everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • “Suddenly, at about 3 p.m. Eastern time, the Dow industrials fell out of bed”

    Computers that calculate the DJIA at Dow Jones are fingered as the culprit in yesterday’s late-day freefall of 200 points. The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones, covers it in gory detail in a cover story in today’s paper.

    Behind the scenes, the team that compiles the DJIA had noticed at about 2 p.m. that heavy trading volume was overwhelming the system, creating a data backlog that was affecting all of the Dow Jones indexes.

    The Dow’s component stocks were falling, but — improbably — the Dow average wasn’t falling as much. Just before 3 p.m., the team switched over to a backup computer system. Almost immediately, the Dow caught up, tumbling 200 points, for an eye-popping plunge on the day of more than 500 points.

    You could probably hear the “hiss” coming out of the world economy as all those Sell orders got matched up and executed. How would you like to be the dude at his console that threw that switch?

    4.07 billion shares traded hands yesterday. The heaviest trading day ever for the New York Stock Exchange

  • reinvigorate.net – shiny new stats app reborn

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    I’m a bit of a stats nerd so I was quite pleased to see that a longtime favorite hosted stats package came back to life after going dark over a year ago. Reinvigorate.net has been reborn from the ashes and is now hosted by the fine folks over at mediatemple which should be able to handle any traffic people throw at it.

    One of the unique aspects of the early version of reinvigorate that I’m happy to see is still part of the service is the tracking of visitors in real-time.

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    Click on the image above for a larger view. You can see that reinvigorate has two large boxes that keep track of Active Visitors & Active Pages. There’s also a clean and simple dashboard telling you how many users you’ve had so far today (you can set your site’s timezone in the preferences), the average number of pages viewed on your site as well as information about referrals. I like this approach because it’s very easy to take in the health of your readership at a glance.

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  • Just Squeezing By

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    photo by SunnyDis

    The buzz around the office this morning is the amazing entrance that the Queen Mary 2 made yesterday. It was a flickr moment as everyone with a digital camera flocked to the shore to document the event. Catch more amazing photos under the tag queenmary2.

    News coverage with details of how the QM2 cleared the bridge with just, “27 feet to spare” at in USA Today.

  • For the man who has everything – one huge swiss army knife

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    In celebration of their 100-year anniversary, Wenger, the makers of the original Swiss Army Knife, are putting out a special edition knife. It weighs almost three pounds and comes with 85 different instruments including the toothpick. Suggested retail is $1,200. Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife.

  • The Value of Editorial

    In this world of automated aggregation engines we can really appreciate the value of someone taking the time to pick through a selection of material, dust off what’s forgotten, and otherwise hold up to the light something to be celebrated.

    I listen to Salon.com’s Weekly Download podcasts and while I enjoy the selections, the adverb and simile-rich descriptions by Thomas Bartlett are just as entertaining. Here’s his intro to Brittle Britches by Quien es, BOOM!

    Austin band Quien es, BOOM! (the name references Billy the Kid’s purported last words before being shot, “Quien es?”) makes music centered around lovely interlocking guitar parts and intricate — sometimes too intricate — drumming. They clearly put so much thought into the instrumental lines, the discreet but delicious bits of electronic ear candy and the way they interact that it’s a surprise when, two minutes into this song, they bother adding a vocalist (although the vocals are, in fact, quite nice, and in a fittingly fastidiously phrased style).

    Brittle Britches by Quien es, BOOM!

     

  • My New Start Page for the Next 25 Days

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    Leslie Harpold will be counting down the days of Christmas with a new daily entry for her online Advent Calendar. Taking advantage of the medium, she will post a carefully selected graphic and link to pair with a Christmas memory from her community. She’s been at for five years so she’s developed quite a following and today solicits her audience for stories of their own.

    Merry Christmas everyone!

    [thanks for the tip Michael]

    UPDATE : I’m sad to hear that Leslie Harpold passed away. As a sad reminder of this, her Advent Calendar is stuck on the 7th of December.

  • Google Maps in your Pants?

    Oh my God – this is so bad it’s funny. Dave Cassel of 10 Zen Monkeys deconstructs a radio spot on the GPS-enabled Helio that features a jingle refrain that’s going to stick with me a long time. I don’t think this was what Google was thinking when they set out to “organize the world’s information.”

  • I’ve seen better UI design

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    Toshiba is working on a new display technology that allows you to get a 360 degree view of what’s on your screen. The downside is you’ve got to strap on a 6 lbs. helmet that makes you look like a bobble-head Neil Armstrong. I think they should have kept this one under wraps before releasing press photos of their prototype. (link to Daily Mail story)

  • Putting out fires with a 747 Supertanker

    Putting out fires with a 747 Supertanker

    Flying down to Burbank this morning I could see the smoke from the massive forest fire that has been raging in the hills to the North of Los Angeles since Labor Day. I heard that they beat back the flames using a DC-10 reconfigured for firefighting and while looking for a photo of this jet, I found this video of a 747 in a flight test. Too bad it’s not approved for use.