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About meArchives for January, 2006
The Mechanical Turk
Here’s a new online toy: the Amazon Mechanical Turk. You go make an account there, and provide HITs—”human intelligence tasks,” jobs that can only be done by human brains and that you don’t feel like doing yourself. You set a price on the HIT and wait for someone to do it for you. Amazon takes a fee on top of what you pay out, and the person who did the task gets your cash, and you get your job done.
Not many jobs on the site as of now (as in, “three”), but it looks like something that could end up being pretty lively.
Translation is one task that could be offered here, but I don’t think I would offer work on this site; too much chance that an underqualified buffoon would take the job on. And I doubt that the translation jobs that might get offered through this tool would pay well enough to attract pros. (Translate this episode of Hot Anime of the Week and I’ll pay you $25!) I imagine there are other jobs where you don’t need to vet your applicants quite so rigorously, though.
A snowy walk
It snowed yesterday. We got about 20 cm on the ground, and lots stuck to trees and bamboo and such in photogenic ways. So we went out and took some pictures. Go see a few of them on the Flickr site.
You can click this chilled fruit picture to see a bigger version of it, too.
Friday Music.
It’s cold in Japan. So cold, in fact, that the monkeys are clumping together to conserve warmth. (Sorry Japanese only; enjoy the photo though.)
In other news, I’m a dangerous person to let near Tower Records when I’ve got some beer in me. Just came home after my Friday class (and the aforementioned beer, and the trip to Tower) with some Depeche Mode and Cure and Joy Division CDs. I never got into the sobby tearstained beautiful tunes of bands like this when I was a middle schooler in the early 1980s, so it’s high time I did at age 35. Right? RIGHT?
Now listening to: “Everything Counts” by Depeche Mode. I remember this song. It’s pretty damn good, actually. Especially on the new stereo gear. A subwoofer and some new speakers would do wonders for this place, probably, but I might as well wait until I get new shelves for the living room and set up the rocking 50″ TV as well.
I probably owe Jes yet another apology for always bagging on her musical choices back in the Condon/Roosevelt days when obviously I would end up digging the same jams in the following millennium. Jes, let me know if you need copies of this stuff.
Trivia about me
Fun link from the Ars Technica Lounge! The Mechanical Contrivium: Trivia about Durf
Ten Top Trivia Tips about Durf!
- You can tell if Durf has been hard-boiled by spinning him. If he stands up, he is hard-boiled.
- A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find Durf.
- Fish travel in schools, but whales travel in Durf.
- Koalas sleep for 22 hours a day, two hours more than Durf.
- Over half of Americans are officially Durf.
- People used to believe that dressing their male children as Durf would protect them from evil spirits!
- A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but Durf cannot.
- Fifty-two percent of Americans drink Durf.
- The colour of Durf is no indication of his spiciness, but size usually is.
- South Australia was the first place to allow Durf to stand for parliament.
Blook? Blah.
I’ve never liked the word “blog.” A log of stuff on the web is a web log, to my mind, not a we blog. So I use “log” in the URL for this joint. The word just kind of grates on my eyes, and ears.
Plenty of people have gone on the record as hating neologisms like “blogosphere.” I found a new one for them to hate: blook! Which is, of course, “the world’s fastest-growing new kind of book and an exciting new stage in the life cycle of content, if not a whole new category of content.”
Why is this a whole new category? Because these books are based on material that was once in a blog, as opposed to material that was once in a handwritten journal (jlooks!) or real-life experiences (rlooks!) or drugged-out hallucinations (H.S. Thompson books!) I guess.
The folks who come up with these pretentious labels for their oh-so-all-brand-new ways to put words in front of the eyes of a reader need to be slapped, hard. With a bound collection of paper sheets on which are printed words inspired by content once available only on a dynamically produced HTML page. You know. A book.
Flickr photos
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