... although unfortunately I think the execution isn't so great.

I'm referring to a website called MeetWays, which helps you determine places to meet halfway between points A and B.

You enter in two addresses, and then points of interest, like "pizza" or "McDonalds," and then it will first locate the point halfway between A and B, and also the closest points to that which meet your criteria.

I think that's a great idea, and one I could find a lot of use for, but unfortunately the site seems have some possibly fatal flaws.

For starters, it's really finicky about addresses. Really finicky. I had to purposely misspell my street in order for it to recognize my apartment (springrun instead of Spring Run), and it didn't seem capable of understanding Canadian addresses, like Toronto.

The other issue, probably a deal killer for me, is that it seems to calculate the exact straight-line midpoint between A and B, not the midpoint along normal driving directions between A and B.

In other words, if you put in an address in Detroit, Michigan, and an address in Cleveland, Ohio, you end up with a point about 30 miles east of Put-In-Bay in the middle of Lake Erie, not some point on the Ohio Turnpike.

Years of driving back and forth between Stow and Columbus have demonstrated to my family that the halfway point on that particular drive is Exit 169 on I-71, just south of Mansfield at Ohio Route 13 and Possum Run Road. We've used the McDonald's parking lot there many times, whether it's for shuttling someone like Grandma or for the all-to-frequent times that I have left something important at my parents' when I visit.

But if you put in my apartment address and my parents' condo address, you get a point near Loudonville. Which is close, but not really all that close to an actual driving midpoint.

At any rate, it could be useful, but I think someone could really improve on the concept.

current weather: Cloudy/Drizzle, 63, Wind: SW 10, Rain today: 0.33; The rain and clouds made driving home from my exam with dilated eyes a lot easier this afternoon

Tags: internet, maps
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: none

I was wondering, does anyone have any recommendations for good sources of news on the internet? Specifically, local or national news.

I've had a "My Yahoo" page set up for some time, that I use as a homepage, with news feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters. I liked that setup, but over time, the My Yahoo interface has gotten sort of bloated and I'm finding myself liking it less and less.

For international news, I really love BBC News. They have real comprehensive coverage, and they also tend to cover world stories that I never hear much about anywhere else (except maybe NPR). I would love to find a site which had the same quality and depth of coverage, but focusing more on the United States specifically.

NPR has a good site, but doesn't always include transcripts of its stories, just the audio, which require the NPR player application to listen to, and I can never seem to get it to work right. Even if I could, I'd rather just read than listen.

I don't like Fox News and CNN's web pages very much. I don't really like Fox News's web page format, and it also has a pretty clear bias to one end of the political spectrum. CNN doesn't have such a clear bias, but it is incredibly sensational, with a lot of focus on pointless stories (like "Kid Rock Waffle House Fight Caught on Tape"). I also have some trouble getting CNN's videos to play nice with FlashBlocker.

Reuters has a website, and it's not a bad source of news, but their stories are usually quite short and not particularly in-depth.

The New York Times has its own bias, but even worse, its site and the Wall Street Journal require registration.

The Cleveland TV stations have web pages, but they're not really that great, and in fact, Channel 3 sometimes puts stories up that don't even feature complete sentences or any kind of coherency. For the most local of news, the Stow Sentry has a reasonable site, but it looks like it was designed in 1998 and doesn't support RSS for reading it on a site like Bloglines.

Which is, increasingly, where I read a lot of news. But it's still not any good for any kind of breaking stories.

So have a I missed anything? Are there any other good sources for American national news, or for breaking news, on the internet?

Tags: internet, news
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: curious
Current Music: none

I am a huge fan of the You Don't Know Jack series of game show-type trivia videogames. I used to love playing those in Taylor Tower with Lisa and Carol.

I didn't really realize this, but it's been something like 3 or 4 years since the most recent one came out.

But now, Jellyvision is setting up You Don't Know Jack as an online game.

I suppose it's not quite the same without being able to play with your friends present, but it's still pretty awesome:

http://www.youdontknowjack.com

It looks to me like they post a new quick game every day, so you can keep checking back. Friday's was a game where you had to decide whether something was a name for a kinky sex technique, a form of torture (not endorsed by the U.S. military), or both.

I got 5 out of 7 - I'm not sure what that says about me.

Anyway, it's in beta right now, but it looks like eventually, you'll be able to register and it will keep track of your scores and stuff, which is really cool :).

Also, I apologize for the absolute lack of posting lately. Work, general stress, lack of sleep and Christmas things have just taken up too much of my time. I do have some interesting things to talk about relating to the last couple of weeks.

