Growing up, I was fascinated by and drawn to computers at an early age. My family didn’t have the money to get an Apple II like we used in elementary school, so the first personal computer in our house was a cheap IBM PC clone my oldest sister won in high school in 1989. It […]
Month: April 2007
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My Thoughts on Google Web History
So last week, Google replaced its “search history” feature with an updated one it calls “Google Web History“. It previously stored a dated list of all the searches you did on their site while logged into your Google account, but if you have the Google Toolbar installed (and the PageRank feature enabled), it will now […]
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RSS Explained in Plain English
While I’ve been evangelizing the benefits of RSS and news readers for quite awhile now, this video does a better job of explaining the benefits of this technology than I ever could. Hopefully it’ll encourage you to setup an account on Google Reader!
Last week marked the 10 year anniversary Flood of 1997 in Grand Forks. Local and regional media outlets have been featuring coverage for at least several months now, often providing day-by-day flashbacks of the events that transpired. Somewhat surprising to me, Minnesota Public Radio seems to have some of the best online resources on their […]
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BP Making Things “A Little Better”
It seems that oil industry juggernaut BP launched a new advertising campaign for its gas stations early this month, called “Helios Power“. The goal is “to make things ‘a little better’” for customers of its BP Stations. In their own words: The theory behind ‘gas stations, a little better’ came from the insight that consumers […]
My new issue of Fast Company magazine arrived in the mail yesterday, with a cover story about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s already up on their website for you to read for free. I’m a big fan of Facebook, but have to admit I didn’t know whole lot about 22 year old (!) Zuckerberg and […]
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Blog Recommendation: Brazen Careerist
Though I didn’t have much time for blogging last week in between work and life, I wanted to pass along one of my favorite new blogs to you. It’s called Brazen Careerist, by Boston Globe columnist Penelope Trunk. Penelope offers lots of great career advice to readers, especially those on the early end of their […]
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Blue Man Group in Fargo Tonight
The Blue Man Group How to be a Megastar Tour will be in Fargo tonight, and Casey and I will be taking in the concert. Friends who’ve seen it say it’s the best show they’ve seen, so we’re pretty excited. It seems that they encourage fans to bring their cameras, so I might have some […]
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Article on Edward Tufte
One of my design heroes is Edward Tufte. He’s the master of telling compelling stories with information, and has some of the best books on the subject ever made. Stanford Magazine has a great article on Tufte in its latest issue, which you can read online. It tells of Tufte’s love for Galileo and many […]
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Thrift: Facebook Open Source Tool
Facebook released some of its home-grown software architecture as open source a few days ago. They’ve called it Thrift, and can be downloaded from their developer site for free. Browsing through Thrift’s whitepaper (PDF), I’m still trying to completely understand it. It appears to provide a consistent way for different programming languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, […]