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testing an ad system. TESTING I TELL YOU!

Hotel Chatter created a compilation of the best geek friendly hotels. Some are quite nice, some are just picked for its thematic brownie points.
Here we go:

The Tribeca Grand (New York)
It has the iStudio full of apple gadgets. Desktops full of fun a/v editing software, cameras, etc. A bose sounddock, fully loaded ipods for your room, and if you get a room number ending in 06 or 16, you get G5’s in your room. Other rooms have slightly lower ended comps. The front desk manager…is also on Aim. You can chat with him from your hotel room!

The Hotel@MIT (Boston)
They gave this one a few points for having an @ in the name…very nice. It’s also home to MIT AI Lab graduates, free wifi and T1 line in your room. Digital safe in every room, networked laser printer, and high tech decor. And plus..its MIT. Ya gotta give em some points for that

Woodlyn Park (New Zealand)
So, New Zealand…tourism for Lord of the Rings, nice hobbit rooms. They are underground, and windows that match the movie. Totally here because of its LOTR’ness

Baena Hotel+Universe (Buenos Aires)

Every room has a perfectly placed flat screen that is placed OUT of glare. Internet connection galore, with wifi everywhere. Poolside tech service with charging plugs for all your devices, and the water is placed to create a nice illusion of floating.

Sidi Driss (Tunisia)
Star Wars Fans unite! This ones the location of real world Tatouine. Its a underground maze where parts of it still have Star Wars set. Whats funny about it is, its 16 Tunisian dollars/night

Wynn Las Vegas
So, you’d think Las Vegas isn’t the place for geek toys. Nope…hi def TVs in every room with on demand HD, plus some poolside. Motorized drapes and lighting with a remote, VOIP phone system and a Red Card key that uses RFIDs. Its crazy as your Red Card stores everything. Funnily, the system runs off Windows XP. Here, Hotel chatter contemplated the pluses for a tech using this place, mainly, red card hacking>>casino>>happy tech, angry hotel.

A few others also made it to the list, but see it, links to hotels and pictures on Hotel Chatter

A quick page on why intelligent people (in particular children) tend to be unhappy, while the rest of the world seems to go on and not notice.

A quote :

“Children
develop along four streams: intellectual, physical, emotional (psychological)
and social. In classrooms, the smartest kids tend to be left out of more
activities by other children than they are included in. They are
“odd,” they are the geeks, they are social outsiders. In other words,
they do not develop socially as well as they may develop intellectually or even
physically where opportunities may exist for more progress.

Their emotional
development, characterized by their ability to cope with risky or stressful
situations, especially over long periods of time, also lags behind that of the
average person.

Adults
tend to believe that intelligent kids can deal with anything because they are
intellectually superior. This inevitably includes situations where the
intelligent kids have neither knowledge nor skills to support their experience.
They go through the tough times alone. Adults don’t understand that they need
help and other kids don’t want to associate with kids the social leaders say
are outsiders.”

Read the full article here
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8778/Why-Intelligent-People-Tend-To-Be-Unhappy

Technological waste is becoming a large problem.  As we use more and more computers, and use more and more televisions, we get rid of more and more old computer and old televisions.  Whats not recycled goes into landfills, and there are lots of hazardous chemicals inside these electronics.  Televisions contain lots of lead.  Computers contain different hazardous metals.  And all of this stuff gets thrown away.

“

Discarded computers, televisions, radios,
batteries, cell phones, cameras and other gadgets contain a stew of
toxic metals and chemicals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium,
brominated flame retardants and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says American consumers
generated nearly 2 million tons of electronic waste in 2005. Gartner
estimates that 133,000 PCs are discarded by U.S. homes and businesses
each day.”

More and more companies are trying to recycle this waste.  Many companies recycle metals and other components of value from old equipment, either melting the materials down into new components, or re-selling or refurbishing old components.  Many states are looking at new laws that require companies to begin programs to take back the goods they sell once they’ve reached the end of their useful lives.

“

Among computer manufacturers, Dell has
emerged as a leader in electronics recycling. The Round Rock,
Texas-based company has pledged to phase out certain toxic chemicals
and began offering free recycling for all its products in December.

Chairman and CEO Michael Dell challenged the industry to follow his
company’s lead in his keynote address at this year’s Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, saying, “It’s the right thing to do for
our customers. It’s the right thing to do for our earth.”

The company recovered 80 million pounds of equipment in 2005.”

Read the complete article here
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2921136&page=3

I was doing some reading for Lit class, and i stumbled into an awesome parody of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. If any of you have read this poem, you will appreciate this parody very much. For the rest of you, read it, and if you get any of the references…hehe….just think about it.
Check it out, its by Jeff Duntemann:

Let us go then, you and I,
For fast Chinese and talk of years gone by
Filled with random jumps and custom cable;
Let us go, recalling joys of FORTH and MUMPS,
The cluttering lumps
Of threaded code in frantic ten-hour hacks
To get that midterm project off our backs:
With code that twisted, doubled-back and bent
And set into cement
But came through with an underwhelming “B”…
Oh, do not ask, “What was it?”
I don’t care what it does, just how it does it.

