Technology

There are creeps everywhere, man! They don’t even attack…they just keep taking punishment, and they just keep moving, like they don’t even feel it! :) For me, the sign of a good game is that hours after I play it, I’m sitting there thinking about better ways to play it. By that measure, Desktop Tower Defense is a good game. It looks easy at first, but then you start to realize the enemy (creeps) is getting a little farther each time, and those backup towers are starting to come into action, and you realize you aren’t going to make it another ten levels, and another hour has passed in defeat. ...

Despite the popularity of personalized homepages, I hadn’t been using one. At home my homepage was the normal Google search page; at work it’s a wiki I use for taking notes. Well, my tab order has now changed. I’m using my personalized Google homepage, with my Google Calendar, Gmail, quotes of the day, a NASA picture, and weather. All of this was available before, so what made me change? Google started offering visual themes for what had been a boring page. I tried it out, and was mildly impressed with the results. Still not that interested, until I realized the themes change depending on the time of day. So now I have the Tea House theme, with pleasant green accents across the page, and what appears to be a hat-wearing fox that lives in a house in an orange grove. The fox does different things depending on the time of day, such as having lunch in the grove right now. (It looks like sushi, not squirrel.) ...

Get yours now! Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

If you’re like me, and spend part of most days thinking “I wonder if Google has a tool for that?”, check out the Google Cheat Sheet. A lot of information about Google and its services, in just two pages. Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

Several theological questions, answered by thinking of God as a programmer: Q: How come the Age of Miracles Ended? A: That was the development phase of the project, now we are in the maintenance phase. Link courtesy of Digg.

So it organized itself into a large list of free online education resources. Although, it does claim to have been created by Jimmy Ruska. :) Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

I have a domain — clockworkmind.com --- that I have an idea of using for development purposes, but I haven’t set anything up yet. In the meantime, I set all email messages coming to that domain to forward to my Gmail address. Today, I received 200+ bounced messages from where a spammer used random usernames combined with [at]clockworkmind.com to send out spam to addresses that either didn’t exist or were blocked. There’s a great introduction to the world. :| ...

Silly String as safety device? Brilliant! Before entering a building, troops squirt the plastic goo, which can shoot strands about 10 to 12 feet, across the room. If it falls to the ground, no trip wires. If it hangs in the air, they know they have a problem. The wires are otherwise nearly invisible.

Jon Udell writes about trying to define “the learnable component of effective search.” Last night an old friend who runs a small software company confessed a secret. When he and his staff answer technical questions for clients, they are often “only” searching Google. At one point, he even asked a client: “Do you really want us to search Google for you at $100/hour?” Yes, in fact they did. My friend thought that was crazy. I suggested that it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Effective search depends on reservoirs of tacit knowledge and unconscious skill. Some people possess much deeper reservoirs, and/or can tap into them more effectively, than others. That makes them valuable. ...

More random stuff I thought I’d blog about, but haven’t: Three lies about social software - I can’t state it any better than this: “The ’team’ represented by a given blog community is actually a collection of incredibly diverse people, with common interests rather than common views.” Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time. Windows Vista Product Guide - A feature-by-feature guide to Windows Vista, by Microsoft. Link courtesy of OSNews. ...