Recently my father shared an interesting story from Slashdot with me about a man that pays other people to argue with him on Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk is a place where you can offer up money in exchange for the performance of a task. Typically it’s used to accomplish things that a computer [...]

Joshua Porter asks the question, “Did the Long Tail beget social design?” I think the answer is absolutely yes. Here’s what Joshua had to say Netflix rents most of its movies from the catalog of past movies, not from the current list of blockbusters. Same with Amazon and books, iTunes and music. Christopher Anderson goes [...]

It seems like the Facebook engineers add another javascript and css file to their pages with every new feature. As of today, viewing the Facebook homepage loads 36 javascript files from Facebook and 4 more from advertisers. In addition to these 40 files, there are 12 css files. That’s a lot of files! If you’ve [...]

Last night I went with a few friends to Yoshi’s in Oakland to see Ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro put on a sold out show. This guy is a Ukulele player. He’s outrageously talented, but he’s still a Ukulele player. I’ll bet most people in the Bay Area have never even seen a Ukulele before, but [...]

Nothing ground-breaking here, but I wish someone had told me about these things sooner. Maybe these will help some of you out. Firefox ctrl+1 . . . ctrl+n will switch to that specific tab. ctrl+t (new tab), ctrl+k (search), ctrl+l (address bar) and ctrl+w (close tab) are also musts. You can add new items to [...]