Kedrosky votes for London Heathrow (LHR), but I'm here to tell you that Frankfurt (FRA) is the worst airport in the world.
Here's why Frankfurt is 2X the crappiness of Heathrow.
- It's ugly
- There's no place to sit
- The workers are German, not known for hospitality
- You miss a connection, good luck Charlie.
- You are in Frankfurt, Germany. Not London England.
The one good thing about Frankfurt - the beer and pretzels in the Lufthansa first class lounge.
Heathrow has one special charm to offset its many problems: imagine you have arrived on a red-eye from the west coast. You're getting in at 6am. You get off the plane and onto a bus. Normally I hate buses after the plane - i.e. Dulles. The bus drives thru the bowels of the airport (on the wrong side of the road). You are barely awake, but the sensation of driving thru a life-size LEGO airport, with all the little workers in colorful jumpers, driving LEGO like vehicles around, is something that amuses me every time....
I know, I'm weird, but there you are.
Labels: randomness
¶ 1/30/2008
A good article from BusinessWeek on how to present like Steve Jobs. ¶ 1/28/2008
Andrew Goodman notes the bearishness of the press on Google's Q4 outlook. The Investor's Business Daily article he casts doubt on is typically crappy reporting on the search engine world.
In the article, they cite Nielsen numbers and claim that the number of searches that google gets is declining, month over month for the last quarter. Here's what they write:
Some evidence suggests a search slowdown. The average number of daily Google searches in the U.S. fell from 4.4 million in October to 4.2 million in November to 4 million last month, says Nielsen.
Holy Dr. Evil, Batman! How order of magnitudinally challenged can one be?
Now the actual Nielsen release covering search isn't too hard to read, but apparently the reporter at IBD isn't good at maths.
Google gets at least 4 BILLION US searches per day you idiots! See the (000) in the table column header? Not 4 million.
Thank goodness those professional business journalists have editors to catch these minor over sights...
Seriously if you want cogent analysis on search engine share, Danny Sullivan is one of the few games in town. Be sure to read the caveats.
Labels: google
¶ 1/28/2008
I ordered some address labels from Vistaprint.com. They give them to you basically for free, and you just pay shipping.
The way that Vistaprint saves money is rather ingenious. They mail you the labels as sheets, and they send regular envelopes. See the picture. I ordered 480 labels, and got six envelopes. I was expecting a little roll, but I think their printing technology is cheaper based on sheets.
The labels I got were pretty plain, but Vista print offers lots of different designs. Unless you really like the roll form factor, give Vistaprint a try for the next batch of address labels you need.
Labels: vistaprint
¶ 1/18/2008
Rich Skrenta points to a web article by database experts Michael Stonebraker and David Dewitt, as they exude a fusillade of hate on Google's Map / Reduce computing model.
Skrenta dubs their screed: "The sound of disruption".
Basically they mis-understand the purpose of the thing. One thing Map / Reduce is great at is processing log files. Databases aren't so hot when you have 100M things a day or more to look at.
As I wrote earlier, Google is making efforts to get college kids to learn to think in map / reduce ways. Now they are offering free access to scientific datasets in mapreduce clusters to certain universities.
The upshot is that the web requires parallel processing. No one has really extracted a lot of knowledge out of the terabytes of web usage data that flow by every day.
But the data is out there, and paradigms like map / reduce are how it's gonna be dissected. So if you want to work in the consumer web, with billions of users doing stuff every day, leaving data tracks, you should spend some time learning map / reduce.
Not to get too geeky, but to collect these in a single place, here are some key papers to read if you want to understand the google architecture:
And a bit of bonus inspiration - the story of how an New York Times blogger converted 70 years of archives (over 11 million articles) to PDF in under a day using Hadoop on Amazon EC2.
¶ 1/18/2008
A good Fred Vogelstein Wired piece on the making of the iPhone describing how the iPhone really broke open the carriers closed world.
Application developers are poised to gain more opportunities as the wireless carriers begin to show signs of abandoning their walled-garden approach to snaring consumers. T-Mobile and Sprint have signed on as partners with Google's Android, an operating system that makes it easy for independent developers to create mobile apps. Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network.
The first player that brings people into the broken down walls of the garden usually has a nice advantage.
Labels: apple, iphone, technology
¶ 1/16/2008
For the past 3 years, I've had 3 or 4 monitors on my desk. Two 20" Dells, a 17" Dell and a laptop.
People may scoff at the relatively puny 20" and 17" sizes, but I also regularly go into a different office and use a Dell 30" with my laptop.
Dual 30" monitors would seem like a great solution, but my problem is that they don't have any curve to them. They are actually too big!
With a group of smaller monitors, you can angle them so they form a curved array, and that makes viewing more comfortable for me. As I swivel in my chair, I'm facing one of my screens pretty much square-on.
If I was to start over, I'd probably go for three 24" monitors, turned sideways.
But today I see that Alienware is promising to ship a curved 42" monitor. Something I've been waiting for. I think curved monitors are the way of the future for desktop screens.
Now I can wait until those curved LED or LCD monitors come out, and come down in price to about $1400. Lest you forget, Alienware is actually owned by Dell these days.
¶ 1/10/2008
I was watching late nite TV and saw this ad. (See the website, in the upper left corner.)
It's INSANELY ABSURD. It would be impossible to parody.
It just gets better and better as it goes. I pretty much spit my drink out when I saw the cream injection.
Labels: randomness
¶ 1/08/2008
