Imagine a world where every citizen feels empowered and part of their neighborhood. Imagine if everyone trusted and felt taken care of by their local government. That is the idea behind SeeClickFix, who is leveraging the power of the internet to bring citizen and hard-working local authorities and service people closer together.
Here is an example of their service hard at work. Ass you can see many people have reported pothole problems in and around Boston. If you zoom out of the google map you can see the reports go clear across the entire country.
SeeClickFix encourages residents to become citizens by participating in taking care of and improving their neighborhoods. We allow anyone to:
See - see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
Click - open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
Fix - publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution
They also believe in the power of technology to promote:
Transparency - governments and most organizations work best when they conduct their business in plain view. We'll do our best to do the same.
Collaboration - Four brains are better than one. And millions of brains are better than three. Our goal is to give everyone else the tools to accomplish what we never could ourselves. Open source software and wikis are good models for us.
Scale - We could have created a site that focused on our home town. Using the internet and all the tools others have created, we want to reach as many people as possible around the globe. Massive scale, please.
Efficiency - Although paper has its place, there is a lot more room for the web and the mobile phone. Rather than re-invent the wheel, our site is built on open source software and Google maps.
So go out into your neighborhood and if you See a problem, get back online and Click the map and help your local government Fix our issues.
After 6 years of using [and abusing] my pc, it was finally time to reinstall the operating system. Moving of all of my data from the on-board hard drive to the USB hard drive took most of the morning, mostly because I have been lazy over the years with my locally stored data. But what a time saver having a 250 GB portable drive makes. No cd back ups at all. Next came the drive format which I think is key in a reinstall to get you back to nothingness. Then I turned to my XP reinstall disk and watched that work for the next 30 minutes. And then the real work begins. Drivers, my wireless card, Firefox, anti-virus, Plug-Ins, Office. You just don't realize how much software you have installed over the years because it is all just there for you. I stopped last night with a long list of items to install today like WinAMP, Sonic Recorder, and Photoshop. Now if I can just figure out why I have no sound, I'd be in business.
Ever want to design your own clothing? Do you like hoodies? If you answered yes to either [or both] of these questions, you much check out Champion's Hoodie Remix Challenge website. With their online design tool, you can create your own design with colors and patterns for 11 different elements of the hoodie including the front panels, arms, pocket, hood and back. You can even pick the color for the strings, trim and zipper. Here is what my first design looks like:
The winning design, which will be selected on May29th, will go into a limited production. The contest ends on March31st, so get your thinking cap on, sharpen your design skills and whip up your very own hoodie.
Have you ever had someone call you to ask a question which they could have looked up for themselves? Directions? Recipe? Phone Number? Computer Question? I have had several occasions where I have been asked for some bit of information and all I did to help out the questioner was to jump over to Google and look it up. Well now I have the ultimate tool for those situations:
The site was the product of a lunchtime chat about Googling stuff for other people. When you use lmgtfy, you get a custom link that you can email someone which first shows them how easy google is and then gives them the actual google page with the search results. For example, say you got a call from a friend who wanted to know how to add an item to your start menu. You could send them a link like this:
[Really click the link, you'll get a kick out of it]
I love the animation that shows you first how to type into Google's input box and then how to click the Google Search button. The site is to be used all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.
Don't be suprised if the next time you ask someone to google some information for you that you may just get a lmgtfy link in return. I know I can't wait to use this service!
What happens when you pit the video sharing giant YouTube vs the gaming titan Wii? Check out the video of YouTube vs Wario Land?
Wario Land is taking the hand held user interface to a new level with quick motions, including shaking, to get your character to react on the screen. Of course the YouTube page reacting as well is pretty darn clever.
For me I'm just waiting for the Wii lightsaber to come out before I pick up a Wii system.
In it's first week on the shelves, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith sold over 500,000 copies and at 50 bucks a pop that's a $25 million dollar week for Activision/RedOctane [which I'm sure the Aerosmith boys will see a nice chunk of]. This is quite a change for Aerosmith, given there last album, Honkin' on Bobo, has sold a mere 590k copies since 2004. Ok it's not quite fair to compare one of the hottest gaming platforms on earth and a game that contains an artists greatest hits vs a band's 14th album which contained 11 blues covers and 1 original track however it does ask the question, is GH a new music distribution platform?
