Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Clown Car Update

Accidentally caught the Reptilian party "cnn tea party" "debate". There were 8 cards on the table. All appear challenged and slow. They represent the people who are a few decades behind the rest of the country, primarily the elderly. It seems that Republican candid-8 attending the debates should have the same right (or obligation?) to carry a concealed firearm that they enjoy when they go out for a drink. Let the sniping begin-- or continue. You have to fight for your right to "party". Didn't the Gipper say that?

DuckDuckGo

I'm making more use of DDG. Put it in your Firefox search bar if you use Firefox.
https://duckduckgo.com/

DuckDuckGo is a search engine based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania that uses information from crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia) with the aim of augmenting traditional results and improving relevance. The search engine philosophy emphasizes privacy and does not record user information.

DDG is coded in Perl and JavaScript with help of YUI, served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on EC2. We use PostgreSQL+bucardo, CDB, Solr, BerkelyDB, S3 and flat files for data.
Google may be a victim of its own success. Yahoo, Altavista, AskJeeves, Google, and nothing much else has come along to challenge Google other than Wolfram Alpha and Bing.

This explains it textually and graphically with good links as examples.
http://dontbubble.us/

Watch Eli Pariser's TED talk if you haven't already heard his spiel:
http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser….

This is also worth reading -- altho I'm not sure they can say they've solved this problem, if I understand their explanation correctly.
http://donttrack.us/

Cowboy Junkies session break



As introduced and interviewed by David Byrne. 1998?



I haven't watched it all because it's 2AM and I think I'l watch it tomorrow.



Only 6 views? Hope it doesn't get deleted because i haven't seen it before.