This is what a joke might look like coming from an eye doctor.
Weekend Storms
Over this past weekend, we have experienced a few bouts of severe weather. Friday, June 13 we had a line of severe thunderstorms move through northern Ohio. Here are a few images showcasing the convection which took place ahead of the line. I’ve also included a video in which you can hear a rumble of thunder. Continue reading
Ivanhoe Reservoir Covered In Balls
I thought this was rather interesting. There is an open reservoir in Los Angeles which has recently been discovered to contain elevated levels of Bromate. Bromate has been discovered to cause cancer but according to scientists, the risk is only attached to humans if bromate is consumed over the course of one’s lifetime.
According to the LA Times piece:
The water needs to be shaded because when sunlight mixes with the bromide and chlorine in Ivanhoe’s water, the carcinogen bromate forms, said Pankaj Parekh, DWP’s director for water quality compliance. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, he said, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix.
So instead of placing a tent over the entire body of water, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dropped 400,000 pebble weighted black balls into the reservoir to act as a blanket from the sun. This is the same technique used to deter birds from congregating in water covered openings near airports.
Here is a link to the video showcasing the massive ball drop – 400,000 balls dropped into the water
I would of embedded their video into the blog, but they have some of the worst embed code I have ever seen. It doesn’t even work when posting it into the WordPress post editor, even in HTML mode.
Will Plurk Kill Twitter
In last months poll, I asked if you would listen to a daily WordPress podcast. And here is how the poll turned out.
Well, I don’t think I’ll be doing anything in regards to a daily podcast. I have more on my plate at this time then I did when I started the poll. However, I still have to talk to a few people about the idea but I may try and do a live podcast that deals specifically with blogging and all aspects of it.
The poll for this month is, Will Plurk Kill Twitter? Since there are so many people going hogwash over the service, I thought I’d put my foot in the hype water and see what you think.
Is Jaiku Still Around?
Remember Jaiku? That service which was launched in 2007 which aimed to be a Twitter like service except that it was more of a content aggregator than anything else. Using Jaiku, users can type in 140 character messages as updates while also having conetent aggregated from other services they are apart of through parsing RSS feeds.
As it turns out, Jaiku is still around. In a blog post published on the official Jaiku blog on May 30th, Jyri reminded folks that Jaiku is still alive and well and that moving the service into the Google App Engine has taken much longer than anticipated. Jyri also mentioned that they do in fact have plans for future development. What that future development might be is anyone’s guess.
What I find interesting is that, this service called FriendFeed has ate Jaiku for lunch and then spit them out. FriendFeed works in a very similar fashion to Jaiku except there are no 140 character limits and the content aggregation looks much prettier on FriendFeed. Also, there appears to be much more conversation surrounding the aggerated content items on FriendFeed than there is on Jaiku.
So although Jaiku was one of the first services out of the gate to allow aggregation of your content into a central location allowing others to comment on those items, either their timing was wrong for the service or they had a few things wrong with their implementation. If that was the case, I don’t know what those wrong items might of been. The bottom line is, Jaiku was the first major player in this arena and once Google acquired them, they have fallen flat on their faces. Also, I find it funny that the people behind the FriendFeed service are ex Google employees. Isn’t that quite the coincidence?
The bottom line is, FriendFeed is the place to be in terms of content aggregation in a central location. The early adopters along with many of the big names within the blogosphere are climbing all over each other on the service which is usually a good sign that the service is worthy of your time. Jaiku on the other hand is still invite only which doesn’t appear to be doing them any good.
I don’t see Jaiku ever becoming a threat to FriendFeed. FriendFeed has picked up where Jaiku has left off, improved upon their offerings and apparently, they have done everything right. There is no looking back for FriendFeed and if I were the creators of Jaiku, I’d be thanking my lucky stars that I was acquired before the launch of FriendFeed.
One last thing before I go. I wanted to highlight the fact that it would seem as though being the first one out of the gate does not guarantee anything. I strongly believe that the Google acquisition has done nothing but set Jaiku back but hey, at least Jryi and company received a nice paycheck.
Twitter Implements New Limitations
According to the StopTwitterSpam website, the folks at Twitter have updated their Help Page to reflect new changes that have gone into effect in regards to Following and Updating limits. It looks like these limitations have probably gone into effect to not only lessen the strain on the overall infrastructure of Twitter, but to also deal with spam. As far as the limitations go,
What are the limits, specifically?
The limits are based on multiple parameters–not a single metric. Because the limits are in part meant to curtail nefarious behavior, we are not revealing the specifics of how they are reached. Please note that these limits are sure to change as we figure out what works. We’ve taken a best guess to get started, but Twitter is still evolving and new uses are being invented all the time.
Good idea on their part as this will make it harder for Twitter spammers to reverse engineer the limitations. Hopefully, this does not adversely affect the majority of legitimate Twitter users and helps to make Twitter a more reliable service.
Cool Water Slide
This is a pretty cool water slide that I never knew existed. Don’t pay attention to the male bathing suits though. Not sure how he put that on.
Would you go on this slide?
Happy Birthday Jeffro2pt0.com
Thats right folks. Today is this blog’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than to look back on the past 365 days this blog has been online.
For those of you that are wondering, the first post published on this site occurred on June 4th, 2007 New Fan Of Tumblr. Since then, I have provided a number of reviews on different sites and services, offered tips on blogging, covered various news items and a whole lot more.
Instead of rehashing the story, if you would like to know how this blog came to be, please read my About page which goes into detail as to how this blog came about.
For those of you familiar with the story, let’s take a trip down memory lane together to review some of the highlights of this past year of blogging. Continue reading
StumbleUpon Site Scanner
Does anyone know of a tool or service which I could use on Jeffro2pt0.com that would tell me which pages have been stumbled and perhaps tell me how many thumbs up or thumbs down that particular article received? As a bonus, I’d also like to see reviews of the articles which were submitted.
New Version Of Woopra Released
Excellent news for all of you lucky enough to be able to use Woopra as your statistical analytics package. The Woopra Client is now up to version 1.1.2.1. This new version contains a number of bug fixes alongside some new features.
One of the reasons which might of taken this client update so long to be released is that, according to John P. the client update works hand in hand with the back end architecture of their servers. In other words, the client update comes out at the same time that their back end undergoes an update.
Three features which become immediately apparent are as follows:
- The live map view now displays the page that a visitor is reading as they view it.
- The calendar has been updated to a cool new extremely easy to select slider bar.
- We’ve added multi-monitor support to the full screen live map.
Despite the new features and the bug fixes contained within this release, 1.1.2.1 is considered a minor release with a major version scheduled to be released within the next three weeks or so. Also worthy of mentioning is that all users who have been waiting to be approved should be approved by tomorrow evening. After the approvals, Woopra will have a testing base of over 20,000 users. That is 20,000 users which didn’t exist over 2 months ago.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 