Category: asides

These are quick thoughts that just don’t fit a whole post…

How to loose a game user

From Tateru Nino’s blog:

Sorry, Portal. For nearly a half hour, you asked for wit and ingenuity. Then right near the end you started asking for reflexes. Sorry, I don’t actually have any of those.

Guess I won’t be able to finish the story. A shame.

Switching metaphor or required skillset half-way through a game (or story, or application, or whatever media experience imho) seems like an excellent way to loose audience.

An Italian tumble/side/bookmark-log

Just to start the new year diverging from my resolutions, I started playing a bit more with my tumble log. It’s (mainly) in Italian, and it’s turning out to have a good affordance for being an “inspiration” dump. Which is quite in conflict with how I mainly used this blog so far. Blimey.

So this is my current knowledge toolscape:
ToolScape

how broadband can help save the planet

Just a link to this article by Emily in SmartMobs that reports a study about how broadband access could spare the planet 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases.

How would faster downloads and Web page loads curb the annual flow of globe-warming gases, and by how much? According to the report:

– Telecommuting, a “zero emission” practice, eliminates office space and car commutes: 588 million tons.
– E-commerce cuts the need for warehouses and long-distance shipping: 206 million tons.
– Widespread teleconferencing could bring one-tenth of all flights to a halt: 200 million tons.
– Downloading music, movies, newspapers, and books saves packaging, paper, and shipping: 67 million tons.

Blinking in the fog

a bit disappointed for not being in Berlin, but a bit relieved for being here too.
My Italian holidays are almost over, tomorrow I’ll fly back to London. My hometown this morning is already cloaked in mist, like it was forecasting in numb anticipation.

I spent so little time clackering these days, I feel a bit detox’d and a bit out of spin. Probably would be a good idea to try to get back on “track” in the next few days, maybe with one of the thousands of pet vaporware waiting in the dusty pages of wikis, google docs and email drafts.
Maybe the social news reading one.

But now it’s time for a shower and one more walk.

When Google doesn’t play nice

While helping out $prettybigUKnanopublisher in optimizing their visibility, I came across these odd guidelines for Google News:

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.
[...]
If the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it.

Now, this is weird and quite evil.