January 31, 2006

links for 2006-01-31

Filed under: Bookmarks | Lindsay @ 12:20 pm

January 30, 2006

links for 2006-01-30

Filed under: Bookmarks | Lindsay @ 12:18 pm
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January 29, 2006

Do picture IDs really mean anything?

Filed under: My Life | Lindsay @ 9:44 pm

I have been wondering about something lately and I thought I’d see if anyone else has some insight to offer. This weekend I bought some clothes at the mall and I was asked to show my driver’s license. That in itself isn’t odd, since some stores ask for that as a policy, and sometimes clerks just ask for it when they don’t think the signature on your credit card is legible. This time the clerk actually did a double take… she looked at my picture, then looked at my license and then at the picture again for a minute before shrugging and handing it back to me. And that didn’t suprise me… but what did is the fact that she didn’t say anything after all.

About a year and a half ago I reached a significant, life-changing personal milestone: I stepped on on the scale and weighed 95lbs less than I had almost 2 years before that day. I lost all that weight faithfully following the Atkins diet and during the process watched the surprised expressions on the faces of family, friends and acquaintances that hadn’t seen me in a while when they didn’t recognize me and suddenly realized who I was. I look like a completely different person.

Judge for yourself:

Driver’s License pic Recent similar pic
Driver's License Pic Recent ID-type Pic

Knowing that I am the same person in both those pictures, you can definitely see the resemblance, but if your responsibility was making sure that a person is who they say they are, wouldn’t you at least question it if you were presented with my license? Especially if you were an airport security agent in the U.S. with our perpetual state of “Orange Alert” because everyone is a potential terrorist?

So, why is it that I have been through several airports and many financial transactions where I’ve been asked to show my license but never once been asked whether I was really the person in the picture? Am I (and other people I know) deluded into thinking that I look significantly different now? Is it simply a race thing, not questioning because I’m a white female? Do I look particularly trustworthy? Could it possibly be people trying to avoid embarrassing me (I can’t imagine that!)? Or is it that no one pays attention to ID pictures after all? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking to be interrogated every time I show my license. I’m just curious as to why no one has ever asked…

If you’re wondering why I haven’t updated my license, mainly it’s because I’m lazy. I’ve been waiting for it to become more of a hassle to not change it than to wait at the DMV for 3 hours and stand in 5 or more lines to get it fixed. But since no one has ever bothered me about it, it’s not yet worth the pain. Besides, I figure if there is anywhere where I will encounter trouble proving that I’m really who I say I am, the DMV will be the place.

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Self-replicating robots

One more step towards the future, guys. Make these self-replicating robots nano-sized and it’ll be The Diamond Age

Flying Dogs

The video called “Birds” on this site is so cool. Hairy dogs + gravity + slow motion = very cute!

links for 2006-01-29

Filed under: Bookmarks | Lindsay @ 12:17 pm

January 28, 2006

links for 2006-01-28

Filed under: Bookmarks | Lindsay @ 12:17 pm

January 27, 2006

Stiki Pad - the new personal wiki

Filed under: Reviews | Lindsay @ 10:38 pm

Stiki PadI was deliciousing today and saw a link to a beta site called Stiki Pad. When I clicked on the link it was an email signup form with the tagline “Launching (very soon)”. I read the blurb and sent my email and started adding the site to my own del.icio.us archive. When I hit save and the page refreshed, it was live! I guess they weren’t fooling around with the term “very soon”!

So I signed up and started playing with it. I’m pretty impressed.

I’ve toyed with wikis before and I’m always looking for new ways to store and organize the information I gather. My fascination with informatics software started when I was introduced to Microsoft OneNote. The free-form note storage with tabbed pages and deep searches was great, but code snippet tab-stops were destroyed by the automatic formatting and that was a problem since a lot of things I wanted to store were code. I found Instiki and played with it for a while but I didn’t like having to start the Ruby WebBrick server every time I wanted to use it. I was completely fascinated with the micro-content wiki variation TiddlyWiki for several months, and even created a version of it that allowed you to tag your entries but for some reason or another I just quit using it after a while. I didn’t want to go to the trouble of hosting my own wiki online mainly because most of them run on Apache servers. But Stiki Pad requires no independant hosting or setup and looks like it will be a good alternative for me.

Besides the fact that the site has a nice, clean, pleasing design, there are several things about Stiki Pad that make it stand out beyond the things that you’d expect from a wiki service:

  • You can access your wikis by defining your own subdomain. For instance: I could create macrolinz.stikipad.com
  • *You can associate your own domain with your wiki
  • *You have almost complete control over the look and feel of your wiki: You can style your wiki using CSS and set up templates which control the whole page structure if you want to reuse a format you’ve created that was useful
  • You can tag your wiki pages
  • *You can monetize your wiki by displaying your Google Ads!
  • *You can upload files to store on their servers so you can store more than just textual information
  • You can grab your data as RSS, HTML or PDF (Stiki Pad is not a walled garden)!

There is a free account but some of the advanced services (*) are only for paying plans. The plans look fair except possibly except for the bandwidth restrictions. And the amount of storage could potentially be increased, considering that the standard for most services that offer online storage is at least 1GB for free these days. Don’t plan on using this site as a substitute for a blog if you expect to get any significant amount of traffic. But for personal use, keeping family and friends in touch and keeping small groups of people organized and collaborating, it would be a good choice.

In all this seems like a very interesting service that I plan to find some good uses for. Today was a good day for delicious surfing!

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links for 2006-01-27

Filed under: Bookmarks | Lindsay @ 12:18 pm

January 26, 2006

links for 2006-01-26

Filed under: Bookmarks | Lindsay @ 12:18 pm