The Iron Yuppie

Holy cow, Yahoo's new maps are so good it makes me want to weep.

Check it out here.

Just a small list of things that make it phenomenal that no one else has:

• Mini map in the upper corner with translucent edges makes it a breeze to get around and see where you are


• Real time traffic integrated right in


• Searching for stuff shows categories on the left that you can auto click


• Directions (with from and to boxes!) built into the interface


• The directions allow multiple waypoints


• The nice balloons over things that you're looking for are very unobtrusive and invite clicking (cartoon bubbles are very inviting for people)


• The balloons fold out wonderfully on mouse-over and then expand even further with a click


• Every action is bookmarkable with a URL


• I can drag way points up and down the side list


• Mouse over directions highlights the segment on the map


• Drag and Drop from the map to the directions!


• SEND DIRECTIONS TO PHONE VIA SMS!!


• Errors (such as multiple listings at a single address) present a nice fold out error box associated with exactly what's wrong

There are some MINOR things I'd improve (these are VERY minor):

• Stop the clicking sound! (Note, IE causes this, but there's got to be a better way)


• The URLs are great, but it screws up my history and my back button (after 5 minutes of clicking around I had over a hundred Yahoo maps in my history list)


• Different way points should have different colors


• My popup blocker stops new windows from opening when I click on the "more info" link


• As I drag further away in the minimap, it should scroll faster


• Zooming in could have that nice fade in fade out effect that Google maps does


• Still kind of jumpy, especially when doing searches... i frequently lose where I am. For an example, search on Microsoft, then search on "UPS". It lists the stores, as it should, but when you start looking and clicking on the stores you're interested in around, it jumps zooming in and out seemingly randomly... probably just a bug


• Dragging and dropping directions should "grab" the entire balloon rather than just the words


• When you drop down a specific segment of a direction, it should do something (what? I don't know... maybe that map portion)?


• When you drag and drop a balloon onto the direction list, it seems like you're dragging it in between two segments of a direction... it's a bit confusing


• Traffic should highlight a road segment rather than just a dot


• Could be a faster


• Did I mention it has to STOP THE CLICKING SOUND! (Still, this can be done through IE, but should be better)

As I said, I just could not be more impressed with it. Bravo!

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

If only I could think of something... bizarre? crazy? fanciful? foolish? insane? nonsensical? preposterous? unreal? wild? Wait... the comments will solve this for me:

Here is what is absurd. How often you use that term "absurd". Google search on your site for the term absurd. Thats absurd! FYI if you are running out of absurd try the ebay link on the right.

Indeed it is Chooky. Indeed it is. I always worried about having a writing style that lent itself to a specific element. I know one was that I used to always end blogs with questions or single words; Chooky has caught another... my overuse of a certain word. I will now endeavor to avoid in the future. Anything else that annoys you, my reading public, feel free to pass it along. I'll feel free to ignore it.

D

I was browsing through some clippings and came across a great piece from the NewYorker titled "One Billion". Basically, they look at the number that constantly gets thrown around at the Oscars about how a billion people supposedly tune in. But the number is just absurd! Daniel Radosh goes through some great basic math... the number basically assumes that 15% of the world's population watches (equivalent to the % of people who watch here in the US). But he quickly goes on to show that the most generous world wide audience figure could only be about 2 billion (number of TVs, number who can get broadcasts, etc). 15% of that number is only 300 million. And even further, there's no reason to think that the Oscars has anywhere near 15% of the world wide audience... we're not unique in our worship of celebrity culture here in the US, but we certainly lead the pack. One can pretty safely assume that everyone else has less than 15% viewership (the article quoted that of China's huge population, only 1% tuned in).

I would like to request that reporters begin to call anyone who says this stuff on it. It's so simple! Just say "where did you get that figure from"? When they stumble around, you can quote them as stumbling around, and, presto, great story.

The Colbert Report is absolutely brilliant. In fact, it's so good, that I think it's going to fall into the area where it's so satirically right on, that people are going to start treating it as real. I hope he starts taking on controversial issues... here's a little template for him

Who is Bill O'Reilly Talking To?

blinkx

I've used a hundred thousand of these different desktop search tools. On the Mac, I was a huge fan of Sherlock... today, I think the best one is X1, because it prunes as you types, highlights terms and would not fall over when dealing with Outlook (namely, continually run into the "Outlook.PST is still in use" bug).

But I've switched back to MSN Desktop Search because it scales so well. X1 was starting to really suffer perf issues, and MSN Desktop Search just keeps chugging along. I really like the deskbar integration but it's still not perfect... not until you get prune as you type and highlighted terms is it going to be really great. As a reminder... here's what I want:

• Search as I type with full previews (deskbar is nice, but not perfect)
• Unlimited listing of all items I search for
• Better and deeper previews of what I'm searching for ... render tough docs correctly
• Highlight search terms

Many many thanks.

Man I love this idea. Basically, it's a wrist watch that measures how you sleep, which you can then download to a computer. I've always wondered what I look like/move like. But the best part about it is that it'll wake you up depending on what phase of sleep you're in. For example, you set the wake time to 6:30 and a wake interval of 30 minutes. It'll then wake you around that time... maybe earlier, maybe later, depending on your phase of sleep. It measures this based on how much you're moving.

I think this is brilliant and I'm totally going to get one... eventually.

Sleep Tracker

D

iPod Tax

Wow. This is basically the biggest and stupidest mistake Apple could make with the iPod. Stupider than charging $1.99 for a day old version of a show which I could record for free. Why does Apple hate everyone else? MS on the other hand would not only make connecting to their devices (should they have any) free, but they would probably pay or subsidize special device makers to build stuff. Apple is in such an amazing place with the iPod, you think they'd be doing anything they could to avoid screwing it up. Oh well.

D

Ah the fast of repentance and atonement...

Skinner: [on the phone] I know Weinstein's parents were upset, uh, superintendent, but, but -- but I was _sure_ it was a phony excuse. I mean, it sounds so made up: "yom kip pur".

This is the one time of the year I feel like I have an excuse to not watch TV or do anything electronic. Have you ever really tried doing it for a while? No electricity whatsoever? It's damn hard. I let my self use just my laptop and, then, just for writing a journal. Nothing else, not even Free Cell.

I just love it. It's such a nice forced break. So, expect no blog from me tomorrow during the day, I'll be atoning for my year of sin. Tomorrow evening, you'll find me a new man!

D

P.S. Boy, Blogger really needs to work on their spell checker. No "Yom". No "Blog". Not even "atoning"!

I know, I know, you're probably saying WHAT? Lack of marketing?

Man, I'll tell you, it's not that they don't market. They do! But because they try and be all things to all people, they frequently miss key audiences or over simplify or just generally can't fit it all in. An example is the following:

Command Line Defragging

What an incredibly rich little utility all built in a couple of lines of code. I remember the first time I did this on Linux and thought it was awesome. But here it was the case Windows could do it the whole time. That's the one thing that I think webservices like MSN and Google will always lack... it just doesn't seem like they're going to have the ability to have that random little script pulled together that does just what someone wants and no more. I just wish MS (and others) would talk about all their cool little features.

D