Google has published a Zeitgiest for 2005 that takes information culled from all of the queries sent to Google search engines and then aggregates it. The results are both interesting and sometimes surprising. It's not surprising that the iPod is the number one thing searched for on Froogle, but it does surprise me - it actually annoys me - that Janet Jackson is the top search in the news category.
I'm also amused that Martha Stewart gets more searches than Donald Trump.

If you haven't seen this it's worth a laugh. When you send a movie back to NetFlix you put it into a little CD-sized envelope. It turns out that many people are putting Post-It notes to the poor folks who have to open the returned movies. Some of the messages are hilarious; and not one is about Woody Allen.

Jan Loiselle sent this link to a nice set of instructions for defeating voice menu systems at a variety of major companies. Thanks, Jan!

Some shockwave movies are pure silliness. This one lets you fly thorough clouds and a blue sky. You move left and right by simply moving the cursor to the edges of the page.

Yahoo! has a new acquisition amongst the Web 2.0 players like Flickr. I think this is just the early part of a long term battle between the two giants. Microsoft, once again, is way, way behind.

I like this little service that let's me use Google and a variety of other services to pinpoint my location. I'm using a mobile device that is with me pretty often to keep it up-to-date.

This is not the usual thing a normal person would dream up! And, I love the results -- it says much about the people who come in contact with these disposable cameras.

I can imageine taking on the next kind of puzzle -- more of a numeric crossword puzzle than SuDoKu is. This is an online site that allows you to play KaKuro. I'm looking for one that lets you actually print the puzzles out rather than force you to play online.
Wait, this site or this site may have the printable versions.

Might this be worth it? A subscription to see multiple feeds from CNN on a realtime basis? The cost is pretty small, but I'm already a safari and audible groupie. Do I need more subscriptions? I might try it for a day or two and see if I like it. More details later.

Another weekend shot. Amazon just announced that by telling be that the next installment of Fun With Kinsey Malone is on the way. Let's see, there's "T, U, V, W, X Y, and Z" left. At one a year, Grafton will be done in eight years: 2012.

Cingular has just announced that they are rolling out a 3G service at long last. However, the number of markets is pretty small and the rollout is going to be slower than what you would really hope. It also requires that the user have a PC Card slot, so all those owners of Dell X1's are out of luck. The press release suggeests that there will be other devices and services available in 2006. Hope so. I love nothing better than to give Cingular more of my money.

I certainly hope this is a trend. THe Westin chain is only a possibility for me when it is a venue hotel, but a non-smoking hotel chain would get my support and dollars under almost any competitive circumstances.

Maybe.
In New Orleans, Bell South agreed to help the police department get back on its feet with technology and networking assistance. That's smart in a number of ways.
Later, when New Orleans decided to help its citizens get on their feet by offering free connectivity to the Internet throughout the city, Bell South decided to renege on its offer of support for the police department. What are these people thinking? They could have seen an opportunity here: offer to provide the free WiFi support for a year or two and then have a whole new set of customers in the future for broadband and multimedia. Details here.

Whatever happened to this company? It's completely lost it's way in consumer electronics. It puts rootkits on music CDs and now this!! I bought the PSP and I think it is a great little piece of hardware, but the company can't get anyone to write games for it and then cripples the underlying operating system. This company is completely dependent on the new Playstation to stay alive. Nothing else coming out of Sony makes much sense.

Microsoft has released it's own anti-virus tool. That's good. Competition is good. Anything that gets Symantec to lower their prices rather than rely on that anti-consumer rebate gimmick is good. But all is not well in Redmond-land. From the release notes of the product comes this quote: "Windows OneCare will not be compatible with the Windows Vista operating system (formerly codenamed 'Longhorn') when that operating system is released."
Wait, Microsoft is knowingly introducing products that will not be compatible with future operating systems? That may make sense if the anti-virus software and functionality is bundled directly into the operating system, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. This is simply more fodder for those who say Microsoft is confused and dazed.