The whole thing (including activation) seemed to take less than 10 minutes. I got the 16GB model in white. I sat in the parking garage for at least 15 minutes playing with it before I forced myself to put it down and drive to work.
Category: Technology
Fun with Wordle
I used it to analyze the recent editorials that the Presidential candidates submitted to the New York Times about future Iraq policy.
According to their description, “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Also called a “tag cloud“, a word cloud summarizes the frequency with which certain words in a blob of text appear. Words that appear more often, are displayed larger while words that appear less often are smaller. Unlike the tag cloud for this blog (which appears in left sidebar), Wordle’s clouds are adorable. Their cloud editor is very easy to use and lets you change many aspects of the cloud. I used it to analyze the recent editorials that the Presidential candidates submitted to the New York Times about future Iraq policy.
Social bookmarking
For all those reasons, del.icio.us has become a mainstay in my suite of web applications.
For me, the power of the internet is in its ability to facilitate communication with other people. Thus, I have lately found myself attracted to various “social networking” websites. Most recently I’ve been experimenting with several social bookmarking sites, all of which offer free memberships.
Remix of Radiohead’s “Nude”
James Houston took seriously the challenge by rock band Radiohead to remix their song “Nude”:
Houston explains the remix on the YouTube page. More information about the remix challenge is here. Radiohead’s original is also available on YouTube along with loads of other user-created videos.
A Few Disparate Links
- Happy Birthday Little Graham: Tina’s paean to our youngest son on his 9th birthday. She nailed it.
- Oregonian article on Twitter: Steve Woodward profiles my favorite web service and mentions some of the more popular Portland area Twitterers. He also provides a link to a del.icio.us page with more links to Twitter resources.
- 2008 Presidential Election Interactive Map and History of the Electoral College: Predict who will be our next president.
- NameVoyager: Even if you (like me) don’t have a baby in your future, it’s fun to see naming trends over the last century. Note that the y-axis for the chart adjusts each time you change names.
- Brand Tag Cloud Quiz: Identify the brand based on words/phrases other people have used to describe it. The larger the word, the more often it has been used to describe the brand. You can also feed the quiz.
- The World of Chemistry (below)