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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
My son has been one of thousands of IT workers who’ve suffered problems from excessive mouse usage. Part of the problem, I believe, is that mouse users tend to keep their wrist on the work table and have their hand at an angle all the time. This eventually causes strain. The repetitive use by the forefinger doesn’t help either.
I’ve overcome problems I’ve had by shifting my mouse from the right to the left hand for periods of time. I’m naturally a little ambidextrous, but I don’t suppose most people would actually find this any harder after a couple of days of usage.
However, better than changing hands (or an alternative, anyway) is a new mouse that’s now available. It’s vertical in style, rather than horizontal. That is, instead of the hand lying over the mouse, it sits at right angles to the desk, more in a handshake position.
Evoluent, the makers, claim that the vertical position is much less stressful for the hand – when you think about it, we tend to hold our hands at a vertical rather than a horizontal position most of the time.
There are five buttons on the mouse, and their functions are basically normal ones. They don’t perform preprogrammed operations unless you set them up to do so. There are virtually no real innovations on this mouse; it will perform quite a few functions, but most people seem unlikely to use them as a matter of course. It’s main feature is its ergonomic design. If it lessens hand strain for many IT workers, that will be a major plus in itself.
I’d never heard the word ‘fugly’ until today, and a bit of investigation on the Net showed that it’s origins aren’t too healthy: it meant, originally, f***ing ugly.
Okay.
On the HitTail report for my other site it came up with John Chow fugly. I don’t know that I’ve seen too many photos of John Chow, but from memory I wouldn’t regard him as being one of the fugly people on the planet. Still maybe the person doing the searching thought he was. Let’s hope whoever it was has realised their mistake now.
The Net is a great place to find new words, and new uses of old words. For instance, yesterday I discovered that a ladder rack isn’t just the thing you stick on the top of a car to carry stuff, it’s also a way of carrying cables around a room. It still looks like a ladder, but in most circumstances you wouldn’t go climbing around the room on it.
So there you go. If you didn’t know about either of those, you do now!
Once upon a time, dogs ate the scraps around the house. In fact, many dogs owners still give their dogs just the scraps and nothing else – and the dogs do well.
We’re baby-sitting a dog at the moment that’s not allowed to eat ‘human food.’ I suspect they don’t mean the dog isn’t allowed to eat humans, as such, though it’s fun to think that it might be allowed to. This dog has a nourishing selection of various bits and bobs that are fairly chewy, but nothing like getting ones canine teeth into a good bone. The dog has plenty of things to chew: several demolished balls and squeaky toys (doggy-type) lie around the garden. But you miss the sight of the dog getting its fangs into something really chewy, like a good juicy bone.
I can agree that dogs shouldn’t have inferior dog food, but to me, in a way, most food that comes out of a tin or a pack is inferior, even stuff that’s labeled organic dog food. I think dogs survived best when they could pick up the leftovers and then go for a good run round the yard or across the field to lose any additional calories they might have gained by eating ‘human food.’ Too many dogs nowadays are picking up ‘human diseases’ from cancers to liver complaints, from arthritis to you-name-it. Could it be that we’re just feeding them the wrong sort of stuff altogether?
And anyway, it’s boring for an animal to eat the same thing day in and day out. Well, it would be for me if I was a dog.
I’ve been reading Freakonomics by Steven Levett and Stephen Dubner. I picked it up (less GST, which was a nice surprise) at the Whitcoulls in Auckland airport, and had been enjoying the lateral thinking ever since. I’m just about finished it, and will now have to start reading the blog in order to keep getting my fix of off-the-wall approaches to economics. This is economics in a very broad sense, not the limited idea most of us have of the subject, that is, of it being something primarily
concerned with money and how it works in society. Levett has been accused of being a sociologist rather than an economist, but in fact, there are people in both disciplines who’d pooh-pooh that idea. He’s an economist who’s taken the subject and made it accessible to ordinary readers – well, ordinary in the sense that he still expects you to have your wits about you. The book only occasionally has its longeurs; for me it was when they went on about the way names affect people’s futures. There were just too many lists at that point, for me.
I’ve always had a theory about names anyway, but it’s nothing like Levett’s (Dubner is the ‘writer’ of the two, in the sense that he takes Levett’s unwritten material and brings it to a readable level. Levett can write, of course!) I’ve always felt that there were links between people with the same name – often quite undefinable links, but links nevertheless. Of course this is something the Hebrews believed way back, and they were probably right. Give a child a certain name and he may well grow into it. But if you think about friends and acquaintances who have the same name, can’t you see something that ‘joins’ them in some way? I often can. It’s not an indisputable theory, by any means. Just one of those quirky things that get into your head and you become more convinced about it, the longer you hold it.
