Bend made the national headlines last week (CNN: Rush minute becomes rush hour) because it’s the largest city in the west without a public transit system. And we’re not going to get one anytime soon, unfortunately. From the CNN article: Public transportation advocates in the city are up against a steadfast car culture reinforced by… Continue reading Bend Gridlock
Author: Jon
Overused Phrases on Blogs
Gah. I almost wrote a blog post at the end of the year ranting about the most overused phrases showing up in the blogsphere. (“Blogosphere” itself is definitely an overused word, but I can’t help it. It’s succint.) The phrase at the top of my list for 2003 was “drinking the kool aid.” The new… Continue reading Overused Phrases on Blogs
Amazon Reviews
One of the big online stories over the past couple of days is Amazon.com‘s weeklong glitch that “suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews” (New York Times article here). Turns out a lot of what was revealed was that authors were anonymously writing glowing reviews of their own… Continue reading Amazon Reviews
Happy Valentine’s Day
It’s a little late in the evening, I know, but better late than never, I figure: Happy Valentine’s Day!
Comment Spam
Last night I got my first bonafide blog comment spam! Two comments showed up four minutes apart on an older post (the post titled, “Not Your Father’s Sesame Street“) that have nothing to do with that post—in fact, it’s kind of disturbing that they would show up on that particular one, since it’s about kids’… Continue reading Comment Spam
Writing every day
Since the beginning of the year, I set a personal goal for myself to write and publish something on my weblog here at least once a day, and I’ve actually stuck to it. (Yeah, there’s some gaps on the calendar there, but if you look closely, it’s because the post didn’t get done until something… Continue reading Writing every day
PHP XML Benchmark
Interesting PHP benchmark of parsing XML showed up on PHP Everywhere. In High Speed XML Parsing is Not Intuitive, John Lim tested five methods of extracting the title element from an XML RSS feed. Surprising results; the regular expression match was by far the fastest, and I would have thought the SAX parsing (based on… Continue reading PHP XML Benchmark
Upside down calculator spelling
Here’s how it works (in case you didn’t know). Find a calculator—a single line LCD display one, not a fancy thousand-button monster or the Windows calculator (!). Turn the calculator upside down. When you punch in the numbers, they will look like crappy LCD versions of letters. The challenge is to spell words using those… Continue reading Upside down calculator spelling
Oregon SWAP
From UtterlyBoring I picked up this link to Oregon SWAP, which looks like an interesting experiment. SWAP is designed to promote reuse of materials in Central Oregon. It is a free and convenient way for individuals and businesses to exchange reusable or surplus products and prevent them from ending up in the dump. Looks interesting,… Continue reading Oregon SWAP
Data Mining the Web
An interesting article today on MSNBC titled “Online search engines lift cover of privacy“, and the “InfoPorn” section of February’s Wired (can’t find a link, sorry) highlighting identity theft motivated me to write about a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while now: data mining the Web. The article talks about the absurd amount… Continue reading Data Mining the Web