The First Blogger

According to Technorati (see image above) I last updated the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog sometime during 1970. I think this makes me the first blogger :-)

The Economist Evaluates Recycling

The truth about recycling:

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads. Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock.

Company Culture

via: Crunch Notes "Whatever company this is, they should use this as one of their primary recruiting tools." It certainly does show part of the culture of the company. The company? Connected Ventures, which is now part of InterActive Corp. Specifically, these are the teams from Vimeo, CollegeHumor, and Busted Tees.

Dofollow Trackbacks Plugin

Dofollow Trackbacks Plugin - new wordpress plugin that will remove nofollow attribute from trackback comments (rather than just removing the nofollow attribute from all comments). Thus those that link to your blog and are approved for display by you will have an actual link to their blog not a nofollow link. For more info see the link and Dofollow on bumpZee.

Flag Pie Charts

Flags by Colours - pie charts of country flag colors.

Seperation of Church and State

An easy way to determine whether separation of Church and State exists in a particular instance is to substitute religions that are not approved by whoever proposes some item that might blur the line for whatever religion they want to promote. This post provides a great example:

Backpack Blowback: Religious Right Activists Want Preferential Treatment From Public School Forum They Created

Outsmart Your Toddler

Outsmart Your Toddler: 5 tricks for getting yours to do what you want

Act like an idiot

"Even the most defiant toddler will take pity on us if we seem like total incompetents," says Harvey Karp, M.D., author of the DVD and book "The Happiest Toddler on the Block." The trick is to convince your child that you should be helped, not resisted:
...
Be wrong. Next time you foresee a battle getting your toddler in the stroller, try squeezing into it yourself. Chances are good she'll announce, "That's mine!" Finally her possessive streak is good for something.

Be incompetent. Put your coat on backward and place your shoes on your hands. Say, "I'm ready to go, are you?" She'll laugh, straighten you out, and get her own shoes on for once.

Using Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same Time in Ubuntu

There are several reasons to run multiple FireFox windows that are disconnected (not the same profile). Using the same FireFox profile means all windows are connected so all cookies are set the same for each window - which can be annoying at times (for example having multiple accounts with a web site). Another reason could be to separate extensions onto different profiles (in case they conflict or are slowing down FireFox due to the sheer number of extensions you have).

To create an additional profile in FireFox (using Ubuntu) close FireFox. In terminal type firefox -profilemanger

Use profile manager to create new profiles.

Then create an additional FireFox shortcut.

Next edit the properties of that new shortcut: in the launcher tab update the command field:

firefox -P newprofilename -no-remote

where newprofilename is the name you gave your new profile in the profile manager. I hope this is helpful.

I found the following useful in getting this to work in Ubuntu 7.04 and FireFox 2.0: Use Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same Time - Geek to Live: Manage multiple Firefox profiles

Tags: ubuntu - FireFox - FireFox profiles

Consumer Reports

I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports online. I can't believe they don't even provide simple sorts by obvious criteria. I want a cordless trimmer. They provide information on the major types of trimmers, one of which is cordless. Do they give me a list of those cordless models? Nope.

They list like 30 models without any indication of which are cordless and which are not. That is really lame for a web site which should be data base driven and give users an easy way to view just what they want. It seems they act like they still are printing everything on paper and you just happen to view it on your computer screen. I guess it isn't quite as bad as one pdf for each magazine and you just read from the pdf but it isn't much better.

They also don't let you click on the model and get more information. They really should do a much much better job of making the material effective over the internet.

Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars

Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars (sadly they broke the link so I removed it, why can't people figure out that breaking urls is a very bad idea):

Amsterdam only 40 percent of workers commute by car; 35 percent bike or walk, while 25 percent use public transit. Copenhagen’s commuting patterns are almost identical to Amsterdam’s. In Paris, just under half of commuters rely on cars. Even though these European cities are older, with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.

Not surprisingly, car-dependent cities have more congestion and less mobility than those that offer a wider range of commuting options. The very vehicle whose great promise was personal mobility is in fact virtually immobilizing entire urban populations, making it difficult for rich and poor alike to move about.

Fix your mom's computer for mother's day

Great marketing (and a cool product) - Fix your mom's computer for mother's day:

This Sunday is Mother's Day. Why not fix your mom's computer?
...
To make it easy, this Sunday we're making Fog Creek Copilot absolutely free.

