My Iranian friend Taghi Amirani describes his meeting Presidential candidate Barack Obama last October in Londonderry, NH. I fear the stories of radical Islams in Iran, but I also have some great friends from Iran, and I know their country (like all countries) has wonderful people. I look forward to the day of secular states with equal educational rights for all people, including both boys and…
How to hack credit cards . (I post this about once a year or so.) I just got the following voice mail message: "Hello, this message is from the Card Services Security Department in regard to possible suspicious activity on your account. As a benefit, we monitor your account for fraudulent activity and need to verify some recent transactions. It is important that we speak to you as soon as possible…
Bush Freudian slip . Is it evil to find this humorous? :) But of the thousands of Bush youtube videos over the years, including speeches given while drunk, the most interesting one to me was a video comparing his excellent verbal skills while governor compared to his very poor vocabulary and speech when he was president. I'd not be surprised if Bush had one of the largest declines in quality of…
Facebook killing blogs? I just spent some time going through my blogroll list of friend blogs from a couple years ago. Half of my friends are no longer blogging. I wonder how much Facebook status updates, and to a lesser degree, twitter, are killing the desire to blog? Facebook status updates are of course much briefer than a blog, but they are so easy to do, and the newsfeed is such a simple…
Kayak.com released our iPhone travel application today ! Please try it and let me know what you think, especially if you have any suggestions. (Thanks christian and billo.)
Fake Amazon Reviews . What to do about them? I'm finding more and more of these fake reviews on Amazon, where it appears that the company who makes the product gets several people to post glowing but fake reviews. I've discussed this with several friends, many of whom have also encountered this. This depresses me, as I used to think the best part of Amazon was the reviews. You can read through the…
I've been getting lots of spam from different companies using cvent.com email services . So I just called cvent at 866-318-4358 and asked for their Chief Privacy Officer (CPO). The woman on the phone was very elusive, and asked if she could remove my email from their list. When I said no, I wanted to speak with their CPO, she instead gave me the email address privacy@cvent.com. I asked if their…
Two initial thoughts about Chrome : 1) Google has more infrastructure than Akamai . Imagine what Chrome browsing will be like when Google gives Chrome-only access to a cache of the web which is stored within a couple hops from your desk. Neither a Firefox p2p cache nor Microsoft would have any chance of competing with that speed. 2) It is interesting to see the amount of energy and venom people…
I'm going to create bumper stickers which say "McCain/Bush for President".
Someone should put boston.com out of its misery. How is it possible that the New York Times has not yet laid off every employee at boston.com, and replaced it with a clean and functional website -- like nytimes.com -- without all the annoying popups and animated ads. At a minimum, boston.com should just use Google AdSense for relevant text ads, and then just publish Boston Globe stories. The site…
I used to be a HUGE fan of Obama. I had never before been so interested in national politics. I love his message of inclusion etc. But once he had beaten Clinton, Obama started to pander to the "mass market". First, when he reversed his position on telco immunity. And now he is reversing his opinion on offshore drilling. Maybe this is "what is required" to win in a nation of idiots who watch Fox…
I wonder why gmail Contacts feature is so slow . It used to be fast. But then some gmail programmer did a "fancy version" with ajaxy stuff (oh so 2008) and yet, as is the case with most software, this "fancy stuff" actually deteriorated the software performance (and thus usability). Given how obsessed Google is with performance monitoring, it makes me wonder what about the gmail team lets that bad…
iomega sucks . I bought an iomega nas drive. The CD did not work on Mac. Fine. So I haul out a Windows PC. Then the install does not install the "discovery tool" to find the device on my LAN. Each time I launch the install tool, it tells me my iomega software is out of date, even though I click to install it each time. Of course the install *requires* that you register with them. And, check out…
There's another scary article about cancer and cell phones . Staying in denial for a moment about cell phones vs. drunk driving , I'm going to immediately start using my wired (not silly bluetooth) mobile earphones when DWT, and, I'm going to move my charger from bedside to the other side of the room. Here is the full list of recommendations from Dr. Ronald Heberman's advisory : 1. Do not allow…
iHate iPhone, v2 Well, the iPhone v2 lasted three days before I returned it, for these reasons: No cell connection in my house or on my way to work, even though I always had great connection with my AT&T blackberry. (I'm told that the 3G iPhone coverage is not that great in many areas.) The battery lasts less than a day. (I'm told that 3G consumes batteries.) I could not tell which part of the…
I just got the new iPhone . I had previously purchased the v1 iPhone when it came out, but I returned it after a week. Not due to its shitty keyboard, but due to: 1) the lack of asynchronous email. (Fixed in v2.) 2) the lack of Exchange integration. (Fixed in v2.) 3) the lack of "autotext" macros. I have hundreds of these on my Blackberry. 4) to "delete" an email took more than 10 milliseconds. I…
How is it possible that gmail does not accurately diagnose whether emails claiming to be from paypal are authentic or not? I just got a legitimate email from Paypal and it was put into my gmail spam folder. Any email claiming to be from paypal but which is not really from paypal (easily identifiable by google based on a registered email server mechanism) should be deleted, not even put into my…
codesnap is a new website to allow code buyers to quickly find coders to build small projects. A posting costs you just $5, and then completion of typical project will be $100 or so. Your posting will be seen by hundreds of coders, who will then complete your job usually within a few days. Buyers, this is also a good recruiting tool -- to meet coders and to quickly evaluate them via your small…
When will there be a service to have someone post tons of fake reviews and high ratings of your item on amazon? I'm looking to buy a futon. Of course I looked on amazon, even though that sounds like a weird place to buy furniture. But amazon seems to sell *everything* these days. I was surprised that amazon had 512 futon mattress search results . I was even more surprised that one of these 512…
McCain and Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran
I've posted Nicole's photos from the Zambia trip that we did together last week, when I went to present at a CIDRZ electronic medical records meeting. We visited some CIDRZ projects in Lusaka, and then went to Victoria Falls (unreal) and also to a safari from Mfuwe Lodge in Luanga National Park. This was one of the best trips I have ever taken...
Kayak describes its use of QuickBase for customer service .
The new Google "Android" platform allows third party developers to build apps on the new Google Phone. Android includes of course the ability for great location-based services and mapping. Check out these cool Android applications from MIT .
I have become a major fan of the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. I have now converted each of my desktop and laptop computers from Windows to Ubuntu. The major benefits are Stability, Safety (not virus-ridden like Windows), Simplicity, and Speed. Ubuntu can transform a slow buggy Windows computer into a sleek and high performance Linux computer. There are many other benefits as well in terms…
Hello, world written in hundreds of different programming languages. See also 99-bottles-of-beer which implements the infamous song in over 1,000 languages! :)