When I read that ex-Google engineers were coming out with an uber-cool engine to trump Google, I was excited.  So I hopped right over to cuil.com to check it out.

What I first noticed was that the start page was verrah nice.  The Mac-ish look offered up dreams of sweet searchy goodness to come.  Since I am a bit of a Celtic Mythology buff, I thought I’d pay homage to the name of the engine on my first search and type in “Celtic Mythology”.

While I saw some spammy results earlier in the day, I decided to come back and give the Cuil another kick at the can, as everyone is allowed some rollout pains.  What I was greeted with on my next go round was clean, academic quality content that made me catch my breath.  They also feature a pic from the home page, a feature that I am surprised that Google didn’t adopt a long time ago (maybe because Anna left?  Hmmm….)

I like the democratic nature of Cuil’s results too.  Fellow SEO buffs will enjoy saying “you’re on the first page” rather than “you are #10″.  I’m sure there is a way to count but lets all just leave it alone if we can (I know, we can’t, but you can’t blame a girl for having a dream).

And may I say THANK YOU for keeping Yahoo Answers out of the top search results.  That app is the worst thing of life to happen to search engines, ever.  If I wanted an amateur to solve my problem, I’d ask myself the question.

The Explore By Category box adds a lovely touch to the whole dynamic, allowing you to follow a breadcrumb trail to related subjects if you so desire.

The real test for me will be in researching the many articles I write.  I’ll keep you posted, but from what I have skimmed on the surface I have a feeling that these search waters run deep.  Major, major kudos.

Posted: July 28th, 2008 under Technobabble.
Comments: none

This has been a slow, creeping addiction.  I start off all of my addictions this way.  When I smoked, it was just a couple of cigarettes when I was drinking, then it slowly bled over into my daily life.  When I played Shadowbane to the exclusion of all other social interaction, I just started playing a few hours a week and by the time I was done I was commanding an army over over 100 people online, every night.

Now it’s Facebook.  Oh yeah, I started off slow.  I just checked my messages, looked for old friends, and had the pleasure of reconnecting with a few.  Then I started on the games.  That is where the trouble started.

There’s this little outfit named Backstage Technologies out of Vancouver that makes little free gambling games that follow the addict’s pattern of risk/reward rather nicely.  I have all of them on my Facebook profile.  I play Slots everyday to get more credits for Scratch and Win, and play Pull Tabs every chance I get.

Then some scintillating asshole released a game called “Might of Many”.  Remember MUDS, text-based games on the BBS’s that were basically a D&D game online?  Remember how fun those were?  Yeah, some genius decided to stick a MUD on Facebook.  Goodbye world, hello guild-building.

Might of Many has also destroyed the pristine quality of my friends list.  It has diluted it with mouth-breathing strangers from all over the world (like me) who are completely addicted to it.  By the way, if you are a MoM player, my game name is Ilia (that is I as in Ivan, L as in lovely - ia).  Add me dude.

I have resorted to an 8 hour a day lockout on Facebook. If I even find myself going to the address bar, I check myself and go to one of my daily news sites for a break instead.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain… sweating… but I’ll try!

Posted: July 9th, 2008 under Technobabble.
Comments: none

Today I saw an article on how future capital businesses are valuing the site LinkedIn at 1 Billion dollars.  That’s a lot of zeroes. 

Then I log in to my LinkedIn account.  What do I do with this?  I import my e-mail contacts and add them to LinkedIn.  That’s about it.  I don’t actually DO anything with it beyond build a network, that one day I may plan to use for world domination, but that’s about the scope of it.  You really have to ask yourself, as I did; is that worth a FREAKING BILLION DOLLARS? 

Google may be worth a billion dollars (considering that I have no concept of money past about 5000.00, bear with me here), Facebook may be worth a billion dollars, but LinkedIn?  LinkedIn?  Seriously? 

Then my little brain started wandering back to the heady days of the tech bubble.  I remember my boss asking me, since I was the nerdiest person he knew, if he should buy Yahoo stock.  My response was yes, to buy as much of it as possible as people are attaching false value to it rather quickly, and then sell it off in a year before it tanks.  He never did buy it and he’s probably still kicking himself, because that turned out to be sound financial advice from a nerd straight out of school. 

You can see little signs of a mini-bubble blowing up again, although I wouldn’t call a one billion dollar valuation of LinkedIn little.  There’s always a story in the media about little software companies being purchased by big software companies, and these amounts are steadily creeping up and up.  Much like what happened during the tech bubble. 

Now I don’t think this means that everyone should divest themselves of tech stock entirely.  I think we need a few more watermark signs like the LinkedIn one.  But if that is any sign, I think a mini bubble burst is on the way. 

LinkedIn.  One Billion Dollars.  Seriously. 

Posted: June 18th, 2008 under Technobabble.
Comments: none

Canadians worried about the coming copyright legislation should be armed with all of the tools possible in order to combat against their personal information being shared with the government.

What a lot of people are not putting together on the copyright legislation story is the fact that ACTA is coming out shortly as well. The Copyright legislation is just one component of a one-two punch that will have most Canadians ponying up fines faster than you can say “how do I cash in my RRSP?”. The copyright legislation simply gives ACTA teeth.

What is ACTA? Basically the government, or law enforcement, can call up your ISP and demand your records. If they see things that they don’t like in there, which will include downloaded music and movies, you will be fined enormous amounts of money under the new copyright legislation. Of course, they will also see your proclivities for midget porn as well, and dagnabbit, noone should have access to my midge lovin’.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has come out with a set of tools that will allow you to check up on your ISP to see if they are storing information on your internet habits. If they are, then it is time to switch to one that is not doing this BEFORE the legislation is voted through, not after. Besides; do you really want to stick with an ISP that is doing this in the first place? Why go with an ISP that already has the tools in place? When you call around to change, ask them if they would hand over your records if required to by law. There are a few out there that will say “No.”. The big guys aren’t one of those that will say no.

This article gives a blow-by-blow on how to install the necessary tool and library. OK, so this really isn’t an option for everyone as not everyone can install the Python library. However, if we are talking about guarding your personal freedom, there is no time like the present to learn.

You also should consider switching if you have ever received a letter or an e-mail asking you to stop using so much bandwidth. This means that the ISP is closely monitoring your activities, and probably storing data on you. No need to install the tool if you have received this warning sign; just switch.

I will be looking for a new ISP myself in the coming months, as I have received in the past an e-mail from Cogeco stating that we went over our download capacity. It didn’t bother me too much before I started reading current news, but boy does it bother me now. That and I can’t see Cogeco saying no to the government, ever.

Here is the screening process I plan to use for my new ISP.

1a. Do you currently collect data on your user’s packets?

If no…

1. Do you know about Acta?
2. If not, send them article.
3. Now that you know about Acta, will you start collecting information on your subscribers if asked to by the government?

I’ll let everyone know which ISP I chose after I go through my process of screening them - and even if they tell me that they don’t use data storage on user habits, I’m still installing the Python tool to check them out anyway.

Update:

Apparently Google is coming out with the tools for you to monitor your ISP.  No Python library required!  Yay Google!  Unfortunately we don’t know when, so my recommendation still stands to get friendly with your inner Python.  No, I didn’t mean heading over to RedTube.com, you sicko.  And you are going to have to actually type it in, I’m not going to link to it.

Posted: June 16th, 2008 under Canada Copyright Reform, Technobabble.
Comments: none