Zooomr is a relatively new photosharing site, started by an 18-year old late last year (when he was 17 – boy I feel old), as a direct competitor to other photosharing sites, many of which aren’t that old themselves. It’s got all the catchy web2.0 features – a nice Ajax interface, the use of Lightbox for image loading effects, and the catchy “er” to “r” transformation. It also features geo-tagging, by way of integration with Google Maps, allowing you to show where the photo was taken. They recently opened their beta to the public, and began offering free Pro accounts to bloggers. Naturally, I had to give it a try.
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Spam is pervasive; it is everywhere. If Ben Franklin were alive today, he’d probably be quoted as saying that “In this world nothing is certain but death and spam“. In fact, it’s one of the major downsides of the web as we know it. With increased availability of information, comes the inevitability of spam – direct consumer marketing thrown in alongside legitimate content that decreases the SNR (Signal-to-noise Ratio), effectively making it harder to find quality, real information on the Internet.
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Well, it’s time for another cottage weekend, thanks again, to Meaghan. The first one was a blast, and the weather’s even hotter now. Hopefully, there’ll be less bugs this time of year, but if not, I’m loading up on the bug spray. Unfortunately, my shoulder’s still a little sore, so I probably won’t try waterskiing again… not that I was all that great before though. I look forward to the relaxation though, and it’ll be a nice change to get away from computers and the Internet (and all of its tubes) for a while.

Should be back on Sunday, hopefully with some more pics!

I’ve written about CMS platforms before and how they’re finally getting greater usage among large institutions like universities. Back then, it was about how Queen’s adopted Apache Lenya, perhaps a lesser-known CMS, in a pilot project to unify Faculty and Department websites. Having a common “look & feel” is important to an institution such as University, if it wants to present itself as professional and competent; besides this it also makes content much easier to manage. That was why I was pleasantly surprised to see the Engineering Society of Queen’s adopt Drupal to manage their website.
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Apple recently released their new Mighty Mouse, this time clipping the cord to make it wireless and adding upgrading the tracking from optical to laser. While it’s certainly an improvement, it’s by no means groundbreaking. Yet, fanboys everywhere seem to be rejoicing about this momentous occassion and harshly criticizing anyone who dares disagree with the significance of this event. Why?
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I wrote about Windows Live Mail before, back when it was apparently having some server problems. Those problems have been solved, but the issue of quality and usability remains. While I don’t like uninformed bashing of Microsoft products just for the sake of doing so, Windows Live Mail has some real problems with usability that need to be resolved before it goes out of beta and becomes “live”.
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With all this hullabaloo about how neat and nifty web 2.0 technologies need to be made more mainstream, useful and practical technologies can often be forgotten. One of the things out there that I believe is a core part of web 2.0 is syndicated content, known variously as (thanks to competing standards) RSS, Atom, and XML (in the early days) feeds. What exactly do all these acronyms represent? Well, it’s complicated, but basically it’s a way to stay up-to-date on the newest content and information from your favourite websites – essentially subscribing to them, and allowing you to focus on quality content instead of having to weed out the junk. It’s a form of crack for tech news junkies who have to be “in the know” about everything new that happens.
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I recently watched a re-run of the CBC’s Fifth Estate on Bird Flu, which was done in a docu-drama format (whatever that is), entitled, Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic. It originally aired back in January of this year, right at the height of flu season, and is quite an alarmist view of what would happen if the H5N1 strain of Avian Flu were to mutate into a form spreadable from human-to-human.
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This Wednesday, while playing ultimate, I sprained my shoulder in an unfortunate situation – I went for a dive for a disc, got bumped by another player, and came down a little hard on my left shoulder. I thought I heard it *pop*, but then again, I yelled “OW” pretty loud, so it’s hard to say – I don’t really remember. But, it did hurt. A team mate thankfully drove me to a clinic, where the doctor didn’t have anything particularly bad to say. Another good sign is that I got ice on it pretty fast.

So, now it’s just pretty sore – I don’t have full range of movement but I am doing range-of-motion exercises to keep it from getting stiff, and it doesn’t feel that bad. I had previously injured my right shoulder last year, so I had been doing shoulder exercises with weights to strengthen them to prevent this sort of injury – though I did come down pretty hard on it, and the doctor seems to have thought it could have been a lot worse if I had had less muscle there. So, maybe the training did help. Continued

If you’re into web design or development at all, you’ve probably run into the term “web standards” and the W3C, the body whose job it is to organize and draft these specifications. The truth is, web standards are still by-and-large, just suggestions on how to do certain things, and are as of yet, not completely and widely followed. This is more an artifact of the way the web and browsers have evolved, but sometimes, you gotta wonder what the W3C is thinking.
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