Back on April 11th, Motley Crue released their recent Saints of Los Angeles single as downloadable content on Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Store. In the first few weeks of it's release, the Rock Band version outsold iTunes and Amazon downloadable versions five to one. The news prompted Allen Kovac, of Motley Crue's management company, to comment to Rolling Stone: "Pretty soon, this is going to be the way you sell music."
If the guys at Guitar Hero and Rock Band can find the way to export the music from the console to your iPod, they could become the next big music portal [and help save the record industry from itself].
Comcast says it is now looking at metered billing as a way to maintain bandwidth for all users. This was announced as Comcast begins to test new network management techniques which no longer target specific protocols and applications like San Francisco's P2P file-sharing provider BitTorrent. Now, Comcast is taking a wider look at its users' traffic patterns and throttling the speeds of heavy users at peak times of network congestion. The test areas are Chambersburg, PA and Warrenton, VA, so if you live there and are bandwidth hogs, you may see you speeds drop some. On an interesting side note, after first denying they were using internet shaping techniques, Comcast is now working with BitTorrent, Pando and others to easily identify their traffic and work on management techniques.
This also will be very helpful when the FCC finally gets around to ruling on their previously unannounced traffic throttling. They could claim is was an Alpha stage of their new revenue model [since they basically got caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place]. Yeah that's it - we were just seeing if we could do for the future. Yeah that's the ticket!
Yesterday's Boston Globe Magazine included a First Person interview with Co-Owner of the Boston Celtics Wycliffe "Wyc" Grousbeck [who has also held the titles of Managing Partner, Governor and Chief Executive Officer since 2002]. Not only is he a local-boy-done-good [graduate of Noble and Greenough School in Dedham and current resides in the Metro west with his wife and 3 children] but he is also a very realistic owner. His comments on not winning a championship this year were well put and very businesses like [as in building a team that can contend now and be legitimate contenders for the next 3 to 5 years]. I have to disagree with him on Moon vs Peart. He said Peart is more skilled and there's no doubt he is one of the best drummers ever [I personally rank him second to John Bonham]. But the best part of the interview was when he was asked about Mark Cuban [very outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks] to which he said Mark was welcoming and he hinted that looked up to him a bit and his communication with the fans. He said he would try to do the same here and with that offered his email address if you have a question for him. It's nice [and quite refreshing] to see a person like Wyc make himself available to anyone who has a question about our Boston Celtics instead of hiding behind a great green wall of websites and non-describe email address. Now if they can just bring championship # 17 to the hub, it will be a great start to 2008!
MP3 or not has a simple exersize to test your listening ability. Can you hear the difference? I could after several listens and the difference was very subtle. Of course that's with my little ear bud headphones. Listening to these clips over some high end speakers via a home theater you might notice the difference more easily. Still a fun exercise.
"Paris Hilton has reported to a Los Angeles County jail to begin a three-week stay for violating probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case.
The 26-year-old heiress was booked late Sunday into the Century Regional Detention Facility in an industrial area about five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, according to the sheriff's inmate locator Web site."
This quote was taken directly from the Associated Press story from very early this morning. Although there are many interesting parts of this story - celebrities who think they are above the law, actual enforcement of the law in LA where it is usually money can buy you out of anything or the fact Paris entered the correctional system 2 days early - but the interesting part to me is that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's website as an inmate locator.
If you go to the inmate locator and enter the required information [Hilton, Paris], you will get exactly 1 result - Booking Number 9818783. Clicking into the booking number gives you the 411 on Ms. Hiltons entrance into the county jail system - At 23:15 on 06/03/2007, Hilton was taken into custody by LASD-CENTURY STATION PATROL at CENTURY STATION and will be housed at CENTURY REGIONAL DETENTION FACILITY in LYNWOOD and is scheduled for release on 06/26/2007. Even her mug shots from 2006 and 2007 can be seen online already. God I love the internet!
