GoogleTube

I just read this article that discusses various companies looking to buy YouTube for $1.6 billion. I find this nearly sickning even though I do enjoy both YouTube and Google. Hell, the article says that Yahoo! is looking to buy Facebook for about a billion. Good god.

Technorati Tags: google, youtube, buy out, yahoo, facebook

Girl set to give birth soon

A young girl has said:

[I’m] looking forward to being a mum. I can’t wait to take the baby swimming and out for walks in the pram.”

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Top Post: Google Gulch

Right now the top hit getter here in wordpress world is Google Gulch. Although I thiink it is quite spectacular that with a simple add-in file and this technology we are able to see tanks and humvees at a fairly good view, this post is about the comments the post is getting.

When I first clicked the link, the post had 303 comments. Then, about 5 minutes later when I was done reading the post, I went to the author’s blog’s main page and saw that the post had gotten 4 new comments in that span of time.

Clearly this is a hot issue. I did a quick scroll through, there were a few heated comments. Which that does not surprise me. But one guy left multiple comments of just smiley faces. Which I wonder why on earth somebody would do that.

Technorati Tags: google, google earth, map, iraq, war, comments

Rumsfeld Quote

Here’s a quote I found while reading a random article.

“It turns out it was wrong, that intelligence. Fair enough,” he said. “It’s a tough business. It’s a difficult thing to be right all the time. And the information was not correct. Does that give one pause? You bet.”

Technorati Tags: rumsfeld, quote, intelligence

A weekly leaving

I have been noticing that almost once a week for a number of weeks there is an article in UWNews that a provost or a vice-provost is leaving my university for a usually higher position. The latest one that is leaving is Rusty Barceló, [link].

My main question is why are all these vice-provosts and provosts are leaving all of a suddenly. Everybody says that the University of Washington is one of the top schools in the country, so why the mass departure as it seems to be? Are these the talks that happens behind closed doors five layers deep, for months and months, or is it a hey come work for us type of deal.

I am just an undergraduate student, so I don’t quite know or understand what these various administrators do or what their role is per se. But is a provost just brought in to setup a program or something, bring in money, then move onto the next place? That is almost as it seem as though that is the case. I am not too sure how I feel about this exactly.

college, university, uw, university of washington, administration, provost

Is MySpace Bad?

After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads.

I read this news article yestereday, which the above quote is from. The guy, Chris DeWolfe, that owns the domain of MySpace, used to be a not-so-nice guy on this Information Super Highway we have here. Just as that quote says, DeWolfe used to make pop-up ads that track movements online. I have seen the same sort of banner on MySpace that is ‘Click here to get this cursor.’ Is this the same sort of thing as before?

To me, it would be an ample oppurtunity to get some ad-ware into people’s systems. Why? Because I am guessing that a majority of MySpace users are female teens. Seeing as my sister, and other females my age and younger, like things because they are ‘pretty.’ This beautifying factor could almost be undoubtably translated to the computer. I bet if you would as my sister if she would like that boring arrow cursor changed into a dancing ballerenia, or a ballet shoe, she would say yes. Ok, maybe not today, but a few years ago.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, ad-ware, spy-ware, internet, cursors

9-11: What’s our role?

This morning while I was making the post on Pink Floyd, I kept seeing that the timestamp would update. I kept eyeing it…The September 11, never set in to the date. Then as I was browsing it set in, it is 9/11, some say it was the day that the world stood still.

I remember either pulling my shoes on or finishing up breakfast and hearing mom saying “What the hell happened?” I assured her that it was maybe a mistake, and explained how that if the controls went dead the airplane could have done basically whatever until it crashed into something. I went on doing my routine for school, and while I was brushing my teeth I heard her scream. So I came out of the bathroom to see if she needed some kind of help. At that time the Today Show was reshowing video of the second plane hitting.

I don’t really most of that day for week really because it was completely filled by this. I do remember having an extremely long first period, I want to say that the principal of my high school wanted us to stay in our classrooms till instructed. I forget if this was that my high school had a bomb call and that was the reason we were instructed to stay in our first class. For me, this was the perfect class. It was Honors Contemporary World, so we sat around discussing world issues. There was two other engineers along with myself. We tried to calculate the chances that the Twin Towers would fall. I think we collectively agreed that the structures would stay standing for a number of hours.