kindproject

stumbleupon.tv

Posted by jonathan - 10/01/08 at 03:01:15 pm

Back in the day we learned how to use the entire-web by clicking on links in porn sites and typing crazy urls like monkeysex.com into the address bar. This was all in the search for porn and funny sh1t. back then 94ish, pre-goog and longing for the days of altavista we would stumble upon random stuff and occasionally nothing. Yes nothing, type something in and nothing would return. stumbleupon the website brought some of that back over the last few years and they might have something here with the new stumblepupon.tv for the video crowd. I cannot/do not watch vids at work and at home I still gravitate to the tv. I got the laptop-netflix (ie only) streaming video home-theatre lcd 40″ samsung flat screen thing hooked up over the weekend but it still needs tweaking.

My question is though what the hell is ebay going to do with it, stumbleupon. its not like they have a great track record. I still can’t pay local merchants through paypal, they got skype and the call quality is still pretty crap. I have not seen much that draws my attention, the windorphins was a cool advertisement but never went back there. not really sure what goes on at the e by the bay. are they a business company or a consumer company? maybe they need to team up with yahoo.

Funny my second ripting of ebay recently.

P.S. Yup you guessed it, stumbleporn

live music for 2008

Posted by jonathan - 06/01/08 at 05:01:14 pm

JazzFest April-May 2008
Its about that time again when we need to start planing for the annual pilgrimage to the NO, (aka the crescent city, aka the big easy, aka k-ville) for Jazzfest. This year proves to be more tricky as we have to decide if and when we will go with our newborn, who will be 2 months old. Our new convert to the kind family tradition, Darrick, sent us this recent nytimes link.

Nothing beats bloody marys and beignets for breakfast followed by live music 18/4. You might have a slightly different ratio, but I need at least 6 hours sleep. Maybe that will change with a couple months of fatherdom under my belt. school yourself here, here, and here.

Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert 2009
For the past few years we have unsuccessfully entered ourselves for the ticket lottery to see the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert. While most guys are bathed in new year’s football he kind family is watching the dancing horses that accompany the concert waiting for the final encore when the company plays the radetsky march. Maybe next year will be the year all the stuffy people in black tie make fun of me and my wife as we jump up and down in the concert hall clapping along to the music.

NJPAC shows
njpac is the performing arts center in Newark. It is actually quite easy to get to from the path and just as accessible to new york as other outer boroughs. I’ve seen few shows there and you can pick up a nice brazilian meal in the irondbound neighborhood.

• Friday Feb 15th 8pm, Chick Corea and Bela Fleck
• Friday Apr 18th 8pm, Dave Brubeck Quartet

dissecting the manhattan from across the rivers

Posted by jonathan - 06/01/08 at 05:01:34 pm

Prodded by Astoria’s own Mr. Woodard I write again about a common subject, the Manhattan. Not the city or the project, but the cocktail that was past down from my father’s main cash outflow, frequent restaurant outings in Gotham. In the house of my childhood the booze was kept next to the comet under the sink. Frugee the inner Jew and this sense of alcohol as a poison (maybe it was the band) have kept my tastes closer to the people.

Good ingredients do make good results, but blood orange bitter’s cries hipster foodism 2007-2008. A good bargain, great company and a heated debate over irrelevant topics make for the best Manhattans. So on to drink new york’s sixth style.

Here in the bourgetto of Jersey City the Manhattan is shaken in a plastic container with a 3:2 ratio Marker’s Marker : Cinzano Sweet Vermouth sans bitters (technically that makes it a sling not a cocktail). Its poured into a rocks glass and consumed before the ice melts. Number two is lined up like a Bulgarian on a bread line in 1990, quickly before someone else gets the good stuff.

While I don’t remember how the Hiram Walker’s Kirschwasser Cherry Brandy found its way into the house, it jumped into my manhattan while rummaging through the liquor cabinet during christmas. Not sure if this addition will make it into the starting rotation, but it did add a bit of holidaze specialness to the standard drink. At Jason’s suggestion I will work the bitters into the rotation simply for the gastro effects as the kind family has always had a good relationship with the gi docs.

Will ebay drown?

Posted by jonathan - 05/01/08 at 06:01:57 pm

My buddy Noam posted about his love/hate relationship with ebay regurgitating many points, crappy design, retarded feedback system, exposing your email address to spammers. Today I read a BW article about esty and then minutes later came across some of their advertising in a local magazine, new, while getting a haircut. With the growth of niche marketplaces, such as esty for crafty people and liquidation for wholesalers along with the surge in temporary ownership through services such as netflix, pandora, and gamefly I wonder if there will be a place for ebay 5-10 years from now.

Only two years ago the 40 year old virgin had the love interest own here own “We Sell Your Stuff On eBay” store. Today two years later on my walk to the doctor I see one of these places shutting down. Unless ebay gets thier shit together and I don’t mean by some windorphins campign I could see them swallowed by some young upstart who came of age  long after the world was shocked by aol taking time warner.

increasing whitespace on a page using opensearch

Posted by jonathan - 03/01/08 at 02:01:49 pm

Having not posted about tech in ages and wanting to add some special sauce to my current day-time site, I went back to adding an opensearch provider. My corporate gig in an enterprise tool which requires as much screen space as I can take. Therefore, I wanted to refactor search to pull the global search box off the page and move it into the browser.
After some googling (here and here and here), I thought about creating an opensearch generator, but as usual I was beaten to it here. Its these little focused tech sites that I love.

Basically, the opensearch provider can be broken down into two components.

1. xml file that defines the search info to the browser
2. link that tells the browser the search provider xml file exists

what the f%4k happened to intranets

Posted by jonathan - 03/01/08 at 07:01:07 am

The last few years has seen a proliferation of web-app development. Lots of productivity tools, to-do lists, online word processors and spreadsheets, presentation tools, groupware, calendars, etc. Lots of business software.Noticeably absent are dedicated intranet tools. Software to help businesses get their shit together internally. A place to post common information, to have discussions, to share files, and possibly to share a calendar or important dates. There are definitely products out there, but this market doesn’t seem to have seen the same level of development as other business software. - 37 Singals

Like the guys at 37 signal’s my first foray into web dev was actually on an intranet app with one of the best designers out there. Back then, 2000, people cared about privacy, as David Pogue’s (the nytimes circuit author) recent article, The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality, points out there is a generational divide over privacy, security and payment.

I would love for my company to drop most of their internal apps and adopt the wiki, forum, and open source tools which make the barrier of entry into a market so minimal. I have a new hire starting on the 21st and I have to get him, setup on the domain, in the bug-tracker, on the project management tool, performance review, expense system, all of them have different policies and procedures and no good place for me to discover them. Why would we tackle this when you could use free services to handle the same tasks.

1st post from blackberry

Posted by jonathan - 02/01/08 at 04:01:11 pm

I posted my first entry from my doctor’s office today. Its pretty cool that wordpress works nicely on my blackberry browser.

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