What if you don't have the glove or smoking gun? What physical object can you present juries to really drive home the point? Technology is the answer. Legal, or forensic animation, is the next big thing is court room presentation. Forensic animation is defined as the use of full-motion computer graphics to recreate an event such as an automobile accident, the collapse of a building, an assault, or the workings of a mechanical device from a variety of perspectives. Forensic experts, police officers, engineers, and eyewitnesses compile the data and supply it to the animators, who create a series of fixed video images that are assembled to create a cartoon-movie-like rendition of the event. Simulated audio is sometimes also used to create a short audio-visual production.
In a recent case, dubbed "The Lady In The Lake" by MSNBC, Chris Hansen explores this mysterious case and in one segment, they show the use of a the forensic animation used in the trial. Dr. Igor Paul, a mechanical Engineer from MIT, worked with Framework Media to create these animations [scenario 1 and scenario 2] which show the victim could have fallen to her death instead of being pushed. This type of expert testimony is the future of the legal system and is another example how technology is infiltrating all facets of our daily lives.
Can a 2GB iPod Nano hold 500 songs? How about a 4GB SanDisk Sansa player holding 64 hours of music? Neither of these statements are true or at least they need an asterisk or footnote to qualify the statements. Here is the straight dope, MP3 players are portable storage devices that have some finite capacity to store data files. They can hold X amount of data [where X = the storage capacity like 2 or 4 GB].
The iPod Nano has the following statement when referring to storage capacity:
Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; actual capacity varies by content.
This brings up an interesting question, how long are your songs? Well that depends I guess on what you listen to. For example, if your a fan of Green Day's Dookie album you would find 14 tracks with a total running time of 39:46. Average song length: 2:49. Now if you happen to be a fan of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album you would have 8 tracks with a total running time of 42:25. Average song length: 5:18. Almost twice as long! If my MP3's were all twice as long as yours, we would have a much different number of songs that we could store on the identical device - because it's all about storage capacity.
The SanDisk Sansa player has the following statement regarding storage capacity:
4GB of memory plays back over 64 hours of MP3 (128 hours of WMA) music (over 960 MP3/1920 WMA songs)* - based on 128Kbps playback.
This brings up the other major factor is hours of storage, sound quality. When a CD track is ripped into a MP3 file, it has to be encoded at a specific quality or bitrate [or more specifically Kilobits per second - Kbps]. The typical rage of bitrate is from 128 Kbps [PC near CD quality] to 320 Kbps [HI-FI near CD quality]. Each bitrate has it's own "compression" ratio, for example 128 Kbps is 1:11 while 256 Kbps is only 1:5 so if you were to take a full CD [700 MB] of music and rip to 128 Kbps you would end up with 63.7 MB of MP3 data however if you were to use a bitrate of 256 Kbps you would have 126 MB of data - again twice as much.
If you were to mix these two concepts in the worst case scenario, the Zeppelin 256 Kbps rip would be 4 times larger than the Green Day 128 Kpbs rip - even though the Zeppelin album is only 3 minutes longer.
So how many songs [or how many hours] can your MP3 player hold? Exactly, it can store as much music as can fit into it's flash drive until it's capacity is completely utilized.
Imagine a world where every citizen feels empowered and part of their neighborhood. Imagine if everyone trusted and felt taken care of by their local government. That is the idea behind SeeClickFix, who is leveraging the power of the internet to bring citizen and hard-working local authorities and service people closer together.
In it's first week on the shelves, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith sold over 500,000 copies and at 50 bucks a pop that's a $25 million dollar week for Activision/RedOctane [which I'm sure the Aerosmith boys will see a nice chunk of]. This is quite a change for Aerosmith, given there last album, Honkin' on Bobo, has sold a mere 590k copies since 2004. Ok it's not quite fair to compare one of the hottest gaming platforms on earth and a game that contains an artists greatest hits vs a band's 14th album which contained 11 blues covers and 1 original track however it does ask the question, is GH a new music distribution platform?
Yesterday's 