Colin Hill's Blog

Yarn Harlot: Weenies has a great account of the threat posed by knitting needles on a plane. Some pople are just hopeless. What else is there to say…

CNN.com – TSA�announces security screening changes – Dec 2, 2005
TSA announces security screening changes. When asked why, a TSA representative said “Security is one thing but, My God, those stewardesses were hetting gnarly. Young men the world over were starting to fly only Hooters Airline. It looks like the combined efforts of the Airline Lobby and the Manacurists Lobby is a truly unstopable force.

And now for something totally different: Archive – Totally Absurd Inventions & Patents, America’s Goofiest Patents
Totally Absurd Inventions

The IVR Cheat Sheet by Paul English is a good idea in need of a few enhancements. It needs a search engine such that the data is searchable by company name, phone number and most importantly, domain name. Multiple domain names should be abled to be associated with the data, and a firefox extension should be written which displays the company phone number for any site in the database, the user is viewing. The dialing instructions should be displayed as a tooltip. I’ve messed with Mozilla extenstion writing a bit, contributing to GoogleBar and putting together a kiosk mode update mechanism but this would be my first attempt at writing an extension from scratch. I still havn’t decided whether this will be the project or not.

Wired 13.12: Who’s Afraid of Google? Everyone.
Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world’s information. High-minded as that sounds, Google’s ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.

Hard To Do Any Worse

UL | Turkey Fryer Safety Tips
“We’re worried by the increasing reports of fires related with turkey fryer use,” says John Drengenberg, UL consumer affairs manager. “Based on our test findings, the fryers used to produce those great-tasting birds are not worth the risks. And, as a result of these tests, UL has decided not to certify any turkey fryers with our trusted UL Mark.”

RollingStone.com: The Man Who Sold the War : Politics
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management,” manipulating information — and, by extension, the news media — to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help “create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power.”

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 – Google-Mart
There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We’ll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways — most of them not even envisioned by Google) there’s suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That’s the goal.