Writing, the Wiki Way

The Wikipedia is powerful. It's huge. It's free. Information by the people, for the people. It's all that. Or is it? What about all the spammers and vandals and misinformed? Can it really be self-policing? Let's do an experiment!

Oh, wait. A.J. Jacobs, a writer for Esquire magazine, already did.

With consent of the Wikipedia administrators, he submitted a draft of an article about Wikipedia to the site and instructed the community to edit it and the results would be used in the magazine.

Wow! Over 373 edits in the first 48 hours. The original article was poorly written and included factual errors. The final version is a much better read. And look through some of the discussion that took place during editing.

Wikipedia is cool. Posted by Chris on 9/30/2005 01:12:00 PM :: Permalink   

TiVo Tribute Wall

Every one of my six coworkers now have TiVo, so Dave and I thought it was appropriate to make a statement. We used the Rasterbator to create a five foot tall TiVoGuy on the wall in our conference bay.

Like William Gibson said, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

But we're working on it.

One coworker at a time.

Labels: tivo

Posted by Chris on 9/29/2005 10:18:00 AM :: Permalink   

Make Huge Poster Prints

You can make prints basically as large as you'd like using a free app called The Rasterbator. You can upload your picture (or one from the web) and they'll convert it for you and send you a printable pdf or you can download the standalone app and create them on your computer.

Either way, you print out all the sheets and then put them together for a big impact. This uses less ink than just resizing and printing poster size in something like Microsoft Publisher because the Rasterbator turns your image into a bunch of dots of varying sizes. It also allows much larger sizes in either color, black and white, or any monochromatic color. Posted by Chris on 9/25/2005 09:51:00 PM :: Permalink   

Tab Mix Plus Firefox Extension

Tabs in Firefox are great, but I need lots of them. I want them to wrap around to multiple lines so I can easily access 15 or more with one click. Previously, I was accomplishing this with the Flowing Tabs extension and some edits to userChrome.css. But this is difficult since Flowing Tabs hasn't been repackaged for recent Firefox releases and I really needed several plugins (like Focus Last Selected Tab, Disable Targets for Download, Tabbrowser Preferences, Session Saver, and UndoCloseTab) to do everything I wanted.

Enter Tab Mix Plus. It handles it all. Just be sure to uninstall any of the above extensions (or similar ones) before installing Tab Mix Plus. So far it works great and replaces so many other extensions. There's also a beta version compatible with the beta release of Firefox 1.5. It adds other features like displaying tabs you haven't yet viewed in red.

Here are my must-have Firefox extensions (in no particular order):

• googlebar
• IE View
• Web Developer
• Download Statusbar
• Google Pagerank Status
• Webmail Compose
• Adblock
• Copy Plain Text
• Image Zoom
• BugMeNot
  
• Forecastfox
• ChromEdit
• DictionarySearch
• About site
• x
  
• Plain Text links
• Bloglines Toolkit
• Spurl
• Diggler
• Tab Mix Plus

Posted by Chris on 9/20/2005 11:08:00 PM :: Permalink   

Look at Me! I'm an Airplane!

We went to the RDU Observation Park today. I had never been but it was pretty cool.

There's a covered observation deck that overlooks a runway and we saw several planes of various sizes take off. You also get to hear the radio chatter between pilot and air traffic control. It's still amazing to watch a huge 747 plane suddenly lift off the ground and start climbing quickly out of sight.

There's a nice flat paved area and mini-runway that the girls loved riding their bikes and scooters on. And we even had snacks at the picnic tables there.

Fun and FREE. More photos here.

Labels: family

Posted by Chris on 9/18/2005 08:49:00 PM :: Permalink   

Victoria's First Face

Aquadoodle drawings fade fast, but blog postings are permanent.

This morning Victoria drew her first face with eyes and a mouth. We thought she was done but she said, "No. He needs a nose."

She wasn't too happy when it soon started to fade away, though.

Labels: family

Posted by Chris on 9/17/2005 12:48:00 PM :: Permalink   

Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a great site with all kinds of really useful info, i.e. "hacks for your life". Not all of the posts are tech related, either.