On the Net the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

Over yellow chad that chattered out from teletype machines,

Over yellow tape that rattled out encoding fever dreams
That curled into the data center trash;
We lingered, inventing novel sort/merge schemes,
Or ways to thwart collisions when we hash–
And seeing that we’d been logged in since late last week
Took one last slug of Jolt and fell asleep.

On the Net the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

No! I am not Bill Gates, nor would I want to be;
I’d rather parse the fish than own the knife;
(Imagine! Having moby bux but chained

to ninety million lusers, what a life…)
Am a flamer, goateed, pallid, overweight,
Willing to pull two shifts, then (hell) a third,
To save a session from a deadlocked state;
At times, (to put it mildly) unrestrained–
Almost, at times, a nerd.

I grow old…I grow old…
dBase II and Wordstar are no longer sold.

Shall I start a BBS? Do I dare to try to teach?
I shall take my palmheld portable and hack upon the beach.

I have heard the networks passing packets, each to each

They have no traffic for the likes of me.

I have seen the Altair live and die
And software startups score on sorry score–
And millions made by men like Mitch Kapor.

We hackers linger by our leading edge
Forgetting what is pending in the cache
Till practice hurtles past us, and we crash.

Thank you Duntemann

It is time, for me to clean up some firefox tabs I have open.
Speaking of FF tabs….I found this nice FF extension thats going to be useful for packrats everywhere who have tons of tabs. Do you know how many tabs you actually have? Well, with Tab Counter, you will.
Sadly, you can’t have it cap the number of tabs, or do anything like that. Then again, if it did too much, it might be too bloated for casual use. Get it at the addons page of the mozilla site and start countin your tabs: Tab Counter

Ever done one of those online forms with a large textbox, submitted it, and had it fail? You try to use the back button, but…it doesnt work. Or, it does, and the text isnt saved in the old page. Well, by using this nifty extension, you can do your big texting stuff outside of FF in an external text editor! Get it through installing “It’s All Text!“

Finally, last FF extension: ResizeIT
Ever had these windows pop up, have it load something, and find out: oh, look at that, it can’t resize?! Half the text is cut off, you cant understand anything, and you have to copy paste into notepad? Or have that happen with a media file and be screwed? Well, never fear, ResizeIT is here. You can resize it using keyboard shortcuts to a variety of sizes. Yay! Get it: ResizeIT

Everybody is obsessed with fractals… If you don’t believe me go to this website (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/fractals/mandelbrot.html) to find out why they are so cool. Here’s an example of a Mandelbrot fractal:

If that’s not interesting enough check out the videos on the website, it will make a lot more sense later…

Here’s a similar picture with color added:

Of course this is a relatively simple type of fractal… (I just chose it because it looks like a snowman…)

Here’s the cool video I mentioned: http://www.stanford.edu/~willywu/downloads/xaos1.mpg�

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Found this post in the ‘drafts’ folder, it’s offically post #609 (We’re near post #1300) But thought that it seemed interesting, so here it is for your reading enjoyment - Joe

Right from the article here..

“In an attempt to boost its
sagging fortunes, Dell, one of the leading PC makers in America,
recently launched the Dell Idea Storm website to solicit ideas on how
to get Dell back to the top. The most popular idea so far? Desktops with pre-installed Linux.

That’s good news, but what’s
better news is that Dell is taking it seriously. In a brief email
exchange with Bob Pearson, Dell’s vice president of corporate group
communications, said, “You’re right that Linux is one of the hottest
topics on Idea Storm.”

Read the rest of the article here
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8382062536.html

powered by performancing firefox

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I’m going to start this one off by listing the source for this article as the National Nitwit.  Enough said.

“Atlanta, GA) Harold Merriworth said that he is a “reasonable guy,” but
that he has reached a point where he needs to take drastic action
against some neighbors who piggyback his 200mw A/P wireless signal.

“I think there are at least three blatant SOBs sucking up my bandwidth, and this is really getting old,” he told National Nitwit reporters. “It’s getting so bad that it takes, like, 30 seconds just to upload the Google homepage.”

Merriworth’s
innovative solution is to install lead sheeting on the exterior walls
of his house to combat the “signal leeches,” or people who tap into
someone else’s wireless Internet connection without permission.”

Now would probably be a good time to mention that this article is not serious, and extremely sarcastic.  The first time I read it, I was seriously worried about the large number of people who left comments that indicated they actually believed the story.

http://nationalnitwit.blogspot.com/2007/02/man-installs-lead-sheets-to-fight.html

This link is self-explanitory.  These people are either general annoyances, in one case a top spammer, and the others are general nuisances. 

http://www.valleywag.com/tech/griefers/internets
-most-wanted-a-rogues-gallery-231320.php