robots are cool

A cute yellow robot that dynamically senses audio beats and then DANCES TO THEM?

Hell yes.

I want one.

Also, it was developed at CMU. Woot woot.

If you want more info, check out his home page. They're not for sale, to my eternal sadness.

library complete!

Whew, that was time consuming. But I finished scanning my library. And my author cloud now much more accurately reflects my collection. (Even the embarrassing parts, like the big shelf full of Dragonlance books which make my author cloud have a big ass Margaret Weis in it.)

Warren Ellis kind of cheated, though. Every one of his graphical novels counts as a book, so he ends up dominating the cloud, even though in terms of shelf space, other authors have him beat. But that's okay cause I love me some Transmet.

I even added a cool little widget on the side panel of the blog that pops up five random books from my collection. What a great website.

the consumerist

Heh, the Consumerist found me and linked to my post about DirecTV being a bunch of incompetent idiots and trying to charge me for my own Tivo.

It's fun reading people's comments both there and on the original blog entry. My favorite is the ones accusing me of having a stolen Tivo, and the crazy luddite who claimed we should all stop using DVRs and go back to VCRs.

I knew something was up when I woke up this morning and had a queue comments to moderate on a month old blog entry. It's a weird feeling when the interwebs turn their attention your way.

tonight we dine in vegas

librarything is awesome

I've been playing around with Librarything tonight, and it is really amazing.

It's a website where you can scan in your whole library of books by ISBN, and it tracks it all for you.

Isn't this like delicious library, or mediaman, or X, you ask? No, not really. It's got a LOT more data. It's done Web 2.0 style so you can tag each of your books. This comes in really handy for things like "loaned" or "read/unread" or even "library/office" for location, etc. The tags are totally up to you.

It's also got a mobile interface so I can be in a bookstore and verify my home library that I don't have a book before I purchase it.

I can make my whole library available to the world, like so:

My Library

And you can all look at my books, ask if you can borrow one you haven't read, etc. If you guys join up, you can add each other to your 'watch list', which is the equivalent of 'friending'. Let me know your username if you do.

There's some really cool features too, like looking at my author cloud, which shows that a) I'm an enormous nerd, and b) I haven't gotten past G in my fiction categorizing.

They also collect a lot of cool statistics, which will be more useful once I've tagged and entered more, but it's fun to see how many of my books were written in each decade, etc.

Also, importantly, you can get your data out in any number of ways, exported as CSV, RSS feeds, you name it. So I won't be locked in like with some of those other solutions.

I've entered two bookshelves of books so far, with several left to go. What's hilarious is my technical books took about 10 minutes with a cuecat, boop boop boop and they were all done. My fiction books are HELL. Any of my sci fi books from before 1980 don't have bar codes, so I have to hand type ISBNs, and even then a lot of books don't even have that, so I have to look them up by title and try to find the right edition. But thank god I'll only have to do it once.

The only thing I can't quite get my head around is ONLY relying on tagging. I yearn for more data columns. I want a column for "loaned" with the person's name. I want a column for "read/unread" with checkboxes, so I can quickly go through my whole library and click the ones I've read so I know which I haven't. Tags SUCK for speed. I don't want to have to edit each book and paste in the word "read", I want to click a checkbox. I know this is the new, modern way of doing things, but it still isn't good for speedy usage.

My big wishlist is, do things other than books. I've got bar codes on my DVDs and games and CDs, and they can be looked up at Amazon. Why isn't this being supported? I assume it's coming, that'd be a huge oversight to just focus on books, instead of categorized media. You've already done the work to tie to Amazon, this should just happen.

Check it out, and let me know your username if you end up using it.

Tellme -> Microsoft

This week, after lots of stress and speculation and suspense, my company, Tellme, got sold to Microsoft.

So far it seems like a pretty sweet deal. They came in and talked to us, and they're pretty excited about the whole thing, and the benefits of working for a big ass company are shocking after being at a dot-com for so long. 401k matching? Bonuses? What are these things?

We're still in the governmental approval phase, and that will move on to the assimilation phase, but so far I'm feeling pretty good. It looks like they want to take Tellme's voice technology and put it in lots more things than we'd ever be able to on our own. A few years from now, you might turn on your car and use Tellme to find a local restaurant, or use Xbox live to get tickets to a movie through Tellme, etc. There's lots of possibilities when you're Microsoft.

Anyway, during the buyout, I took lots of pictures, because it was surreal beyond belief. We all basically stopped working and started drinking once it was obvious that the announcement would come later in the day. What was amazing was that everyone filtered into the game room, and we had a HUGE gathering, and killed a bottle of rum and maybe five of scotch, and then all filed into the main room to hear the big news.

Here's some pictures of what it looks like to be bought by Microsoft:




Our game room, drinking:







Back out in the main room for the annoucement:



We all signed the bottle of booze we finished:



A crappy, blurry shot of our CEO and the President of the Business division of Microsoft making the actual announcement:



Nothing but class:



Here's a link to the full album, if you wanna see all the shots:

http://picasaweb.google.com/tobin.coziahr/MicrosoftSale

even i can't believe it

If you get this, and think it's funny, you're a huge, huge geek. *

http://icannhascheezburger.com/

Thank god domain registrations are so cheap now, because when I get a stupid idea like this in the middle of the night, I can make it a reality for $8.

The two hours I spent setting it up, I can never have back.

I still giggle every time I look at it though.

Course, when the cat picture meme is dead in like five minutes, no one will even know what the hell this is, but I don't care. The net is ephemeral, but my stupid sense of humor will drag on for far longer than the joke is funny.

* (Okay fine, here's the hint.)

musings on the web 2.0

Amazon just came out with Askville, which is a google Answers knockoff, but if you'll remember, Google answers actually paid people to answer questions.

Amazon picked up on the essence of what Web 2.0 is becoming, which is getting people to make money for companies, without giving those people any compensation at all other than recognition.

So you answer questions, and get experience points, and "level up" in certain areas of knowledge. Cost to Amazon, other than maintaining the site? Nothing.

It's similiar to the old "Employee of the Month" programs, where employees work harder for something that costs the company nothing to give them. It's sneaky, but it works great.

Now, Web 2.0 has made this global. Everyone's busting their ass to do things for free on websites for any sort of recognition, Digg has "top diggers" for people who submit and digg lots of stories, YouTube has "most watched" and "most commented on", Amazon has these new experience points and levels.

Meanwhile, these companies make millions, (or billions), and pay you nothing. It's pretty amazing. And like I've said before, this is being sold as a power revolution with people coming out as the winners. I guess in a way, we do all win. The power and flexibility of user generated content and user-policed web space is pretty amazing. I just can't believe the amount of shit people will do for intangible compensation.