jeffhester.net

Professor Gervaise Germaine explains the difference between data, information and knowledge.

Enjoy!

I’ve got to agree with Boing Boing: Nothing says Merry Christmas like a chihuahua with a rifle, as in this Christmas card from 1895.

No, they haven’t gotten their holidays mixed up, but there is a secret Easter egg sprung over at Flickr. Add a note to a photo with the text “ho ho ho hat” and you can add a Santa hat to the photo. Add a note with “ho ho ho beard” to add a nice, fluffy Santa beard.

Mess with your friends photos (you’re not really changing the photo) — it’s fun! Here are just a few examples.

A little something extra in the eggnog for A Whole Lotta Nothing for sharing this tip!

I’m in Camberley for the next couple of days, and had a very full weekend. Some good friends from Yorkshire came down for the weekend, and Paul and I went to the England-South Africa rugby match at Twickenham. As a result, I’m just now catching up.

So while I catch my breath, I thought I’d share a humorous anecdote forwarded by co-worker Rob Koene. It’s a good example of the great divide that sometimes occurs between management and engineering.

My Fault
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted,

“Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.

“I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I’ve no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip.”

The woman below responded,

“You must be in Management.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems.

The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”

Enjoy!

What is the real Web 2.0? Honestly, as your mom if she gives a crap about AJAX and she’ll say “sure, it gets those stubborn stains out of the tub.” Social networking, interaction, et. al. is expected, but it’s not what people really want from Web 2.0

So what do they want? Coffee, pizza and news. Here it is, in a short video of the real Web 2.0 (courtesy of www.thefirstpost.co.uk).

I saw this on a friend’s blog, and had to give it a try. This little calculator estimates the value of your blog using some assumptions based on what AOL paid for Jason Calcanis’ Weblogs, Inc. Unfortunately, this assumes linear valuation. In reality, the value of a network of websites such as Weblogs, Inc. would more likely follow a logarithmic curve, increasing in value at a higher rate as you get into the rarified air of the “big head.”

But it’s still fun to play make believe, so I ran the number for this humble blog, and found it’s supposedly worth $18,629.82!

Not content to stop with my blog, I dug deeper (I almost spelled that “dug” with two g’s… I wonder why?). Here’s what I found:

• BigBlueBall.com - $108,956.22 (not bad)
• MessengerMods.com - $0.00 (disappointing)
• GetGamer.com - $0.00 (more disappointment)
• HisBuddyIcons.com - $0.00 (etc., etc.)
• and so on…

Just for a fun comparison, I ran the numbers for Flickr, and it returned a valuation of $115,328,747.52. John Battelle estimated that Yahoo! paid in the range of $15-17 million for Flickr last year, making it look like quite a deal!

Now this clever little calculator bases the valuation on the number of incoming links, as reported by Technorati, so if you have sites that don’t really hit the Technorati radar (like many of mine), they’ll end up with a value of zilch. Which points out another flaw in this calculator. It will work better for blogs, especially if they have a tech focus that people save for future reference.

Oh, and if anyone is interested in snapping up jeffhester.net before we do our first round funding, I’ll give you a 10% discount for cash.

Have you ever been in a situation where you wished your cell phone would ring? Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting.

With The Popularity Dialer, you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that’s one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a phone call I need to take…

Last Sunday my neighbor Floyd Landis (actually, he lives a few miles from me) won the Tour de France. A few days later, controversy ensued as ICE announced that one of his six tests during the race showed a higher than normal testosterone level. I don’t know Landis personally, and I truly hope he is innocent and exonerated. But I had to love Stephen Colbert’s take on the controversy on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report.

technorati tags: Landis, tour de france, testosterone, humor