A couple of weeks ago, G4’s Morgan Webb started up a daily video show about what’s going on in the world of tech. I watched the first one and although I enjoyed it, I promptly forgot about it. At the time (it was day 1 after all) there wasn’t a feed or anything. You had to hit the website to watch.

Well today I remembered it again, and now she has a feed set up so I promptly subscribed via iTunes and slurped down the 7 episodes I hadn’t seen. I just finished watching them all, and yup, the show is still pretty good. Morgan is genuinely likable (well, to me anyway, but I feel like I’ve watched her grow up from her first nervous days of appearing on The Screensavers) and the content is interesting and succinct. She then offers links for further info.

If you’re interested in tech, it’s well worth watching.

Today I’m testing out Lijit. It’s kind of a personal search engine that gathers content from your blog, all kinds of social networking sites you might be a part of, bookmarking sites, etc.

At least, that’s my understanding. I generally sign up for stuff like this first, then go back and understand it later.

Of course, I’ve got all kinds of links on here to places I signed up for then never used… for instance my del.icio.us bookmarks haven’t been updated in years.

Lijit Search

Well, it’s interesting but certainly not perfect. I tried searching on “Skellig” which is the name of a book I reviewed here some time ago. Search came up empty. Going to google and searching on site: dragonchasers.com skellig does return results so Google has spidered me.

Ah well, what do you want for nothin, right?

I just signed up for Me.dium, which is kind of part social network, part cyber-stalker-tool. I jest, of course, but what it does is let you see where on the web your friends are, and let’s you chat with them.

Honestly I’m not sure what the experience is going to be like, so I won’t talk a lot about it yet. But I got a “Widget” centered around this site and I wanted to try it out, so here it is:

OK, so there it is. But what does it mean? What is the relationship that Med.ium is finding between this site and the ones that ‘surround’ it?

More research required…

A while back I wrote about an article on using CAPTCHAs to digitize books.

Well it looks like the technology has been launched!. I just encountered it when signing up (last one into the pool as always) for a Facebook account.

Anyway in my original post I speculated on how this would work. Well, this new post is just to pat myself on the back, because this is from the ReCaptcha site, and it’s pretty close to what I’d guessed.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

There’s a lot of smart people in the world but I’m generally not one of them, so when I get something right its cause for celebration! 🙂

So I’m in crunch time for the first time in a long, LONG time. I worked on a project from 9 am to 11 pm today, and tomorrow will be pretty much the same.

And y’know, it feels great. After so long of being a fixer or a cleaner-upper, I’m working on a project that I totally own from start to finish. Of course, it has a crazy short development cycle, ergo the crunch time. But I think I set myself up to work best under pressure way back when I was a teenager working in restaurant kitchens. I learned to love the pressure then, and I think because of that I still do my best work when the chips are down and the deadline is looking impossible.

My biggest problem is the part of me that procrastinates; I think its my subconscious trying to create those high-pressure situations.

Anyway, rambling. But today was the first time in a long time that I truly felt good about something I was building, since I’m building it my way. No one to blame but me if it fails. No one to take the credit if its a hit. 🙂