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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
I was checking out TheOnion.com site, and came across an ad for Instinct, the I-phone.
Instinct’s site has set up not just the usual training video, but a bunch of spoof movie trailers, including a horror one, a kind of Mr and Mrs Smith one, good cop bad cop, a chase, and the basic ‘trailer’ in which we’re told there are no guns, no romance, no plot. (I liked the line, DOA, not LOL.)
These movies are very well made, and a lot of fun to watch (they’re too short, if anything). As well, there’s a video showing the speed of an Instinct phone compared to an everyday IPhone. The music is pure Hollywood razzamatazz which gradually dwindles away to nothing while it waits for the IPhone to load up. I’m at a loss, myself, to understand why anyone would want to bother with an IPhone of this ilk, because you might as well be on dial-up. But some people feel they have to be attached to the Internet wherever they go. (I won’t talk here about the device we took with us to Europe last year, and which nearly bankrupted us. You can see a post about it elsewhere, nor the fact that I got known for having to keep with my email and blogs as often as poss.)
One other thing on the Instinct site: if you catch the ad that says they'll pay you $20 for product placement in your YouTube home video, you'll catch another one of their mini-movies - the briefest of the lot - and also one of the funniest.
Just to go back to The Onion, a site I’ve known about for a long time, but don’t often visit, I must say I enjoy their satirical style, which somehow manages to be full-in-your-face offensive without actually doing anyone any harm. An example from 2005 around the time of the Katrina hurricane disaster:
The 4,000 Louisiana National Guardsmen stationed in Iraq, representing over a third of the state's troops, called home this week to find out what, if any, help they could offer Katrina survivors from overseas. "The soldiers wanted to know if they could call 911 for anyone, or perhaps send some water via FedEx," said Louisiana National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Pete Schneider. The Guardsmen also "would love to send generators, rations, and Black Hawk helicopters for rescue missions," but, said Schneider, "we desperately need these in Iraq to stay alive."
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Just to note that I’ve downloaded Firefox 3 – it’s the day of the great download for those who may have forgotten.
So far it seems to be working very well, and it was very speedy to install. And a site that I use a lot, and which is always very slow to load, jumped to attention at considerable speed. Interesting. (Perhaps it’s had a dose of Phentermine, the weight loss diet pill!)
I wrote about cumul.us in my last post, and decided to check out the three weather sites that had given temperatures for Dunedin, NZ.
Accuweather was the first and it turns out to be quite a tidy and long-established site. The temperature for Dunedin was the most accurate of those shown back on cumul.us, and this is confirmed on the site itself. The site itself has plenty of interesting stuff, including a link to a blog on climate change. The blog has lots of graphics, is a bit technical for my limited meteorological brain, but is still interesting all the same.
Brett Anderson - meteorologist
I’m not entirely sure whether it’s saying there is global warming, but it was worth a visit all the same. It’s run by a meteorologist named Brett Anderson, and in the current post he has a link to an interesting article on scepticism about climate change amongst newsroom weather forecasters.
Of course, if you really want debate about climate change-cum-global warming, check out Climate Debate Daily, where both sides of the question are argued in detail in dozens of articles – most of them too technical for me to even begin to read. Nevertheless I keep the link at the top of my browser in the vain hope that one day I’ll get a chance to sit and sift through the articles.
WeatherUnderground is a very busy looking site, ads mixed in with the information in a rather cluttered way. But there was a great deal of detail about Dunedin’s weather (I note the temperature on the site itself is more accurate than it was on cumul.us), and there are endless links to explore. Somewhere to go on a rainy day, perhaps!
The Weather Channel is at the opposite end of the scale: nothing about Dunedin’s weather when you actually get there; it’s only when you click on yesterday’s or tomorrow’s weather that you get some information. Today apparently doesn’t exist.
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I checked out the site, cumul.us tonight, but didn’t bother to register. I’m sure it’ll be fun to do so, but I’m already registered with so many sites I never ever go back to that I can’t see any point in picking up this one. It was mentioned in an article about whether people were now trusting Wikipedia more than books when it comes to finding out information (the answer is probably, Yes, for the most part), but it strikes me that cumul.us is more of a social networking site than an information one. After all the ‘weather report’ is based on people feeding in information about a particular place, and who’s to know who’s telling the truth? (Which is perhaps where the link with Wikipedia comes in.)
I guess it’s more useful to tell the truth here than not, but what makes me think this is more of a social site than an informational one is the fact that having found out what the weather is, you’re then asked to fill in a bunch of boxes to say what you’ll be wearing – in order to cope with the weather. When we note that all the gear – at least on the home page – is trendy young women’s gear, I think this pretty much tells us all we need to know. This isn’t an information site about the weather, it’s about what you’re wearing. And what your friends are wearing. The weather is just a ruse.
Not having registered, I thought I’d done with the site, but then I discovered that the weather report isn’t actually provided by people literally on the ground, like myself (who could go outside and tell you exactly what’s happening with the weather). It’s provided – in the case of my home town, Dunedin, NZ – by three different forecasters: Weather Underground (not a good title, to my way of thinking); The Weather Channel, and, Accuweather.
Respectively, these three give three totally different temperature readings for the city: 4, 6 and 9 (celsius). Crikey, that’s quite a difference! I can tell you it ain’t 9 outside; it’s probably closer to 4.
So if the degree of accuracy is so varied, what use is the site? As I said, I think its value is to young ladies who want to see what other young ladies are wearing. I emphasise young ladies, because I don’t think most young blokes could give two hoots what their mates or (even more) people they don’t even know, are wearing. I was tempted to register after all and say I was wearing a medical bracelet but I couldn’t find a box to tick.
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We need a burial policy for quite a number of the modern gadgets we now live with. It’s not as if any of them were really necessary.
I came across a blog post by Nick Douglas on Valleywag entitled, The seven most annoying things about the future, and what really struck a chord with me was when he asked: isn't it a bit depressing when everyone walks around with earphones in? I was sitting on the bus this morning, and at least three people out of the seven on board had earphones
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Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files, so writes Brian Stelter in an article entitled Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic.
While spending hours on the Internet looking up travel guides, movie clips, and YouTubes, or reading lengthy articles, or checking out facts, I normally don’t give a thought to the number of bytes I’m using. For a while it became a bit of an issue when I was regularly just going over my limit, but since I’ve upped that to five gigs a month, I now never come anywhere near it
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Sometimes the Internet is a little wide of the factual mark. As Sam Seaborn in The West Wing says somewhere in season two: I won’t use those stats unless I have them from three different sources. (My paraphrase.)
I wanted to check who invented the Swiss Army knife
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I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the imminent arrival of Firefox 3, but Firefox 2 has been playing up something awful. I’ve never known Firefox in any version to crash at all, but recently, both at work and at home, it’s been crashing constantly. Maybe Firefox 2 is upset at the fact that it’s about to be replaced?
I wrote about the Guinness World Record Firefox is attempting a few posts back – the day for this is much closer now: June 17th. NZ’s number of pledges has now overtaken Ireland’s: 3649 compared to 3519. Back on the 30th May, New Zealand only had 824. China, on the other hand, has gone from 5,562 to 16,657 in that time
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While I was visiting a friend in hospital yesterday, she mentioned something I hadn’t heard of: Naked DSL. The way she explained it, it seemed to be something similar to the mobile connect unit we used with our laptop in England, but I think I may have picked up what she said wrongly.
That would have meant you could pick up DSL from anywhere, but that’s not the case. (It’s different to taking your laptop to a wireless hotspot.) You’re still connected to a landline, but in a different way
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