I’ve never sat down and done any stats on it, but maybe that would be an interesting thing to do at some point
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I wrote about the various buskers I saw in London the other day, on my other Orble blog. (See the address below). One thing that bothers me about buskers is their vulnerability to money snatchers. There was a ‘busker’ who wasn’t, when we were on London's Southbank. This particular busker seemed very vulnerable to theft. When I say he ‘wasn’t’ I mean that it appeared to be a person, but in fact it was nothing more than a very realistic hand sticking out of a suitcase on the ground with a tape playing some muffled human noises. The player was hidden under a coat behind the case.
You’d think that we’d all say, ‘There’s no one in the case’ and pass by, but this busker is part of that group of statues that come to life, and it was entirely possible that someone was stuck inside the case and about to give some curious child the fright of their life.
Anyway, there was a busker’s hat in front of the case. Who would have protected the takings if a thief decided to pilfer them? While you could imagine one of the statues really truly coming to life in the event of a thief trying to make off with their earnings, or a
singer/guitarist giving chase, in this case (no pun intended) there was no one to protect the goods
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If you’re visiting Disneyworld, or Florida in general, and want an Orlando vacation home, you’d have to sift through one heck of a lot of sites on the Net. I’ve written about vacation homes in this area before, on the blog listed at the bottom of this post, but I hadn’t realized until I decided to look at the possible renters available just how many there were. I gave up after several pages of listings on Google, in fact, because there seemed to be an endless number of them. You have to wonder how many of them can make their business work, or, on the other hand, whether there are just so many vacation homes in Florida, especially around Orlando, that you could have an almost infinite number of agencies and still not run out of homes.
Perhaps I’m just not imaginative enough when it comes to trying to conceive of the vast quantity of these places. And of the numbers of people who want to hire them. The thing that puzzles me is the fact that they all look like luxury places. If that’s the case, are there really so many well-off people in the States who could hire such vacation homes for a
period? Is Disneyland so popular? Is Orlando really the entertainment capital of the world? Maybe they are.
Being so far away from Florida, and being disinclined to go there, I guess I’m not the best person to judge these things. I must admit I’ve never heard of anyone in New Zealand actually staying at a vacation home in Florida, but my circle of acquaintances may not be sufficiently widespread to have come across anyone who has. Equally, it’s possible what New Zealanders regard as luxury may be the norm for Americans.
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One of the recent ads on NZ television announces that now all our favourite programs will be available via our computers – it claims almost at the touch of a button. The reality is slightly different: only the ‘favourite’ programs that the company has made available can be viewed. At this point my favourite program may not be what TVNZ considers their favourite program. Be that as it may, it’s great that programs from the past that were in general lost to the viewing public are now becoming viewable again. For instance, my wife is keen to catch up on a children’s series we saw years ago called The Champion, which was about a black American soldier in NZ during the war, but it’s not available yet.
As I mentioned briefly in yesterday’s post, the same process is moving forward in the States. The Museum of Broadcasting Communications, which has a huge collection of audio and video material on tape, has begun to digitize its material, which means that not only is the material preserved in a better format, but it’s much more readily available to the public.
As they say, in the past ‘a visitor interested in watching a particular television broadcast would have to search the museum’s database to find their selection, write down the tape’s identification number on a request form and submit it to a front-desk employee. After assigning the visitor a viewing booth, the staff member would locate the tape and insert it into a VCR bank that fed signals to the viewing booths. If a visitor wanted to listen to an audio tape, an employee would find the item, hand the visitor the tape and an audio cassette player, and direct the individual to a viewing booth
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I found a site today hosted by IBM which lists a number of internet innovations where they’ve partnered with various businesses to create new approaches to old forms.
For instance they talk about inventing (along with a couple of other firms) the ‘supercomputer on a chip’, something that will transform virtually everything in the computer scene in due course. They mention museums that have been transformed through the use of digitized catalogues. Or cargo systems where the cargo can ‘talk back’ to the central office, and keep track of itself, virtually. Then there are ‘smart homes’ – hopefully smarter than the smart home that turns up in M Hulot’s film, Mon Oncle, which is about a house full of ‘modern’ inventions, inventions that have a tendency to turn on their owners.
Then there is the huge revolution going on in India in the customer service area. Or a system in Stockholm that charges drivers who come into town in peak hours. Or around the globe life insurance and the means for customers to control their own premiums
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One of the things many people complain of at our church is the overloud music, music that's blasted out through more speakers than are needed and does nothing for the ears or the soul. I'm not personally averse to loud music: a full-on orchestral noise is marvellous and stirring, but thumps and wallops through speakers (and let's not forget: they used to be called 'loud' speakers) is just unpleasant.