No strings attached. Just go to https://www.copilot.com on Sunday, get a free pass, and we'll email your mom a link she can click on to download the helper application. It's really easy. P.S. Same deal applies for Father's Day, June 17.

Copilot provides a very easy way to remotely control another computer - and in this case fix your mom's computer.

More Phone Company Fees

Once again Verizon shows the tendency to charge customers fees at every turn. Any wonder I have no interest in being a customer of them no matter how many junk mailings they send me with marketing claims? Yeah I am going to trust them to clearly disclose all the hidden fees they will charge - not.

Not calling causes a fee:

Verizon last month introduced the $2 fee. It is charged to customers who could dial out for long distance, but don't subscribe to a long-distance service and don't make long-distance calls. Durham retiree Daniel Bius discovered the $2 charge on his April bill. He says he has no use for Verizon's long-distance calling plan because he makes long-distance calls on his cell phone.

"Even though I don't have a plan with them, they say I still have the ability to make a long-distance call if I ever need to, so I have to pay them $2 a month?" Bius said. "What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to pay them $2 for no reason?"
...
State regulators require phone companies to provide basic local-phone service. The phone companies have to give customers a way out of the new monthly fee -- but they will charge another fee to eliminate the first fee. For instance, if Bius pays a $6.75 charge to have his long-distance access disconnected, Verizon will end the monthly $2 fee, but block his outgoing long-distance calls.

How ridicules, pay us a monthly fee. Or if you don't want to pay us a don't pay the monthly fee fee.

Related: Telephone Savings - Customer Service is Important - Verizon Limits Its "Unlimited" Wireless Broadband Service

Car-free zones

On the rise in American cities: the car-free zone

New York is proposing to shut down perimeter roads of Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park all summer long. Atlanta plans to transform 53 acres of blighted, unused land into new bike-friendly green space. Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas, are planning events to promote car-free days in public parks, most in the hope that the idea will become permanent or extend for months.

Cities across America are increasingly declaring that parks are for people, not cars, ... and closing roads within parks is one result of that," says Ben Welle with The Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, in Washington.

Google Pagerank Update

A new Google PageRank update is underway. PageRank is a number that signifies something about the importance of a page to Google (based on the pages linking to it) that can be seen with a Google Toolbar. The PageRank is not the most important factor in search results but it is an easy view to how important a page is so is some webmasters find it interesting. I have seen many pages rise in PageRank but also some fall by one point - noticing falling PageRank seems more common this time around.

The displayed PageRank is updated perhaps every two months. Google uses live data in determining search results, so you finally seeing the updated PageRank should not effect how your site fairs in search results. PageRank follows a logarithmic scale (so, for example, a 6 PageRank is 10 times greater than a PageRank 5 - of course really it can be from just a tiny bit better [just "over the line" that separates 6 from 5] to almost 100 times greater.

Painless Team WhiteBoarding

Looks interesting: Twiddla - Painless Team WhiteBoarding.


1000 Signups on Day One! - "This guy had some pretty good points, so I stepped out for about 15 minutes and built the 'Lemme In!' button. I pushed the build live and Things. Went. NUTS."

Kate Walsh - Homemade Album #1 on iTunes

The Songbird Who's outselling Take That with her Homemade Album:

Acoustic guitarist Kate Walsh has knocked Take That off the top of the iTunes download album chart - but does not even own an iPod. The 23-year-old guitarist recorded her album in a friend's bedroom and named it Tim's House in his honour.

Kate Walsh - My Space

Google Personalize Home Page

I like Google's personalized home page. You can include news feeds, stock quotes, gmail... on one page. The Google reader is also very nice though I find it very annoying that it often is reloading that content section (when it is reloading it spins a graphic which is distracting and more importantly removes all the content). I can't imagine it is meant to work the way it does for me where it is in that reloading state more than it is in a usable state. Does anyone know how I can get it to work more effectively for me (even turning off reloading so it only reloaded when I requested it would be much better than the current state).

Google recently added some personalized graphic headers which are without any practical value but I like the one I have been using. The graphic changes throughout the day. I am sure they are working on having it reflect the weather at your location too - I would be doing so on my 20% time if I were there :-)





Related: Suggestions for Google - Web Search Improvements - Google Search Results - Cloaking..

