Tom’s Two Cents

If you are in one of my classes, or if you are just curious what I am up to, here is a link to my public calendar. Thanks, Google!

So there is a mom who blogs about her daily experiences and it’s pretty hilarious. Mom’s can feel isolated. Blogs can help. Here is my favorite post (one of her early ones): http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/2007/08/adventures-in-grocery-shopping.html

At what dollar amount does money not matter any more? I am convinced that it is around a billion (yes, billion with a “b” — a one with nine zeros after it). This obviously depends on your lifestyle, but a billion bucks would accomodate pretty much anything I can imagine — and I can imagine a lot. (This goes back to my brother Bob’s discussion of the Yahoo/Microsoft buyout debacle).

Yesterday I brought this up with some friends. Marion mentioned that even a million dollars could support someone indefinitely (ignoring inflation). If you stuck it in a CD or some other interest-bearing account that yields 5-6% you could pay yourself $50-60K per year without touching the original million. Where I live, this would be considered a decent middle class income. But when I suggested it to my wife, she just laughed.

So to anyone who has this as their sustainability plan, I dedicate this Bare Naked Ladies song to you.

Over the weekend I got involved in a quick Yahoo Pipes project to aggregate Gustav-related volunteering and housing posts from craigslist. We may have escaped the worst from Gustav, but with other hurricanes already threatening, we are trying to stay mobilized to help in other areas. The idea now it to generalize the site into a Hurricane Information Center while still providing information specific to the individual hurricanes. If you are interested, join the Hurricane Information Center community to see what else needs to be done. We can reuse relevant content and add new tools to provide a resource for folks who will again be displaced by Hannah, Ike, and others.

Chrome is coming! Google’s open source browser project, is coming out in Windows beta. This comic by Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics, does a nice job of explaining the technical details. Here is a brief summary:

Extreme tab makeover: Instead of traditional tabs below the address bar (like Firefox), Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window.

Multi-process design: This is said to use “a bit more memory up front” but it splits up the processing jobs of individual tabs. It’s similar to the design used in operating systems, with multiple processes happening at the same time. One advantage is that an error that would normally cause your whole browser to crash will now only crash that particular tab. Also, when web pages or plug-ins use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager.

Other streamlining: The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features (I am skeptical here, only because I have never used an implementation of auto-complete that wasn’t annoying). And when you open a new tab, instead of getting a blank page or your homepage, you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. On the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs. There are many other features, including a privacy mode, as well as anti-phishing and anti-malware safeguards that keep updating and warn against malicious sites.

Anyway, I’m excited to check out what I expect will be the next generation of web browsers. It’s nice to see that this is an open source project. It seems Google is betting big on the OSS (open source software) model. I think it will work. And I find it interesting how quietly Google goes about taking over… everything.