This week will be just as crazy as last week, maybe even more so, but I'm hoping to still keep up a good schedule of writing. I was doing a really good job at the beginning of the month :(.

current weather: Clear, 35, Wind: calm; It looks like there *might* be some snow coming Monday night

Tags: internet, videogames
Current Location: 40.154N 82.889W
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: none

I accidentally stumbled across a webpage yesterday which I think will be incredibly useful for me, and I thought I would share it in case it is useful to anyone else.

The site is called MapMuse, and it's a pretty standard mapping program, though not as advanced as some of the Web 2.0 offerings from Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo, but useful nonetheless.

What makes MapMuse so useful is that it has maps of chains, franchises, and brand stores, as well as groups of locations by interest, so for example:

All of the Target stores in Ohio,

Panera Bread locations in Florida,

Now, it's not perfect, and doesn't seem to be 100% up-to-date, but I still think it's very useful.

I stumbled across it while trying to find a map of GameStops/EB Games ( had briefly considered making a Wii hunt yesterday), and then discovered I could also generate maps of BP/Amoco/Arco stations, which would be incredibly useful for work (we're supposed to use BP stations whenever possible for gas as we have a fleet card).

So... there you go, hope that helps someone out!

currently reading: "Xenocide" by Orson Scott Card

current weather: Clear, 45, Wind: calm; Not sure about home, but it's going to be 65 and sunny here in Columbus today

Tags: internet, mapmuse, maps
Current Location: 40.154N 82.889W
Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: none

Today's showcase site:

- Del.icio.us

When I first heard of del.icio.us, I didn't understand what it did at all. Beyond that, the name scared me.

But I got over it eventually and tried it out, and it is now quite possibly my favorite web page that I use. It's certainly one of the most useful.

The concept for it is SO simple in fact that I think I overthought it at first.

Del.icio.us is essentially your own personal links page on the web. Nothing new there, after all "links" pages have been around since the birth of the world wide web, but del.icio.us works very well as a package.

Here's the way it works:

First, you sign up at the site.

Doing so will grant you your own personal del.icio.us page, http://del.icio.us/whateverscreennameyouuse. In my case, that would be http://del.icio.us/fusionpanda.

Then, you just save links. This is relatively easy just using the site itself, but this works even better if you get the web browser extensions. If I see a site I want to save, I just click the "tag this" button in Firefox, and the dialog box will pop up (with the URL already inserted and the title of the page).

Once you save a site (or right when you save it) you have the option of entering some notes to explain what it is, and then (you knew it was coming), you can add tags to describe the link.

So an example might look like this:

title: Penny Arcade!
url: http://www.penny-arcade.com
notes: Videogame-based webcomic
tags: comics, webcomics, videogames, games, humor

*note: this is kind of annoying, but del.icio.us tags are space-delineated instead of comma-delineated. What does that mean? Well, basically it means you can't have multiple-word tags. Del.icio.us will separate "battlestar galactica" into "battlestar" and "galactica," neither of which is all that useful. There are ways around this, like "battlestargalactica" or "bsg," but it's a little annoying to me. Also, don't put commas in when you enter tags because it will think they're part of the tag.

Now, if you'll look at my current del.icio.us page you'll get a general idea of what you'll end up with. Admittedly I'm still kind of working on mine.

As you can see on the right, all of the tags you've used are shown in a general cloud. You can alter the settings so that, say, only tags that appear 2, 5, or 10 times show up at all (if you get a lot). If you click on a tag, say, "detroit," it will pull up all of your links which contain that tag. Tags are sorted alphabetically, but you can create "bundles" which can put tags into easier-to-find groups.

Of course, you can also just use the search function (either globally or among your own links).

By default, your links will appear on the left, in chronological order, with your most recent links first. It will also show you how many other people have saved a link, and you can also see not only your tags, but other people's tags as well if you want.

So what is all this useful for? Well, I particularly like this because now I don't need to worry about synchronizing links between my desktop, my laptop, and work computer. No matter where I am, I can access all my links.

In particular I find it very useful for saving links that I want to put up in my LiveJournal. In the past, if I came across a cool link I would either throw it into a "temp" folder in my bookmarks, or would write it down or something.

Now, if I see something interesting, I can just tag it to del.icio.us, give it a "temp" tag, and then anytime I check out my temp tags, my links come up. When I'm done with them, I generally delete them.

There's all kinds of functionality for sending links to friends and other del.icio.us users, which is where I think people really get into it, but so far I am VERY satisfied with just using it as an off-site links/bookmarks organizer.

It also has a lot of blog-integration tools (I can put my links cloud recent links into my LiveJournal - if I only had a brain), which I'm hoping to figure out someday :).