As we get older our ears don't cope with as wide a range of sound, however well we've looked after them, and as a result, in a crowded room with many people talking, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish the conversation you're involved in from the others around you. Amplified music has a similar effect: you can't hear the subtleties as it gets louder.
There's a concern that many young people are becoming slightly deaf because of the loud noise they allow themselves to endure day after day when listening to music, or their need to amplify everything beyond a sensible range
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As I've said previously, I've finally resolved what was wrong with my HitTail account. Thank goodness, because I found it a good source of material for more posts, and have felt a bit bereft when I couldn't access it.
Doogle the Dog has made it to the list, which is interesting. I can't quite imagine who'd be searching Google for him, but there you go. My site comes up first and second on this one. Thanks, Doogle!
One eye over [the] shoulder was next on the list. An odd phrase to go looking for, you'd think. However, it's interesting that this one follows the suggestion Mike Levin (of HitTail) recommends: that key words be included both in the title of the post and the content. It was purely by accident that this occurred, so I can't really take any credit for it
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Google has recently produced a new application called Google Mapplets API. This was only released on May 29 and Google warns there may still be some bugs. The idea behind Google Mapplets is to allow users to customise Google Maps with mini-applications from Google itself or from third-party developers. What can these Mapplets be used for? The range of possibilities is probably limitless, but in the meantime, they could be used to provide news, real estate listings and weather reports. No doubt imaginative readers can already think of other ways of using them. The Google Mapplets API combines the Google Maps API and the Google Gadgets™ API, so anyone familiar with those APIs can quickly build a Google Mapplet and reach millions of Google Maps users.
I had to check what an API was. The abbreviation means: Application Programming Interface. This allows programmers to access the functionality of a pre-built software module through well-defined data structures and subroutine calls. You'll note that's not something I wrote. (Does it sound like me?) As far as I understand, it means programmers can get into the make-up of software that's already available, and use it for their own purposes as well as what it was originally made for. Correct me if I'm wrong
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Imagine if an orchestra, instead of just producing glorious sounds, could also produce electricity? Wouldn't that be a very 'green' approach to the world's need for power? Or imagine that every time you played music on an MP3 or CD player you could actually run the machine itself by the very sounds it was making.
A group of physicists led by Orest Symko, at Utah university, have gone one step further back, and have been working on a method of producing sound from heat, and then turning the sound into electricity. And the genius of it is that it's low maintenance, cost-effective, and easier to manage than other ways of producing electricity on a small scale
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I don't think I've mentioned the site, PayU2Blog.com, which is another place where bloggers can pick up assignments (as opposed to what are called 'opportunities' on other paid post sites) and make money blogging. PU2B has recently got very much more organised, though I've found them very good to work with even when they were sending out assignments by email. They pay promptly, (fortnightly) and they have a range of assignments, unlike some other paid post sites, which seem to offer only a very small number of opportunities.
I've recently joined up with a couple of other sites, whose name I won't mention at this point, but they've been rather disappointing. They've started out with a whiz and a bang, but after several weeks, the same few assignments are all that are available, and of course, once you've posted something about them on your site, you can't do another post in the next while. I suspect there are quite a few people out there keen to get onto this bandwagon, but getting advertisers to sign up is obviously harder than they expected. PU2B seems to have got this aspect of things well in hand.
I’ve finally managed to figure out what went wrong with my HitTail account. In the end I contacted the person who’s brainchild HitTail is, Mike Levin, and he, bless his little cotton socks, attended to the matter personally. He discovered that the code for HitTail that should have been in my blog’s html was no longer there. Well, that was a bit of a mystery until it suddenly dawned on me that about the same time HitTail went AWOL – and so did Google Analytics – I had changed the format of my blog on Blogger. I’d done this because the links were in a font colour that wasn’t very different from the main colour, and so the links weren’t always obvious. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to change the font colour on the particular format I was using (and it was a pity, because I liked the shape of things on the page), so in the end I searched around amongst Blogger’s other templates, and found one that would do what I wanted without too much effort. That must have been the point at which the codes abandoned me – or I them. I would have expected them to follow when I changed over – as other things attached to the blog did - but plainly they didn’t.
So with that little mystery solved, I can stop nagging the HitTail people – and the Google Analytics people – and start seeing results again!
While traipsing round the Net last night I came across a comment on scientific research. The writer said that students were taught to work through famous experiments in order to teach them how to experiment, not because the experiments themselves had value.
When you read the paper you sometimes have to ask whether some students ever learn how to experiment, given the kinds of conclusions the papers report. Perhaps it's the paper itself getting hold of only half the information (which wouldn't be a first) or perhaps it's the fact that some researchers spend a good deal of time trying to prove things that tell us nothing new or valuable at the end of their experiments
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