Monthly Archives: August 2003

Live From the Apple Store

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I dropped into the Apple Store/North Michigan Avenue to get some consultation — the battery on my PowerBook has been disappearing (as if it had been removed) from time to time.
While we wait to see if the battery will fall off, I figured I should take advantage of the wireless network. I guess I could be browsing the shelves, but I can’t really leave the PB on the bar. Oh well, if I come up with anything else to report, I’ll post again later…

Great Idea: Road Trip DJ

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Spotted on Ed Vielmetti’s Vacuum:

The thought then is pretty simple; a mobile music device like an iPod that has GPS location on it, so that it knows where you are and selects or offers up things to listen to based on where you are or what’s coming up. Some of it is totally ideosyncratic, like playing tunes from bands you saw at concert venues when you go past or near the venue. Some of it is obvious, like playing Mystery Spot Polka when you’re on US-2 heading west out of St Ignace, or Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on M-123 north of M-28 near Whitefish Bay.

If you’re actually walking through a town that has enough density of people and events and history in it to have songs written to tell the story, so much the better.

Inspired a bit by Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, in turn recommended by Lou Rosenfeld.

Missing the Point

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MediaDiet reports on some reportage of Boston’s first FlashMob event.
Apparently the word got out well in advance, leading to the thing being swarmed by media, police, and regular citizens who didn’t understand the idea of “playing it cool.” Ah, well.
There are a couple of guys in Chicago who used to organize things like this in a less technical fashion — every so often the Chicago Reader would run reviews of their “happenings” in the art section. I think they sometimes got as many as a hundred people together to do something artistic in public. Anyone remember what they called themselves? I thought it had the word “Gentlemen” in it, but my google-fu is not up to the challenge.

Googled

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Google’s much lauded page rank mechanism has decided that my earlier blog entry citing a Wired news article is one of the best hits for a search on write a virus. Curiously, even though that search says that the word “a” is common and wasn’t used in the search, my page doesn’t show up on the first page of hits for write virus. It must omit the word when identifying hits, but then return to the original search string for prioritizing the results?
Meanwhile, the Technorati cosmos for that posting says that no one links to the page at all, and a Google “link” search shows only my main blog page, which once linked to it. So much for page rank calculations, which are supposed to be primarily driven by the number of inbound links.
As a side effect, I’ve had several people leave comments as if they want me (or someone) to send them a little virus tutorial. I don’t really understand that mindset, but I’m not going to be of much help. All I could do is point them to Google, but I guess that’s not getting them very far…