everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Show me the money

    We just got our absentee ballots from New Jersey today. We didn’t think we really should register to vote as we didn’t have a fixed address yet and now I hear that the race is going to be real close in NJ so I’m more than happy to throw my vote down where it might make an impact. I’m also kind of relieved. With all the various California propositions going on, I’m ok with sitting this one out and not having to study them all.

    As we head into the final stretch, you can check out who’s donating to which party on the following site which places donors onto a map of your neighborhood. Kind of voyeuristic but, hey, it’s politics and it’s nice to see some transparency in the system.

  • Google Desktop Search

    In a move that took everyone by surprise, Google announced a new downloadable product that installs on your hard drive, indexes your email, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and AIM chat logs and adds them to the Google Search results window. The expected move was that Google would launch their own, Google-centric browser but they have once again side-stepped popular wisdom and done something that new and fantastic.

    You’ll do a double-take the first time you run a search after installing Google Desktop Search. Up on top of your results, right under the paid search ads, you see links to personal email and files that contain hits on your query. Instead of bringing the web to your desktop, by putting hits on your desktop files into the Google UI it now looks (and feels) like Google has put your desktop onto the web.

    Rael Dornfest explains what’s going on behind the scenes:

    What’s actually going on is that the local Google Desktop server is intercepting any Google web searches, passing them on to Google.com in your stead, and running the same search against your computer’s local index. It’s then intercepting the Web search results as they come back from Google, pasting in local finds, and presenting it to you in your browser as a cohesive whole.

    John Battelle caught up with Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer web products, and found out that the app is only 400k and runs on only 8 MB of RAM. She also says that the relevance algorithm obviously doesn’t use PageRank but does use 150 other proprietary variables (bolding, font size, etc) to determine relevance.

    Danny Sullivan writes in depth about this new tool going on to say that the Google page that you see when you launch Desktop Search is not actually on the web but is being served up by the web server that comes with the app. This is apparent when you see the address of the URL [http://127.0.0.1:4664/&s=400994545] which is a local address.

    Another benefit is the caching so that you can now quickly peek into the contents of a file without having to wait for Excel to fire up. If there are multiple copies in cache, there’s version history which can save you if you’ve overwritten a file using the same name.

    It’s still in beta so I’ll forgive the fact that it only runs on Windows and indexes only AIM chat and Internet Explorer caches but other than that, this is a most impressive product that redefines its category.

  • Fear Monger

    How do you win an election when you’ve driven up the national debt, sent 90% of the active military into harm’s way to neutralize weapons that don’t exist and ostracized yourself from the world community by ignoring them and mis-pronouncing the names of their leaders.

    You scare the bejezus out of the electorate, that’s what!

  • Mexed Missages?

    Phew! The first presidential debate is over and President Bush grasped to his single flip-flop theme like a mouse to a reed in a stormy sea. Bush kept coming back and accusing Kerry of changing his position on issues, over and over with such regularity that I began to think this was all he had in his bag of tricks. As one pundit said on the local TV station here, “It’s one thing to have conviction in your ways but you can’t pound the pulpit for 90 minutes and say the same thing.”

    Towards the end, in exasperation, Bush blurted out, “You cannot lead if you send mexed missages.”

    You could almost hear the groans from the Bush green room.

  • Surfing One Huge Wave

    The site that hosts this video tries to pawn this off as a shot of someone surfing Hurricane Ivan but the comments seem to agree that this 70 foot plus monster was off the coast of Hawaii at a place called Jaws and that the guy did make it after all. Still, the video has to be seen to be believed – you don’t really realize how big the wave is until it begins to break.

    Amazing!

  • NJ Mother thrown out of Laura Bush Rally

    Not local news for us anymore but Sue Niederer, a mother who lives up the road from our old house in Pennington, was thrown out from a Laura Bush rally in Hamilton, NJ.

    When Bush mentioned the troops abroad, Niederer shouted, “When are yours going to serve?” referring to Bush’s 22-year-old twin daughters, who aren’t in the armed services.

    “Seth died for President Bush’s personal vendetta” his mohter says in a seperate interview with the local paper. Seth Niederer was married less than six months before he was shipped out to Iraq and leaves behind a 25 year old widow.

  • Crazy Weather, Man

    hurricane_reporter.jpg

    Watched an entertaining report from a CNN weatherman “reporting live from the eye of Hurricane Ivan” as he tried to hold an intelligent conversation while holding himself up with one hand on a rail and another on his microphone. He kept getting swept off camera with cries of, “whoa bessy” and then clawing himself back on screen to continue his live coverage as the forces of nature stormed around him. Emergency staff had been ordered off the street but here was this poor fellow, wiping his eyes from the stinging rain, pant legs flapping madly, desperate to bring us this the latest news which basically was – he should get the hell indoors. My question to CNN is, does he get hazard pay for his report?

  • The Dark Voice of Internet Evil

    A new worm is making the rounds of the internet and this one speaks to you.

    The Amus worm, which may be Turkish, uses the Windows Speech Engine, embedded on Windows XP, to play the following message:

    “How are you. I am back. My name is Mr. Hamsi. I am seeing you. Haaaaaaaa. You must come to Turkey. I am cleaning your computer. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0. Gule gule.”

    “Gule gule” means “bye-bye” in Turkish.

    Click here for an audio file.

  • North Korean Nukes?

    Mushroom Cloud Reported over North Korea – do we have another member of the nuclear club, was it an accident or a test? Or is it just a forest fire?

    What disturbs me more than anything in this ever-connected world is that no on knows for sure and this is something that happened on Thursday!