If you give it a try, let me know what you think!

current weather: Partly Cloudy, 55, Wind: calm, Rain today: 0.01"; Cool out but still very nice

Tags: del.icio.us, internet, links, web 2.0, www
Current Location: 41.196829N 81.432822W
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: BT - Superfabulous

Ok, so let's talk Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is a term that gets thrown around a lot on the web, and it's new enough that in many ways the real definition of it hasn't really pinned down just yet.

But put simply, it refers to any manner of new web technologies that change the world wide web experience substantially, towards more of a desktop application-type environment instead of static web pages.

There are a lot of examples of "Web 2.0" things on the web, but some of the prime examples would be social networking sites (like Myspace, Facebook, or Friendster), pretty much any web page that uses AJAX, RSS, and you could even include things like wikis, blogs (I still hate that word), and podcasts (I hate that word almost as much as blog).

I've been pretty intrigued by some of the new things going on on the web, so I thought it would be good to try some of these things out and see what I can get out of them. I had also hoped to sort of roll out all of my results in one grand upgrade of my LiveJournal, but I'm increasingly realizing that I'm an idiot when it comes to HTML, even now, and I am absolutely not a programmer.

So even though a lot of this is still in prototype stages for me, I wanted to take the chance to talk about some of this stuff - some of it very cool, and I'd like to share it, incomplete or not. I'm also hoping that maybe some of my more programming or web-design oriented friends might be able to help some.

- Last.fm
I'm really excited about Last.fm. It's one of the cooler sites I've used in the last few years. Basically, it's a combination of a social network site, a music database, and customizable online radio, all combined into one. It works like this: First, you go the site and make a (free) profile. You get a profile page, just like Facebook or any of those types of sites. Next, you (ideally) will install the Audioscrobbler Plugin into your music player of choice. Then, just listen to your music like you might normally.

As you listen to music on your media player, Audioscrobbler will log any song that you listen to at least halfway, and then it will send that information to your last.fm profile. As you listen to more music, Last.fm will eventually list all of the tracks you have listened to, which lets you make all sorts of cool lists like you can see on my profile page, like "Weekly Top Artists" and "Top Tracks - Overall".

But that's just the beginning. So now last.fm is making an index of music you listen to. But then it uses that information and combines it with everyone else's reporting. Want to know what the most popular track from Mega Man 3 is? "Snake Man," (followed by Top Man and Spark Man) according to the listening habits of Last.fm users. Searching for "Gorillaz" will not only bring up lots of information about that artist, but it will also reveal that their most listened to song is "Feel Good Inc.", which you can listen to a clip from.

Last.fm will then show your "neighbors," or other Last.fm users that it determines to have similar listening habits.

And I haven't even mentioned Last.fm radio. If you download the Last.fm player, you can listen to streaming radio from the site, but what makes it really cool is that the radio stations are customized. For example, you can enter the names of artists you like, and it will find music either by those artists or similar. Since users "tag" music (just like you might put tags on an image in Flickr or a LiveJournal entry", if you click on the "trance" tag you can listen to a radio station made up entirely of music that users have tagged as trance.

If you become a paid member you get even more features, notably your own radio station, which is made up entirely of music in your collection.

Now, obviously not all music is available to listen to just yet at the site, but it's a pretty big collection, and growing. For me, it's cool enough just to see that other people are actually listening to, say, Star Control 2 remixes. Also, listening to neighbour radio or just listing bands you like has led to all sorts of music I've never heard before. It's a great way to find new music.

And last but not least, Last.fm lets you put various charts of your music into other web pages (like blogs, Myspace, or in this case, my LiveJournal). For example, here is my current most played tracks (keep in mind, I've only been using this for about three weeks, so not many songs have actually played multiple times):


Ultimately, I would like to have some of my charts embedded over on the right side of my main LiveJournal page, only at the moment I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how to do that.

Which... probably should get an entry of its own. Clearly I have a lot more to say about this subject and this has gotten pretty long, so I'm gonna stop with this for now, and pick up the topic again with Del.icio.us tomorrow.

In the meantime I think I'll explain a little bit of what I'd like to do with my LiveJournal...

current weather: Cloudy, 51, Wind: NE 3, Rain today: 0.11"; I got woken up this morning at 6:00 am to nickel-sized hail! These were some of the largest hailstones I've ever actually seen in person. Just a small freak early-morning thunderstorm that decided to rumble through. Not even that much lightning, just a lot of hail.

Tags: internet, last.fm, web 2.0, www
Current Location: 41.196829N 81.432822W
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Cowboy Bebop - Seatbelts - Too Good Too Bad