Is ab-so-fucking-lutely awesome. Granted, this link probably has latencies of almost 100-200 ms on just the first hop to my gateway at MAE-West, and my max throughput is only about 90k at best. However, the cool hax element of the whole thing is hard to ignore.
Thanks Boingo!
I always wondered why the hell my shoelaces always felt more loose than usual when it rained, but I never really gave it much thought. Today this was the case, and I think that my fabric laces expand a little when water gets in them.
It’s not really that significant of a realization, but I’m enjoying one of those nice satisfactory moments of figuring out something relatively insignificant. Neat.
Julia told me about a new social networking site that her company has been working on called MingleNow, and I think it’s right on track to make social networking site that’s conducive to (*gasp*) social networking.
The thing that really bugs me about the whole “social networking” thing is that most of the time it isn’t all that social. It seems to me that for most users it’s just a contest to see who can add the most “friends”. And often, these relationships between users appear to have little or nothing to do with any actual social interaction between human wetware. Yes, strangely human interaction seems to exist past computers as well.
When Julia first told me about it a couple weeks back at Vinnie’s holiday party, it got me thinking about the actual incentives for users of social networking sites to use realistic information about themselves. And when I got to thinking about it, there really isn’t any incentive at all. I think that users tend to fill in crap because there isn’t any perceptible advantage to keeping honest about one’s self and thinking about the image they present. Which makes we wonder how sites like MySpace came to be.
I really do believe that MySpace is probably one of, if not the most poorly engineered pages on the Internet for it’s size (*cough*ASP and IIS*cough*). It has a sorry excuse for a UI, and it’s just plain painful to use. Pages like this and this just make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon and let the magic smoke out of every modem in my house.
I think MingleNow certainly has a lot of potential to be a cool space to actually connect and coordinate with real people online and off. My hope is that they get get their userbase-ball rolling, so to speak, and create an actually useful community.
I was thinking that it would be fun to put together something that would sniff HTTP GET requests for resources that end in common graphics file extensions (.jpg, .png, .gif, etc.) and then show them on a *public* display at a popular wifi hotspot. The software already exists to do this, wouldn’t it be interesting to show everything that goes over the network?
Ritual Roasters comes to mind. Or perhaps a mobile installation on a car or something?
I can’t say enough about how much fun it is to post messages in DNA while watching them go up on a webcam.
(11:13:58 PM) jof: Maybe this was a mistake…
(11:14:26 PM) jof: I put an alias to my email up on a giant sign in a club full of inebriated party-goes with internet access
There’s an awesome Telefutura affiliate in the Bay Area (KFSF) that plays Sci-Fi movies at night in Spanish. It’s the perfect thing to have on when I’d like to work on the computer but want a mild distraction just for ambiance. Even though I know Spanish, I’m not fluent, so it’s just right. I can “tune in” to the dialog when I want and work on something else when I want while still having something on with a low cognitive load.
Wing Commander. Oh yeah.