Old and news

It's been a while since I've bored you with a nod to the New York Times' frequently awesome online infographics. There were just too many to choose from during the campaign, and besides, I had caribou on the brain.

But in the face of a complete and utter lack of requests from you, the SFTC reader, for more coverage of the great and wonderful ways that the NYT presents information in pretty charts, graphs and photos, I thought it was about time to pay a visit to those mad geniuses who make the old Gray Lady's web site so newsgeeky-fun.

It's not terribly new, but my latest find is this weekly series of then-and-now pictures from various parts of NYC. The writer/photographer took a bunch of photos in 1978 for a New York guidebook, and now is returning to the same spots to show what they look like from the same vantage point in 2008. These are probably more interesting if you live in New York, but either way, I love how the site displays the photos with a roll-bar that lets you reveal portions of the new picture in the same frame as the old picture - or to just see either picture on its own. Fun, right?

Maybe some day I'll have the patience - 30 years is a lot of patience, but whatever - to do something like this.

Unrelated random thought: For no apparent reason, I was wondering if anyone else had thought of this idea for a web page. And of course, someone had. A long time ago. But I like it.

Surf city, here we come

Next time you see me sitting in front of a computer screen, just typing random crap into the Google search bar, you can rest assured that I'm not wasting time.

I'm making myself smarter.

This news is exactly what lazy, out-of-shape Americans need to hear right now, isn't it?

T-shirt update: Some new inventory (I think that's industry lingo for, um, shirts) went up on my Zazzle.com page last night. Judging by the new designs, I probably need even more brain function than I'm getting right now with all of my web surfing. I know, I'm getting sick of the cross-promotion, too.

Inefficient bureaucracy can really pay off

It's more than a month past California's deadline for a 2008-09 budget and if there's one thing California does not have, it's a 2008-09 budget.

For some reason, the governator doesn't think that's a good idea, so he's pushing the state to lay off all temporary and part-time employees and - and this is where it starts to piss me off - reduce the salaries of all full-time employees to the federal minimum wage, which is now set at a totally-reasonable-for-living-in-California $6.55 per hour. (The state would issue checks for back pay once the budget is resolved, but, uh...)

Anyway, the fly in the gubernatorial (almost as good an adjective as "avuncular," right?) ointment is that California's state government is so ass-backwards that the computer system is still running on COBOL, which I think is what computer science students studied in the 80s. The 1880s.

So making the adjustments to all of those paychecks - I think they'd have to do it by having mice run on treadmills - would take months, by which time, surely those geniuses will agree on a budget. Or not. Why bother, really? Not like having a budget helped save the state from facing a $15 billion deficit.

I especially liked the state controller's quote, which so beautifully illuminated the oustanding efficiency and decision-making abilities of our elected officials: “In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task. And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”

Come, uh, hover with me

I was all ready to add "jetpack" to my Amazon wish list - even though I've had a Segway on there for about seven years and nobody's bought that for me - but then I read the New York Times article about the latest iteration of the personal flying machine. Eh, not so exciting.

Even less exciting when you watch the 55-second video (a few scrolls down on the left). There are a few seconds when the camera is trained a few feet above the guy's head - presumably he also was waiting for the contraption to get up off the ground more than a few inches. I know they didn't want to kill the reporter who was testing it out, but still - let the thing go a little bit!

Then, it occurred to me: If you have really big news about something other than denim overalls, you're probably not doing your presser in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Cuil down period

When your brand is the de facto term for the product or service you're selling, it's gotta be darn near impossible for competitors to dent the market. I'd guess that even more so than Kleenex or Coke, Google has become the term for its product. Has anyone in the last 10 years said they'd "conduct an online search"?

That's why I was interested to read about Cuil (pronounced "cool," apparently), a new search engine designed to compete with Google. Story is that it was launched by a husband-and-wife team who fled Google. Guess they're not going to the alumni reunion this year, huh?

Although the Times tech guy didn't like it much, I think the search results look kinda cool and organized, and when I Cuiled myself (less gross than Googling oneself?) it did better than Google at finding stuff I've written recently and posting it higher in the list.

But if you're launching a search engine that is supposed to compete with Google, you'd, uh, better make sure that on the day your p.r. hits the papers, this doesn't happen:

What are the odds Google employees created a program to crash Cuil's servers? Nah.

Science you can taste

Finally, researchers are doing something useful in the field of genetics. Just goes to show you the good that can come from industry, government and farmers all working toward a common goal ... sustaining the chocolate supply!

Now, if they can sequence the genes for New York pizza and replicate it out in L.A., I'll be the happiest guy around.

Fontastic!

I realize there might be something horribly wrong with me, but I think FontStruct might be the coolest web site ever invented in the history of the universe. You can create and share your own fonts or browse and download typefaces created by other users. Yippee! Or maybe, YIPPEE!

There's some background about it in a New York Times article, which also reminded me that I really want to watch Helvetica, the documentary about fonts. (Anyone seen it yet?)

Oh, I also like the NYT article because there's a prominent mention of Baltimore that doesn't have anything to do with urban blight or crack dens.

If I had an extra $601 million

I'd spend the first mil on a Bugatti Veyron, just because it goes from 0 to 60 in 2.46 seconds and because, let's face it, I'm not going to have an extra $601 million any time soon.

But, again, if... I'd spend the rest on this magic $600 million traffic system that UPS uses to plan delivery routes for its truck drivers. You can get the full details on the L.A. Times' site (holla for the L.A.!) but here are the key goodies: "To design the most efficient routes, the computer program avoids hills, dead-end streets and railroad tracks. It weeds out busy thoroughfares and streets with many signals. [The user feeds the info] into a hand-held computer [which maps a route, including] where to park and the most convenient entrances to buildings."

The article also says UPS plans routes so drivers can avoid left turns. Brill-freaking-iant. (Sorry, that doesn't really work, does it?)

A frivolous purchase? Not if I need open roads for driving my Veyron.

P.S. I bet UPS is pleased with the coverage, but maybe not so happy that the photo accompanying the story on the Times web site is of a bus that crashed into a Dunkin' Donuts.

Data baste

It's Friday. Another week at work: done. You're feeling good about yourself. You're feeling like a smarty.

And then you read this story on CNN.com about a dude who managed to get data off of a melted disk drive from the Columbia space shuttle. I don't even understand how you'd begin to figure out how to do that. I'm not sciencey, not by a long shot, but I do know one thing: This guy is way smarter than I am.

It also makes me wonder. At a company where I used to work, one of the VPs kept losing all of the data on her laptop computers because she kept dropping them. A few feet. On a carpeted floor. Our IT guys could only throw up their hands in failure.

The Columbia disk drive, on the other hand, falls about 200,000 feet from a vehicle traveling at about mach 19 -- a vehicle that basically disintigrated, by the way -- and the drive is burned almost beyond recognition, and a guy in Minnesota recovers 99 percent of the info on the drive. Wacky.