It never fails to amuse me slightly how economists in general do not appear to consider ethics or the environment unless using them to explain a strange statistic. Its almost like to have an economist on a board or in a group means you need an old fashioned hippie to provide balance. Nonetheless, I really like how potentially controversial data can be presented by an economist absent any emotion, just the facts please. Check out the price of cocaine around the world. It seems that if you’re in NZ and get the urge, you’d save a bunch by flying elsewhere for your binge.
Of course it doesn’t quite happen like this, but still, I’d like to see the Economist interviewing all those drug lords to collect their stats!
Jump on over to the Spikefin blog (or email us) if you know any good Practice Managers or Testers who might like to come and work with us.
I just tried out Yahoo Answers, asking the above question. What a useful service! Had an answer in minutes that turned up info I hadn’t seen in my cursory searches on Google. In addition to knowing a little more about the Spikefin fish, I now have a new dive holiday destination, Mabul. If only the local fish shop would show some interest in finding a Spikefin to put in my fish tank… do you know any exotic fish importers?
Big party next week for the latest batch of Creative HQ graduates: Karactaz, deNada and StarNow. A very “cool” threesome this time around. Not that Optimal Usability, Virtual Katy, Calcium, SilverStripe and ourselves, all Creative HQ alumni, are not cool… just that these 3 are particularly cool. Maybe even “kewl” as my girlfriend might say.
So Netscape is still making browsers. But why??
Our neighbours up here in Pipitea House, Mindscape, are in this weeks’ Infotech. Apparently they’ve just released BackgroundMotion, not so surprisingly (since all the content is for Vista Ultimate’s DreamScene), Microsoft is pleased about it. I wonder if I’d like having a subtle video as a desktop background? Might be soothing. Unfortunately as I don’t have Vista Ultimate installed on my lappie I can’t try it out. In any case, nice clean looking website - and you can download the website sourcecode by clicking View Code at the bottom. Cool.
It’s great how I hear about what they’re doing by reading the newspaper 15 metres from their office 
It seems to me that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen just wanted something to say, while everyone else was already talking. Basically, Marc points out that “Web 2.0″ is just a term for the way the web was always supposed to be, so we should just call it The Web. His point is entirely valid, but it really has taken a major evolutionary process to get here, so there is nothing wrong with giving it a name and being somewhat excited that we’re finally getting somewhere. Nutscrape had various version numbers while it still did essentially the same thing but incrementally (and debatably) better each time, didn’t it?
Vitamin have a great post on internationalising a website in php (the principles are the same regardless of the chosen code language). They use Diarised as their example site, which appears to be a prettier alternative to doodle.ch which I’ve found to be VERY useful.
At first when reading the article I thought to myself, “how cool, you can have invitations go to people in their own various languages!”. Well, yes that is cool. But not that useful in the end if everybody gets to the meeting that has been perfectly arranged and can’t speak to each other. Hmmm, I wonder if anyone has put a translation app on a little box (running linux no doubt) that does the job of a verbal translator yet? Then I guess I’d like to see a camera on it that monitors body language and pulls people up (or directionally whisper in their ear) when they’re doing something potentially offensive for someone else in the room.
So last year I saved up all my coins and used them to buy Lego Mindstorms. Yes, that is quite a lot of coins, a condition my brother refers to as “drinker’s pocket” (I think he coined that term). I’ve always had a fascination for robots, and ever since buying Mindstorms I’ve been saving my coins for a Sony Aibo, a robot dog. I saw these fantastic things in Japan a number of years ago and have only just found out now that they’ve been discontinued as of March 2006, but even more saddening, Sony has given up robotics R&D (Note:Wikipedia)?!
While speaking about robotics, check out GrassAds if you happen to need any great big logos printed on grass. The robot fits in a suitcase (so coming from Aussie is no problem) and as I understand it is more accurate, faster and more flexible than stenciling them on. I watched some being done at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, very cool.
According to the front page of the Dominion Post Weekend, “We spent about $1127 million on takeaway foods last year”. That’s quite a bit. In fact, it’s an annual subscription by the average kiwi of $269.51. That’s about a little under a meal a week I guess. I must be above average (depending on the definition of takeaway food, does Wholly Bagels count? does Malaysian noodles count?). Note of course that nearly a quarter of these average kiwis was born in one of more than 200 other countries.
Sales assistants are the single biggest occupational group. I’m not sure exactly what defines a sales assistant, or takeaway foods, but whatever they are, it seems apparent that there is a lot of people who could benefit from great food ordering and management systems on both sides of the counter and by extrapolation, in the office out the back too. In my position, that’s good news.