Phone Fun: Here's a free demo service where you can type a short message and a phone number (US or Canada) and it will call them and read them the message. That's pretty neat in itself, but the demo has a pretty short message limitation.

What's better is that you can spoof the caller ID so it appears that the call is from someone else. You can also pick which voice you want to use. The best for me seemed to be #0 and #3 for female and #4 for male, but try it on yourself to see what you like.

Gmail Groups: Gmail is great, but the addressbook doesn't support groups. If you routinely mail out a newsletter to the same 30 people, you don't want to type their addresses every time. Here's an addressbook trick to get around it.

And let me know if anyone still needs a Gmail invite to get an account. Posted by Chris on 9/16/2005 01:40:00 PM :: Permalink   

Law of Inverse Proportions

Thanks to Dave for this image. Posted by Chris on 9/15/2005 03:59:00 PM :: Permalink   

Children's Lunch Boxes

Last year Delaney had to deal with leaky cups making a soggy mess of her lunch, "creative" food ideas from mom, sappy notes from mom, squished sandwiches, smashed crackers, and the *one* time I actually forgot to send her lunch in with her.

This year I'm glad she's using the same lunch box.

Surprisingly, I didn't cave to the many and frequent requests for a batman or spiderman lunch box. The Disney princess one would be just fine for another year. Even though I secretly (well, not too secretly) am annoyed with the saturation of marketing aimed at my 2 and 4 year olds, but that's a bloggy whine for another day.

Today I say, "Yay Disney! - thanks for not putting lead in your children's lunch boxes."

Really, it seems obvious and simple does it not - don't put poisonous chemicals in the containers for children's food.

But no, apparently it is not obvious. Read more:

Center for Environmental Health: Lead in Children's Lunch Boxes

Be sure to look at the pictures to see if your kid's lunchbox was made by morons.

Posted by Melissa on 9/14/2005 10:18:00 PM :: Permalink   

Google Blog Search

A long time coming, but Google now has a blog-specific search engine. I haven't tried it much myself, but here it is.

Well, searching for "SharpesRUs" sure gives a lot of recent postings on Google blogsearch as compared to the results on Google. Posted by Chris on 9/14/2005 10:16:00 PM :: Permalink   

National Geographic Magazine - WildCam AFRICA

National Geographic Magazine - WildCam AFRICA

This has to be just about the coolest thing I have come across on the internet.

Delaney and Tori love seeing all the animals and hearing the sounds even. It spurred a mini-geography lesson for Delaney as I showed her Botswana on the globe and we talked about some of the surrounding areas.

I've seen warthogs, gazelles, tons of birds, elephants - really, just check it out. The best time to see lots of animals is at their sunrise, which just happens to be the middle of the night here - for the insomniacs out there. Posted by Melissa on 9/14/2005 11:12:00 AM :: Permalink   

Declaration of Revocation by John Cleese

http://www.stephaniemiller.com/declarationofrevocation.htm

For those of you that find John Cleese as inherently funny as I do - a treat. Enjoy.
Posted by Melissa on 9/14/2005 10:19:00 AM :: Permalink   

Another Myth Lives On

This weekend, I was filling up the car and happily paying $2.89 a gallon. I noticed the pump in front of me displayed this warning prominently among the countless list of dos and don'ts. And notice it's not just saying not to talk on a cell phone. It says you should reach into your pocket and turn it off.

But this simply isn't true. There are no verifiable cases of a cell phone ever igniting a gasoline fire. Furthermore, the guys from the wonderful TV show Mythbusters disproved it by experimentation. They tried using faulty cell phones and shorted batteries with intense gasoline vapors in controlled environments and were unable to create an explosion.

Urban legends aren't just circulated on the Internet. They might be right in front of you. Just because they're in print doesn't make them any more credible. Posted by Chris on 9/12/2005 12:40:00 PM :: Permalink   

The Factory

After painting their own pottery at Works of Clay this morning, the girls had a few minutes to enjoy the fountain at The Factory in Wake Forest.

Labels: family

Posted by Chris on 9/03/2005 07:16:00 PM :: Permalink   
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