the 10

economy politics

Today the 10 was packed. Stalled. All the way. The ’10’ is a highway in Los Angeles. Luckily I was traveling in the other direction. When I pass these traffic jams I wonder how much the cars are worth that sit there on the other side of the Highway. Since I am waiting on computers right now anyway, I did the math on that. I came up with 153 Million US$ dollars that I passed in ten minutes of driving. Assuming 15,000 US$ average car value. Since we are talking Los Angeles, so that might even be low.

The next thought is how much money has gone into expanding and maintaining that strip of road. How many new roads have been built? But the number of cars certainly has gone up.

The problem is, that people don’t make the connection anymore between traffic jam and road/car ratio. They just sit they and endure it. People actually endure allot of things.

digital cameras according to flickr

internet marketing

Flickr had a nice idea: tracking which cameras are being used by it’s members.

It used to be that consumer data was expensive to gather and somewhat imprecise. In some areas this is not the case anymore. I reckon that Nikon and Canon did spend some serious money in the past to track market share. Maybe there is a way for Yahoo! to make a couple of thousand US$. They need it.

wii break things

history media

the Wii controller is the thing that you move around like crazy. Good idea. And a bad idea. Ikea will be happy. Health insurances wont.

could not get much cheaper

confessions of a pixel pusher linux

quick howto

how to turn old PC into something useful.

I like the idea of putting the boot CD back into the tray upside down for keeping it handy, for whenever it should be needed.

america

daily life internet misc

Muffler Men, 2 Guys and S4 and allot of road

and of course some blue tape.

yahoo and it’s issues

internet technology

Everybody could see that Yahoo! is in trouble since years.
Now they come to realize it.
The ‘peanut butter memo’ could mark the end of Yahoo!. Or the beginning of it’s second coming. They have a chance if they cut the staff by 50%.

ERs of the world prepare

internet marketing media

Wii Commerical

Lots and lots of views on the good ole youTube. Who needs to buy airtime if its lingering around for free.
For about one out of thousand commercials that people do care about enough to seek them out.

virtual vacation and entourage

confessions of a pixel pusher internet linux technology

Running a postfix server with virtual mailboxes. It’s all pretty nice. Vacation however was sketchy. So say the least. One thing that breaks “Virtual Vacation” (implemented via virtual.pl in /var/spool/vacation, and, yes, googlebot, I am writing this for you) are < > brackets around the recpients email address. Entourage does that for instance. I do not think that there is anything wrong with that. Postfix does not deliver the ‘out of office’ reply in those cases though the mysql table called vacation gets the name of the sender added. Tricky and odd bug. My fix was to add:

if($from =~/< ([^\s]+\@[^\s]+)>/){$from = $1 ;}

right after the line:

if ($from =~/([\w\-.%]+\@[\w.-]+)/){$from = $1;}

which was already in there.

Free and open software is great. Just sometimes it’s the odd things that get you.

larger than life

M$ malware politics technology

Some things are so odd, weird, strange and yet predictable, you simply can not make them up:

Microsoft launches two products right now. “Vista” and “Zune”.
they migh have trouble working together

In case you don’t trust a site called “appleinsider” to break news about Microsoft products, here it is from the the horses mouth

OJ can stand for the juice of oranges or for a strange man, that had an even stranger run in with the legal system.

Youtube has now attorneys. And apparently they are bored.

top 10 spammers are supposed to create
80% of all spam.
I guess that each dollar a spammer makes costs around 10,000 US$ in damages. It might be good for the world, if these individuals would be prevented to use computers. Maybe a few companies get together and make sure that the top 10 spammers are always being caught?

The 250 Million Dollar iPod add on

Apple daily life technology

that would be a Boeing 747

When I saw the headline in BlogsNow I had hoped for Apple picking up the much beloved Connexion system. Just because I want somebody to. Not that it would make any sense for Apple or the airlines. Wishful thinking. Purely egoistical. Free WiFi everywhere. It’s just a matter of time. What I love-love-love is the fact that my ssh sessions which is more or less 35 year old technology applied with safety work on my mac laptop together with it. Apple+ssh+free wife -> Dream come true. I really can work from everywhere. Not just answer email. The blackberry proud can do that. I mean real work, like making things. It is pretty awesome.

I sat in the Yahoo! office complex in LA this morning, free WiFi from Tully Coffee. Some Starbuck’s clone that ‘gets it’: they have free Wifi, as it should be. It was great to have both laptops going, sitting outside, have a Bagel and a coffee. Biggest treat was to see the Yahoo! and HBO worker bees congregating at the water hole during their morning routine and not being one of them.

Apparently Tully coffee makes you ramble incoherently. Sorry.