·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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I’ve never been a big fan of sports. In fact, I’ve always been confused and more than a bit irritated that sports scores are considered news. When I was on a command center watch floor, the three channels that were shown were CNN, CNN-Headline News and ESPN. Really.

Imagine my joy at seeing the new Fantasy Congress. It’s pretty much what you think it might be. Draft legislators into your team, earn points for their performance and compete against others. Just drafting my team was an education. Some high performers you might suspect, like Sen John Warner or Sen John McCain. What intrigued me was that a disproportionate number of the high earners were women. Hmmm. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The ability to test physics by writing on a blackboard….I mean whiteboard, is just cool. And this video is at least several months old. Not sure where the technology is now.
YouTube - MIT sketching

As you know, I’m not a fan of PowerPoints, but here’s an interesting idea. Many-to-Many reports that Slideshare wants to be the YouTube of presentations.

I’m not sure about this, because so many slide decks are considered to be internal information. Perhaps in academia this makes more sense than it does to me. YouTube was initially fueled by bootlegged segments of the Daily Show and home-made Funniest Home Videos rejects. I’m not sure where the impetus for people to post and view will come from here.

You need to be invited to use the beta.

The Navy has embarked on yet another reading program. I’m a fan of these, since I’m always looking for something good to read or to listen to in the car. What I’m not a fan of is the format of the list. I’d like a list where I can login, check off the ones I’ve read, search Audible.com, mark the ones I’ve downloaded to my GPS (which BTW has an MP3 player, very nice), search my local library for others, and search Amazon for the rest. Maybe even write reviews, metatag it, search and read other reviews, and add my own recommendations for similar reading.

Is this too much to ask? Okay, I’ve found Reader2. They have some features, but not everything that I really want.

I’m convinced that companies don’t know how to slowly ship anything anymore. Tuesday I ordered some new toys (webcam and GPS). Figuring that the playing could wait and know that we didn’t have any trips in our near future, I opted for the “budget” shipping. 7-10 days, they promised. My webcam arrived yesterday and my GPS is on track to be delivered today. That’s 2-3 days for those keeping score - one day faster than the “standard” shipping of 3-5 days.

Is warehouse space that expensive? I suspect that they have a shipping process and that it’s a pretty efficient one at that. Changing their process to accommadate those of us who aren’t in a hurry is more expensive than changing for the ones in a hurry.

NetFlix is offering a prize of one million dollars to see who can improve their recommendations system. What’s interesting about this (to me, anyway) is not the dollar amount or the problem they’re trying to solve. It’s the way they’re trying to solve it.

Logo designers have long hated the idea of a logo design contest, as they believe that such free work undermines the true value of their profession. Will code developers backlash against this type of thing as well? Or will the Open Source tradition of code development for free and for the spirit of the hunt win out?