Published on
February 20, 2007 in
chatter.
I’m lying in bed this morning listening to the news on Radio National and I hear Bush’s comments on the search for Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan’s wilderness:
It’s a wild place out there. Wilder than the Wild West!
He really does think he’s living in the movies! It reminds me of his “Top Gun” moment:
Update: I just found the transcript of the talk the sound clip was from. I misquoted slightly. The actual quote is:
Taliban and al Qaeda fighters do hide in remote regions of Pakistan — this is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West
It sounds no less silly to me.
Published on
February 12, 2007 in
google.
I’m a little late in jumping on the bandwagon here, but I thought it amusing enough to post.
I was in Seattle last week and saw the Google maps client for Windows Mobile in action. Now, I’m a fan of the client for Symbian and used it in a trip to Dubbo late last year. I noticed that there was an option for GPS tracking. I’d finally found a use for the GPS receiver in my iPAQ! You see, it’s hard to find maps for Sydney. Microsoft seem to have taken down Australian maps for pocket streets and I don’t want to purchase some strange iPAQ specific version of the tomtom software (generic versions I’ve tried didn’t seem to recognise the receiver). The Google maps software not only recognised my receiver but found about 7 satellites very quickly. While the accuracy wasn’t great it was acceptable (about 20 metres down the street).
I decided to see how it’s directions worked to North Sydney (where I work). The route it picked was pretty good; except for the fact that it went straight through a dead end. Not good if I was driving.
If I ask for directions from the same spot on maps.google.com.au it gives me the same route. Screenshot of the section in question is shown below.
Update: The disclaimer on the maps website tells us that
These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, or other events may cause road conditions to differ from the map results.
A dead end that’s been there in my 25 years of living in this area is not exactly a construction project!
Published on
February 4, 2007 in
web 2.0.
I visited Flickr today and got the following message:
Seeing as that I have a number of third-party widgets located in my sidebar, the Flickr badge being one of them, I wondered how this would affect my page loading times. It was incredibly slow.
If any one of these widgets return results slowly it affects viewing experience. Granted this blog has very little traffic and only a few third-party widgets, and they still significantly affects my page loading performance, large blogs that rely on advertising, statistical and other such widgets could suffer badly if these affect browsing performance. You could read posts before the page is loading but I only like reading pages once the page has fully loaded.
It’s generally why I prefer reading most my my blogs in my RSS reader. Ads are being put in feeds these days, however.
Let’s have a look at the activity monitor for Techcrunch:
That’s a lot of third-party activity just to view the front page!
Aldi are renowned for selling cheap stuff. Some deals are really good, but most of the time the stuff is rubbish. I thought it was particularly amusing after seeing that the latest “Surprise Buys” contains the dot com bubble’s chair of choice, Herman Miller’s Aeron chair, as a prop. Why would you put some piece of $29.99 rubbish on your $1000 chair?
