Hello World

Awesome internet things I am loving lately:

• Flickr--I've already babbled about how lovely Flickr is, but they keep adding cool new features and making it more wonderful every goddamn day. It's ridiculous. The latest innovation is "interestingness," a pretty silly name for a fun little function. Basically, it uses a complicated algorithm to analyze images to determine the relative, um, interestingness of all photos. You can use it to look at the most interesting photos for a given day or month, and you can also sort your own photos by interestingness. At any rate, this is just one example of the neat stuff they're doing over there. The best thing I can say about Flickr is that since signing up for my account there (in April or so) I've probably taken more pictures than I took in my entire life prior to then.
  
  
• Netflix--What can I say. A great, simple service that gets me to watch lots of movies I otherwise wouldn't ever get to, for a reasonable price, with lots of nice online gimmicks (like Netflix Friends, which as far as I can tell is almost entirely useless but fun to browse around in). These guys did it right, and blew Blockbuster and Walmart out of the water.
  
  
• Konfabulator--like Flickr, a recent Yahoo! purchase, Konfabulator is probably the nerdiest thing on this list. It is, I think, an XML-based code environment that is simple to program for, the end result of which is that you can download any of dozens of different tiny "widgets" that run on your desktop, performing lots of different functions. Here are the ones I've got going right now:
  • mini Weather, which displays current temperature and conditions in DC
  • mini CPU, which displays my current processor load
  • mini What to Do?, which is a tiny little to-do list that stays on my screen all the time.
  There are many great widgets available, including volume controls, remotes for media programs (iTunes, Winamp, etc), and, because it's so simple to program new ones, tons of extremely specialized ones (Denver traffic report? What's playing on some random radio station? What laws were just passed in German Parliament?). An especially useful duo for laptop users are battery meters and wifi detectors. You can set each widget's display preferences (always on top, only visible on the desktop, and a few others) and can usually also adjust the way it looks/performs. I'm just starting to play around with this thing, but it shows a lot of promise.
  
  
• Gmail--You can use POP to download your emails. Great search functionality. Huge file sizes accepted. Enormous storage capacity (and increasing all the time). Hotmail and Yahoo! webmail are completely obsolete.
  
  
• Google Maps--All they did was take the best features from Mapquest and Yahoo Maps and proceed to leapfrog them in every way. Plus, they released the APIs, ensuring that all sorts of awesome indie mashup services would take that functionality and do something great with it.
  
  
• Rhapsody--I don't like DRMed music files, and I will never pay to download a crippled file whose sound quality is worse than a CD's, but I don't mind an all-you-can-eat streaming music service that costs much less than Netflix and allows me to listen to my playlists at home, at work, at school, at Starbucks (see below), or anywhere I can get internet access. Rhapsody ain't perfect (and there are other streaming music services out there that might be better/cheaper) but I think this business model might work out okay.
  
  
• Firefox (especially tabbed browsing, which NEVER gets old)--If you haven't already downloaded Firefox by now, I'm pretty sure you're a lost cause. I've personally installed it on a dozen of my friend/family's computers, and if I were at your computer right now I'd install it there, too. Tabbed browsing changed my life, and not having to worry about the myriad problems with Internet Explorer is invaluable.
  
  
• Dreamhost's absurd hosting deal--See my post on this subject.
  
  
• The USPS's mail forwarding form--If you're moving, do this. It'll be the one simple step in the process.
  
  
• Starbucks/T-Mobile Hotspot--I'm a T-Mobile cell phone user, and although there are plenty of sad aspects to this second-class cellular citizenship, it does get me a hefty discount on Hotspot service. I don't know if I will keep it after I get settled in in Boston, but while I've been travelling around the country this summer it's been extremely handy knowing that I could always take my laptop into a Starbucks (or Barnes and Nobles, or some other places) and get online. In concert with Rhapsody, Gmail, Google Maps, and Flickr, I have essentially the same capabilities in some random Starbucks that I do in the comfort of my own home. In fact, I wrote this whole entry while sipping on a venti double half-caff mochachino (with soy milk). Not really. But I could have.

Also, they cloned a dog.

Hey losers:

I just found a ridiculous deal. A full year of webhosting (including a free domain registration, if you want it) for $9.24. It's actually like $120, but if you enter the discount code 777 it gets cut down to less than what you'd pay for one month's hosting. Go here and sign up for the Crazy Domain Insane package (year pre-paid).

Found at this site.

As you may have noticed, I am a user of flickr. This is a place to put your photos, but it's also a great way to keep up with your friends' photos. There's a ton of community features--you can join groups with specific areas of interest (there's a bloggers group, a DC area group, and hundreds or thousands more), you can leave comments on other people's photos, you can browse by image tags (keywords you assign your photos), and lots more. The best feature though, and the reason I'm writing about this, is the "contacts" feature. You can ally yourself with other flickr users, which has a couple of uses: there's a page where you can browse your contacts' newest photos, and (more usefully) you can set the privacy level on your own photos so that only your contacts can see them.

So that brings us to the point of this post: You should join flickr. I know, I know, you use one of those other photo gallery sites, and it works okay. Trust me. flickr is better. So sign up and give it a shot.

If you google my name, the #1 site is about me. It's been a long slog--for a while, all I got were pages like this one (a list of surnames), and this one (related to the fact that my last name is also a dorm at Johns Hopkins) and this ridiculous one (my alter ego is apparently enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks).

So now it's my Flickr page, DCist music reviews, and sundry immature articles from my college newspaper that mention me.

But not this blog. And I think that's probably good news. Or, you know, it was, until I wrote this.

So I'm just minding my own business at work, looking at job-related things on the internet, and I see( this lovely banner ad: )