I get forms to fill out and sign in electronic form all the time now. Often they come as PDFs or word documents, every so often by fax, and more and more rarely on paper. My handwriting is terrible and of course I no longer have a working typewriter. But none of the various tools I have seen for the job have had a nice easy workflow.
As workers search for trapped miners in Utah, having drilled a 9" hole down to what is hoped to be their area, they plan to use things like sound and detecting CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere to find the miners.
Twenty years ago Tuesday, I created the newsgroup rec.humor.funny as a moderated place for posting the funniest jokes on the net, as chosen by the editor. In light of that anniversary, I have written up a bit of history of the creation of RHF. From there you can also find links to pieces I wrote earlier about the attempt to ban RHF and how RHF led to my creation of ClariNet.
A few weeks ago, my site got hacked. The attacker inserted an iframe pointing to a malware site into most of my html pages. That of course is bad, but the story doesn't end there. (I should of course have upgraded my OS from the ancient one my hosting company gave years ago, but they don't really support that, and feel an upgrade consists of rebuilding from scratch.)
I'm a big fan of making money by selling services but a disturbing trend is the requirement that customers sign a one or two (or even three) year contract in order to sign up for a service. Such contracts will have a fat termination fee if you want to end the contract early.
A friend asked for advice on selling real estate. I'm no expert, but I thought I would write up some of my thoughts in a blog post for everybody:
At this point it seems only people in San Francisco want to see Barry Bonds break Aaron's all time home-run record of 755. He has 753 right now. In San Francisco, the crowds get on their feet every time he gets on deck, and that was even before he got on the cusp of the record. Outside SF, fans boo him, and it's commonly believed that should he tie or break the record in Los Angeles or many other cities, he will get booed for doing it. In SF there is a willing suspension of disbelief.
Something light hearted. I purchased, some time ago, a small Li-Ion battery for external power for my laptop and other devices. These batteries are great, getting down near $100, weighing very little and, with 110 watt-hours, able to keep a laptop going all day at a conference or over most of a transoceanic flight.
This particular battery, made in China, contains one of the more amusing bad-english warnings on the label, though, particularly item #3.
I'm quite impressed with Google's mobile maps application for smartphones. It works nicely on the iPhone but is great on other phones too.
Among other things, it will display live traffic on your map. And I recently saw, when asking it for directions, that it told me that there would be "7 minutes of traffic delay" along my route. That's great.
Ever since the first science fiction about cyberspace (First seen in Clarke's 1956 "The City and the Stars" and more fully in 1976's "Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin") people have wanted to build online 3-D virtual worlds. Snow Crash gelled it even further for people.