Server scare

So, I accidentally let my contract with the web hosting to expire, and the site was down for a short period of time. But in the interim, I was afraid that I might have lost months of posts from whenever I last backed up the website. Happily and thanks to the good folks at IXWebhosting, the site is back up, and none of the files were lost. Now, I’m off to back up the server.

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Twitter sitter

Credit: Will Oremus

Via Slate:

Nielsen, the media-analytics and ratings firm, has published an important new study this week on the state of social media. Its insights are trenchant and wide-ranging, and they have given the media much to digest. You’ve got gender disparities in the amount of time spent on social media. You’ve got the rise of Twitter as a second screen. You’ve gotPinterest as the fastest-growing social network. But most importantly by far, you’ve got nothing short of a paradigm shift in how Americans use the bathroom.

Yes, according to Nielsen, 32 percent of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 report that they engage in social networking while on the pot. Nielsen did not report the numbers for other demographics. But it’s well-understood in the technology industry that the behavior of this bellwether group heralds the shape of things to come for the nation as a whole. In short, our days of leafing through newspapers and magazines on the commode are numbered.

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Some random coolness

I was just doing some stumbling around today and found a few nifty sites. Here’s some random examples of coolness from Cyberspace:

Fractal Lab: Here, you can play around with fractal art without having to download a program onto your computer. Just create the fractal right in the web browser. Of course, since fractals are fairly complicated digital images rendered using algorithms, push the settings too high and your browser and/or computer might freeze, depending on the badassery (or not) of your particular system. I created this image while playing around:

Fractal Lab

B-Rhymes: This is a handy tool for poets or song writers. Plug a word into the search, and the site returns words that rhyme but those that might not be so obvious. Unless a person is trying to write a terrible poem or song, for instance, one probably should not rhyme “fun” with “sun.” This search returns more uniquely crafted rhymes. For instance, I entered “stereotactic” and got such gems as “peripatetic” (Consequently, this is my screen name in [[Counter Strike: Source]] with one letter variation), “extragalactic” and “bacteriostatic.”

Flickr Related Tag Browser: This is a different kind of browser that works within a more spatial context, grabbing images based on whatever word a person enters into the search field. I put in the word, “poo,” and here is a screenshot of the result:

Flickr Related Tag Browser

Each of the words in the white rectangles can be clicked to get their respective search results.

And my favorite of the day …

Conflict History: This site offers an interactive map that traces all the battles and conflicts on the planet dating back to B.C. The timeline at the bottom is scrollable, and when loaded, the battles for the particular time periods are highlighted in red and more information is available for each of them. The first war that I could find was the [[Kurkshetra War]], dating back to 2993 B.C.

Conflict History

 

Something cool

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a couple weeks, but the Google Chrome browser comes with a slew of add-ons, called “extensions,” to enhance and make users’ browsing experience more productive. One of the more unique and aesthetic extensions is called Cooliris, which is sort of a visually pleasing way to browse the Internet. Once installed in Chrome (which takes only seconds), users see a large menu to the left with items ranging from “Photos of the Day” to “News” to “Sports” to “Movies and Trailers” to “Games” and more. Once a menu item is clicked, the user is then able to scroll through items of interest in sort of a visual vortex or a tunnel-esque collage. To see what I mean, here is a screenshot:

Screenshot

Items scroll from left to right or vice versa and users can use the mouse to cycle through the selections. Clicking on a picture or news item of interest takes a person to the actual website. For the record, I highly recommend Google Chrome for general Web viewing. It has proven, at least to me, to be quite fast (faster and less glitchy than Explorer), although, since the code for many websites is written with the assumption that most people use Explorer, certain features within websites may not work in Chrome. I’ve found such cases to be rare.