The Case for Physically Separated Bike Lanes

The Case for Physically Separated Bike Lanes - video with good ideas.

Related: Traffic Congestion and a Non-Solution - Urban Planning in Northern Virginia - Red light cameras

Traffic Deaths:

During the same span (2003-2006), about 4 million have died worldwide in traffic accidents. The number of these deaths is rising steadily in most nations, with road fatalities on track to become the world's third-leading cause of death - —that is, traffic accidents look exactly like a pandemic.

World Health Organization Traffic Death Report: 1.2 million deaths a year.

Google Search Results - Cloaking...

My comments on: A quick word about cloaking:

I consider the issue in a much better state now, in that most (all?) Google searchers get the identical page to what Googlebot saw. But I still consider Philipp’s February posts open for investigation, and I will get to them, in the same way that I tackled Philipp’s first two posts about this.

March 4th:
Good. This is a problem with that has bothered me for a long time. Here is one post from 2005 I made: http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2005/01/30/web-search-improvements/

I would think Google could come up with a user participation tool that could help identify this type of behavior. Just give people the ability to click something saying the search link didn’t return the expected results or something (I am sure Google can work on the details). I am sure Google can figure out how to separate, from that feedback, the problematic web sites from all the mistaken, malicious… clicks. Then those few sites, site sections and pages that systemically appear could be forwarded for human examination. This really doesn’t seem like it would be very tricky.

I suppose Google might worry about he confusion such an attempt might cause regular users. Ok, just make it an option. Then users that like me use Google alot and get annoyed at having to ignore those sites I have learned won’t provide the content Google says they will can choose to participate. Yes I understand this will create a self selected population identifying problems but I really don’t see that as a problem.

Another options I mentioned in 2005 is to give me a way of adding a list of websites I don’t want returned. Actually now I can just use a Google CSE to do this. In fact I just did - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=002278424765197393586%3Alfichkez90e&hl=en I excluded webmasterworld.com to test it out and it does work. Less than 2 minutes to do. This doesn’t do anything for those who think it is unfair for some to have Google return cloaked pages as results, but it does help if you just want to exclude certain sites from your results.



March 23rd:
In Search results: “Do Shareholders Have the Clout to Rein in Excessive Executive Pay...
Warren Buffett’s latest attack on excessive executive compensation is another chapter in the long-running saga about how much to pay top business leaders,”

page: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=780

But that isn’t the page the site gives web browsers who are instead forwarded to:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/signup.cfm?CFID=6066164&CFTOKEN=76742544

As I stated before I think having these results might well be fine but options should be provided to users to exclude these sites normally (but you can click an option to provide links that are matches but require additional hoops be jumped through - hopefully the option could be separated - show free registration sites and show sites where pay is required to view results. Also over time this should have the option for me to tell Google which sites I want included by default (say I have subscriptions to 3 sites already…). When I suggested this years ago I figured it might be a bit early to expect. I would have expected it by now.

Trackback Spam

Blogger doesn't use trackback (the ability to automatically receive notice when other posts link to your blog post) which is a shame (though Blogger does have linkback). However the trackback system has been largely broken by immoral people who have resorted to sending false trackbacks. Just like the email scammers that have caused huge amounts of grief for those that attempt to use email these trackback spammers burden others with their intrusive acts. It is a shame people insist on being so immoral but just as always there are plenty of people who insist on acting immorally and technology often makes it easier for these people to burden more people with their immoral behavior than they could impose their bad behavior on without technology.

For wordpress bloggers Akismet does a great job of filtering out spam (comments, pingbacks and trackbacks). But our blogs are now getting thousands of false trackbacks per day and I don't appreciate the huge amount of spam (which makes it impossible to check and see if any false positives were found). Many site have given up and just eliminated trackback (sort of like giving up on the auto because people put big advertising signs in the street so that no one could actual use the roads for the intended purpose and we just let these people remove the rights of others to travel).

I tried a plugin from Rice University: Trackback Validator Plugin and then WordPress 2.0 / 1.5.x Plugin: Referrer Bouncer, they didn't do enough good that I could tell (I only tried for an hour but if they did anything they just reduced the spam some).

In reading the comments on those trying the above I read about an akismet option to automatically delete any spam that is on post older than one month old. This seems to be working very well, for now, and I believe it allows posts to accept legitimate trackbacks which I think is important. Another success for open source software solutions - yay.