Yo, You Wanna Play Foursquare?

Sitting in MEC 585, crossword puzzle, sudoku, wordy gurdy, jumble, and cryptoquote completed, I was forced to read the paper.  Having finished today’s mind games, I began reading about another type of game played by many urbanites in their twenties and thirties – foursquare!

Not that foursquare!  http://foursquare.com/

It’s the new Twitterbook – just seven months old, with about 60,000 users, Foursquare is a social network that doesn’t ask the question, “What’s on your mind?”  Rather, it’s more of a “Where are you and can I come join you?”  When I first navigated to the site it looked kind of corny, but my initial instinct was that I wanted to join… go figure.

Basically you register your mobile device to the website and “check-in” to tell your friends your whereabouts.  The site will inform your friends, recommend places to visit, and even awards sweet badges for accomplishing certain things!

If you want to find out what those badges represent, or to find out how you can become mayor of the Lake Grove Diner for instance, check out the site and play some foursquare, yo!

A Byte of Information

Would you bet me $1000 a kilobyte had 1000 bytes?  What if I said please?

My MEC 102 professor told me 3 years ago that there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte.  Wikipedia says so too, so it’s a fact.

1024 is 2^10.  As discussed in class, computers use base 2 as their language.  Since each “bit” of information comes in twos, information can only be written in powers of 2.  Since 1024 is relatively close to 1000, they peg 1024 bytes to a kilobyte.  Neat, huh.

Gather Round the JiffyPop

October 15th’s unidentified flying popcorn was brilliant.  I have spent a few days trying to come up with something that could hold all the cable news stations hostage for over 2 hours… and failed.  It had everything – some whacked out flying thing floating on and on, a cut little child’s life in danger, and utter disbelief that something this strange could happen.

As I sat watching the news unfold on the various cable news networks Thursday afternoon, eating my lunch and flipping back during commercials on ESPN, I never once thought to myself, there’s no way that volume of helium could carry a child.  The only thing I could think of was, I gotta see how this turns out.  After I saw the lame conclusion, I switched back to ESPN, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how everyone and their mother were going to be talking about it for days.

And now reports are coming out about how it was all a hoax and the father is a felon.  Maybe someone should hire him because although he may be insane, it helped out the cable news ratings.

You know what, I’m happy

I thought this was retarded at first.  According to a NYT article in the Business section today, Facebook has developed a happiness index based on the number of times users use happy or sad words in their status updates.  Please.

According to their findings, people are happiest on the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Halloween.  People are happier  on Fridays as compared to Mondays by roughly 9.7 percent.  And on days when celebrities die, such as Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger, people are sad

While superficial to me, there is more to the Facebook status that meets the eye… apparently.  These studies are what psychologists and sociologists have been trying to collect for decades.  An incredible amount of data has thus far been collected and can provide great detail into Facebook users’ lives.  Scary.

I don’t know how much this reminds me of Big Brother, but it kinda does (no thanks to Selvin harping on it in class numerous times).  Facebookers (totally just made that up) should know by now their information is being viewed and should act accordingly.  I think it’s kinda neat, and if God forbid people kept private information to themselves, then there wouldn’t be that much complaining.

The potential for this amount of information is unknown.  I’m not a social psychologist, so the analysis should be left to one, but we should all keep an eye on this fascinating prospect.

Accuracy

IF 99% IS GOOD ENOUGH, THEN …

- 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.

- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

- 811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.

- 14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.

- 2,488,200 books will be shipped in the next 12 months with the wrong cover.

- Two plane landings daily at O’ Hare International Airport in Chicago will be unsafe.

- 3,056 copies of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.

- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strip.

- $761,900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and CDs that will not play.

- 55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.

- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.

- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.

- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

- 315 entries in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language will be misspelled.

- $9,690 will be spent every day on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.

- 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

- 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

- Homes would be without electricity, heat, water, and telephone service for 15 minutes every day.

- Every page of the telephone directory would contain four wrong numbers.

Source: http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001pZE

Hey, You’re on the Crash Cab!

Epic brawl: pedicab versus taxi cab.  Fox just happened to be there to capture the fun!

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/cab_pedicab_fight_in_times_square_irK6W3egAoNqKgPlt1TZ4O

Crazy blondes on the cash cab:

Shit

That’s what I thought when I saw this article below the fold on the Front page of NYT’s Business section:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/technology/05tablet.html?_r=1&ref=business

There goes my final project.  I had been envisioning some sort of mobile device that would shake up the universe much the same way the printing press, radio, television, and the internet did when they burst onto the scene.  My device would be some catch-all device that would merge virtually everything together and be able to bring you everything at your fingertips (that was within reason).

Enter the Tablet PC, which is due to be released in the next few months.  Maybe you’ll get one for Christmas?  Apple is rumored to come out with the first one and it’ll be like crossing an iPod touch,  a Kindle, and a wholeotta other crap. which kind of makes me nauseous.  Think of the possibilities that can be incorporated into such a device with the current technology.  Disgusting.  Somebody’s gonna get rich though.  (Not me).

It could really save the newspapers if they converted to this format.  Everyone and their mother has a radio and television, and soon they’ll have a computer too.  Whose to say they can’t get another device that combines all these inventions and creates and end-all mobile device?

So there’s my final project in a nutshell.  I am livid.  It was ridiculous to think I could come up with something before all the other millions of people working on this problem did.  Alas!  I will not save journalism and make millions