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Wordle – I love Wordle
Wordle example of blog
I love seeing data in a Visual Data Diagrams almost as much as I love Augmented Reality. It’s become my second biggest interest in emerging technologies lately.
Thank you IBM Research for allowing Jonathan Feinberg, the ability to reuse code he wrote on your dime to develop this awesome, fun, cool, educational application.
Try it – you too will fall in love – http://www.wordle.net/
<from the site>
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.</from the site>
Will this be the most expensive car ever sold? | What One Million Dollars Buys
Just in through JamesList:
Hans-Gunther Zach is selling his entire collection of Rolls’ and Bentleys and center piece of the collection, the 1934 Rolls Royce Phantom II 40/50 HP Continental also known as the Star of India is listed for £8,000,000
If the sale goes through, it is believed to be the highest price ever paid for a car.
The Star featured revolutionary new technology like adaptive curve lights following the movements of the steering wheel and an “all weather” Torpedo Convertible made by Thrupp & Maberly. The engine is a more powerful Continental 7.7 litre pushrod V8 and the Maharaja originally had 14 headlamps put on the car to combat the dark Indian nights, or just scare the living daylights out of his donkey riding countrymen.
Nokia Augmented or Mixed Reality
This concept allows to you to experience immersion and effortless navigation in an Augmented Reality environment. New types of interactions involving near-to-eye displays, gaze direction tracking, 3D audio, 3D video, gesture and touch.
Through these new types of social linkages people will be connected in innovative ways between the physical and digital worlds.It’s hands-free and weightless compared to a tablet, no small screen problem as you have on a mobile phone – but is it truly useful?
Unlike most other AR apps we’ve seen lately, where the physical world is referenced by the AR – the two seem unrelated here. It takes all kinds, though, and who’s to say how AR will be used?(Also, isn’t this music a little creepy? It sounds bittersweet about the inevitable and yet slightly frightening future.)None the less, we’d love to get our hands on a prototype of this technology to test it – just as soon as it becomes real.
Offbeat Traveler: Ithaa Undersea restaurant at Conrad Maldives Rangali Island
a new way to write
lately i’ve been educated by the younger people i work with on my day job, on the way that language is changing “in the wild” (my tags for real life)
LolCats (http://icanhascheezburger.com/) was one of the first to start using it, but not the only one and twitter hit it out of the ballpark with the micro text portion
not only are these sites and adoptees changing the spelling of words, they are also changing the quantity and style of the written word
i do it
for my personal taste i forgo the limits enforced by punctuation and proper grammar
do i know them
yes, i do - i just chose to not worry about them while i am expressing my thoughts on my personal blog
so knowing that change is evident and closing in fast, i started searching and found a wonderful discovery – the guide below
http://www.140characters.com – while going through the site, i discovered the history page
<excerpt>
The original post “How Twitter Was Born” follows.
Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.
“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.
I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.
Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.
The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:
Read more and preorder the book - “140 Characters – A Style Guide for the Short Form”
Cheezburger on Agile Software Development
i know you’ve heard of or visited LoLCats or Failblog, here is Ben the founder talking about one of my favorite subjects
how his company makes 7 figures in ad sales last year is due to this method of development
tools i use and why do i use all lowercase letters?
why all the lowercase?
first off – how i write my blogs – it’s with tribute to e e cummings’ orthography
i write in this manner because it pleases me and it appeals to the design person hiding inside of me
tools i use for my lifestreaming and self learning
publishing/blogging/mobile
wordpress – for my blogs, easy and i love the owner and followers passion
addictionary – great website for new words entering our society, worth a visit a day
rim blackberry curve 8330 – i love it except for occasional memory issues with all my apps, use it for a quick camera as well
the flip - world’s easiest camcorder
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domains and software
godaddy – cheap domains – find a discount before you checkout by searching on google
vlingo – talk to your phone and don’t worry about typing ever again
viigo – easiest way in the world to read hundreds of blogs and resources daily with your bb
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marketing/resources
twitter - for sharing resources i find and feel might interest others looking to learn
friendfeed to learn and discuss subjects of interest or just trivial discussions about life experiences – major geek city
hootsuite – great website to promote multiple accounts on twitter or to handle streams of folks you are following – offers stats and the ability to schedule tweets
delicious - my favorite place to create bookmarks online for use anywhere
facebook – my personal friends only hangout, i now think of it as the friend and family reunion site
linkedin – my professional life and resume with references and groups i belong to
igoogle – great place for office tools on the fly, calendar, email, custom apps, my home page
cluetrain manifesto – a book written in 1999 that applies more today than ever before
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fun
playfoursquare - cool app to play and discover new places and old friends
brightkite – cool place to connect with people and places around you
pandora - online radio that allows you to create stations the fly without signing up
hulu – great television and older movie station, these folks get how it should be done
Five Groundbreaking Augmented Reality Socializing Apps
We’ll have to wait a bit longer for augmented reality-based apps to be available on the iPhone and Android platforms (word is that after Apple releases its 3.1 software update in September, we’ll see a flood of AR apps in the App Store). In the meantime, we’re gathering our wish lists for apps that bridge the gap between our digital social lives and our real-life ones.
You’re Twittering? Me too!
That’s the concept behind Michael Zollner’s TwittARound app that allows you to see live tweets pop up on your iPhone based on location. The app brings the real world into our digital reverie, enabling you to see both where the tweets ae coming from and how far away the person is that’s tweeting it. It could be a useful conversation starter, but mostly Twittaround just seems stalkerish.
Take That, Toy Story! Mattel’s ‘Avatar’ Action Figures to Offer Augmented Reality
Anticipation for James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi adventure Avatar has been at a fevered pitch for seemingly forever, and cinephiles and geeks everywhere now have less than five months to see if it lives up to the hype (it’s scheduled to open December 18, 2009). But for the Comic-Con audience, where the toys are almost as important as the movie they’re tied to, Mattel set hearts aflutter with its announcement of its line of Avatar action figures that are expected to hit store shelves in October. And, get this: The toys offer augmented reality. (The good news just keeps coming).
royal pains – Dr. MacGyver
i don’t watch much traditional tv anymore
that sentence alone lets you know i love to read
i do watch some shows on hulu
my son has turned me onto a new show he loves
it’s growing on me
royal pains – about a concierge physician – who goes with his brother to the hamptons
why is it growing on me
i needed to learn how to veg out
i need to take time every week and not think for a few
PLUS
the humor and setups in each episode
each show has hank needing a special tool
each show has him building or working with one
show six – he needs a microscope – “get me duct tape, a paper towel tube and a jeweler’s loop”
show five – he needs to do brain surgery – “get me a drill, duct tape and hot water”
it feels like they speed up the action for these two minute scenes of “extremely resourceful” for Dr. MacGyver
these are my favorite portion of each episode
take a look and see http://www.hulu.com/royal-pains
MacGyver Paperclip , originally uploaded by kforden.
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