcuts, virus scanners, Firefox, Thunderbird etc
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A handy way to run Ubuntu Linux within Windows, especially to run Linux only Apps. Should also run off a USB drive.
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Very handy utility to enable the Windows 7 shortcuts like dock window to the left/right, show desktop etc, for Windows XP & Vista
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A bunch of windows recovery tools
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links for 2009-12-13
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'Twoddler is a prototype that has been created as part of a course on mobile and pervasive computing at Hasselt University, and was designed and implemented for the Innovative and Creative Applications (INCA) 2009 awards.'
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Very interesting setups
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Multivac the great…
Let there be light… -
She has certainly been around for a long long time
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Another Foodie Mathematician
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Food loving Mathematicians anyone?
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Thank goodness it's just an art piece & not a real baby carriage armed with guns.
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Using a gun to create art. A variety of animal images by firing guns into aluminium sheets.
via http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/12/the-gunshot-art-of-walt-creel/ -
'Well, here's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further "smoking gun" claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story.
And then I'll probably go ahead and try to investigate the claim and write a blog post about it, because that's my job.'
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links for 2009-12-12
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Brain wiring problem it seems, or just lack of practice?
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The world is probably too cynical…
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The article in which the term AJAX was coined.
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'A Googlewhack is a Google search query consisting of two words that return a single result. A Googlewhack must consist of two actual words found in a dictionary.'
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What do job interviews really tell us?
The prelude to Blink! -
Including the classic 25/5=14
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Interesting presentation format – kinda like tree rings. Resembles the Firefox logo though.
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links for 2009-12-10
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A simple script to access Wave in a tab in Thunderbird.
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Handy instructions
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The whole story behind United breaking the guitar. Two songs down & one to go. Companies better beware of the power of the web & social media.
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Minority Report & MAtrix, here we come…
'THE retail giant Westfield is considering introducing controversial face recognition technology at its Penrith shopping centre in Sydney's west.'
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links for 2009-12-09
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Strange case of Northern lights it seems. Interesting phenomenon nonetheless. A few photographs & videos accompany the post.
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Interesting list covering a gamut of villains like Skeletor, Shredder & Bluto. Mostly old cartoons though.
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Something doesn't seem right here, especially if this was supposed to have been a co-branding exercise:
"So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state." -
Not exactly a work of perfection. A really long list. Not to mention the ability of people to distinguish between a sheep & goat's bleat – 'Audio/visual unsynchronized: When the goat is offered to the T-Rex, you hear the bleating sound of a sheep as opposed to a goat's bleating sound.'
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links for 2009-12-08
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Who said subway stations have to be boring. Some of the most architecturally interesting subway stations in the world.
via http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/08/the-most-beautiful-subway-stations-in-the-world/ -
So twitter does help in selling after all.
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It's not so bad. I'm actually trying to get my grandfather on facebook š
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So much for fingerprints being one of the ultimate proofs of one's identity. Also, MIB & Mission Impossible seem much closer to reality now.
'A Chinese woman managed to enter Japan illegally by having plastic surgery to alter her fingerprints, thus fooling immigration controls, police claim.' -
Interesting list – includes Wave, Bing, Twitter among others
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Reliance Mobile has it backwards
I have a Reliance CDMA post paid connection for which the bill gets generated around the 8th of each month. I have a Rs 500 credit limit & they used to send me an SMS when I used to get close to that limit. However, the incident of over the last day takes the cake:
- I get an SMS at 4:30 am saying that my outgoing call facility has been barred, without any warning whatsoever. This in spite of my paying the bills on time (in fact, I make payments in the excess to cushion against the credit limit).
- I log on to their site after waking up and make a payment of Rs 1000 against the bill amount of Rs 838 (incidentally Rs 837.53 that they conveniently round off as Rs 838 on their pdf bills) at 8:30 am.
- I am duly informed of my payment by SMS at 8:40 am (Thank goodness!).
- Another SMS at 8:50 am informs me that my outgoing call facility has been activated (Yippee!).
- However, at 9:50 am I get an SMS saying āyour account usage is high. Pls pay Rs 873.53 to enjoy outgoing service.ā (the amount adds up actually as itās Rs 837.53 for the last bill plus Rs 36 unbilled usage that I had last checked on their site). I decide to ignore the SMS as I have already made a payment well over that amount.
- I finally get my bill for last month by email at 6:40 pm with an amount of Rs 838 due (Rs 837.53 thoughtfully round up in case I decide to pay by chequeā¦ but wait, havenāt I already made the payment?).
- But the best part is when my phone rings at 9:30 pm & I hear an automated voice telling me that my usage is high and I need to pay Rs 873.53 to continue the outgoing service.
Somehow, someone, somewhere seems to have written down the design specs backwards or maybe itās just me. I guess they have changed their support software/interface, or is that an āupgradeā.
P.S. The times have been rounded off to the nearest 10 minutes (not as conventional as the bill amounts unfortunately).
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links for 2009-12-07
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Now that's a real high tech concert. A bunch of interesting videos.
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Or is it? Either way, the philosophy is pretty simple:
'No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as http://www.domain.com.' -
'What if every store had a bar-code sticker on its window so that you could pull out your iPhone, wave it in front of the bar code and get all sorts of information about that businessāthe telephone number, photos, customer reviews? Starting on Monday, you'll be able to do that at up to 190,000 local businesses throughout the U.S.
Google has mailed out window stickers with two-dimensional bar codes (aka, QR codes) to the most-searched for or clicked-on businesses in its local business directory.' -
A very innovative & visual way to represent one's history.
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'Some design professionals expect their portfolio to serve as a "visual resume." But portfolio images are typically just work samples, unless dated and laid out chronologically. What I want to know, is if depicting your work history graphically is effective at getting the attention of the right people, or if they are just novelties meant to amuse graphic-inclined folks like me who find them interesting to study. I assume the traditional resume would also be required, but I'm not sure if that's correct, if you can fit the dates and companies to depict your work history inside the visual presentation.'
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Incidentally developed by an IBMer whose blog & other works I've gone through during my stint with IBM. It's based on Java appets though.
'Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.' -
Needs registration
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Too bad it's not connected to LinkedIn to pull out the recommendations
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Of course those who're not fluent in Klingon will not be able to understand what they tweeted… That's where the "to english" translator comes in handy.
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