Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting. Painting….
I’ve been looking for something on the Internet recently and it’s distracting keeping track of the progress. As you look for a particular item there are often many side channels with important info or of interest on their own. And there are many worthless pages. Some sites cross link and some have pages of links to related sites which are of varying usefulness.
The tool I have been using to track interesting sites is Delicious. One click adds it to a bookmark list and then you tag it. This is woefully inadequate for a lengthy details search. There is no rating system. Each bookmark is standalone. Relationships between bookmarks are not maintained. And if you don’t remember to post it there’s not history.
An alternative would be using the Browsers history feature. I have done this in the past with mixed success. It shows pages in the order you visited, not their relationship. Everything is time dependent, so a search from a month ago is probably not recorded. All the pages you visit are stored; webmail, movie times, etc. There’s not rating mechanism or tagging mechanism to later search through your trail.
I need something that I don’t even fully imagine that makes this easier. It should show pages in a tree view with different perspectives; pages and subpages and links, topic, and relevance. Search engines are hubs based on search terms and visited pages are branches and leaves. Once a significant structure of relevant pages has been constructed. The contents of the pages should be cached to make them searchable. Maybe suggesting new search terms based on the contents of the pages. The intention of the views is to construct something that similar to how people remember/store knowledge. Ratings, notes about pages, and tags should be available to put the searchers perspective into the search.
The process for usage would start by pressing a start button on an toolbar, pages are automatically in the recorded list as the searcher visits, unless they click a button to remove or they don’t stay very long <5 sec. The pages can be cached as viewed and an engine suggests new search terms based on past and current activity. Ask.com has a great context sensitive suggestion engine. When finished the user closes the browser or clicks a stop button. Side searches in other tabs are recorded also and any new open windows are in tabs. The Search component is attached to a browser session, not all browser sessions.
Update: 7/12/07
I also want this tool to overlay the web pages with graphical elements so I can use a highlighter, maker, pen, etc. to focus attention on certain sections.
The master bedroom paint job is really good. Other parts of the house are looking a lot worse. It’s too hot to work outside. Some possibilities are painting the hall bath, redoing the master bath, repainting the closets and trim in the second bedroom, laying vinyl tile in the closets, painting the hallway,..
It seems the most bang would come from the hallway. The texture is far too pronounced and the mustard color is too dark and too sharp. On Saturday, I got lots and lots of color samples in the ranges of peach, orange, tan, and blue. Sunday, I filtered the colors down to 8 or so.
I got the wood chisel out and started trimming down the higher texture. It’s really soft and I was concerned about leaving obvious marks. So, I decided to take Heather’s advice and try out the sander. It worked really well; smoothing out much more rough edges in a lot less time.
All afternoon, about 7 hrs, I sanded the walls using an air compressor to blow the fine powder out of the crevices in the texture. The powder has covered everything with a fine dust. Clean up was surprising. Some blew out the front door, but the biggest help was the vacuum cleaner. Until it stopped working for some reason. There was a lot of start and stopping, because the air compressor can’t keep up and the dust gets to be too much in your eyes and lungs. The walls are finished and the floor has just a fine layer of dust.
Next up is painting. I have to pick the final color and get all the stuff out again. Some things I look forward to are painting the trim around all the doors, the doors, and the ceiling. The ceiling is awful and the trim was painted the same color as the walls.
Transformers is Absolutely Awesome
Travis Meacham
July 2, 2007 10:25
I can’t wait to see this. Obviously, this is a positive review.
Update: 7/8/2007
I saw Transformers on the 4th. It’s very good and lives up to the old TV Series. The actors did a fantastic job. The kid is spot on and very funny. The love interest is smoldering. Talking to the robots didn’t look artificial. There were a lot of scenes where they must have been talking to a green blob, but you can’t tell. I wasn’t as big a fan of the new look. A lot of work was put in here. I found myself just staring at Optimus Prime’s eyes and mouth. The level of detail was amazing.
In the end the Decepticons were dumped in the Marianas Trench and the Autobots called their friends. It leaves open the possibility of a sequel quite nicely, but doesn’t need one. Good movie.
Wow, this is a really long Geek Squad confession from the Consumerist. Some of the highlights are if GS is too busy to fix your computer right they will just reformat it and say something happened. They are on the lookout for your porn collection. And there are more salespeople than techies working for GS.
I found this from someone’s comment to Rethinking Design Patterns. Design patterns are Programmers deriving inspiration from Architects. Kind of like Systems Engineers deriving inspiration from Biologists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_without_a_name
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Reorganizing for profit from Seth Godin’s blog.
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When you go to Home Depot to get what you need to build something out of wood, why don’t you find the glue and the wood saws and the screwdrivers and the screws all together in a section called, “working with wood”?
It’s pretty simple: if you want to sell belts and socks and even shoes, you need to sell a suit first. Make it easy to add on, and people will do it, quite happily.
I love this idea. Wouldn’t it be easier?
I found a new blog mentioned on Joel on Software blog. Rands in Repose is very interesting to read.
My personal weblog. No, Rands is not my real name. I use my real name as a full time engineering manager of teams that designs phenonmenal software. Yeah, that’s me in the logo. I hadn’t shaved in some time. My hair is longer now.
I’ve been writing here since April of 2002. I tend to write about four significant pieces a month, but changes depending on shipping schedules. Content varies from thoughts of being an engineering manager in Silicon Valley to writing to Vegas.
Before Rands in Repose, I wrote a weblog called The Bitsifter Digest. The site is no longer available and the articles are gathering dust on my hard drive. One of these days, I’ll dig up those articles and repost them because they document an interesting time of the Internet.
are here. I was a bit busy and lazy and didn’t get the camera till late.
Daily Mail
Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
By BEN CLERKIN
Last updated at 22:00pm on 27th June 2007
They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child’s bath – but so far they have floated halfway around the world.
The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.
Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.
And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.
While the ducks are undoubtedly a loss to the bath-time fun of thousands of children, their adventures at sea have proved an innvaluable aid to science.
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