Tom Printy’s Blog

This past Saturday I took a night cruise on the Chicago river and lake Michigan. The tour was given by Richard T. Crowe the famous Chicago Ghost hunter. The two hour tour took us down the south branch of the Chicago river and out into the Lake. He talked about such things as the design of the Civic Opera house, the Eastland disaster , and many haunted ships and boats. One of my favorite stories that he told was that of the building at 680 N. Lake Shore Drive. This building was formally known as 666 Lake Shore drive.

It was a great evening and I recommend taking a night cruise like this. If I had a better camera I could get some better night time pictures of the city. The picture shown here is the Wrigley Building taken from the Wacker Dr. side of the Chicago River.  While this building wasn’t on this tour you can learn more about it on the  Chicago Architecture Foundation’s river boat tour.

Having to go 30 minutes to the data center at 4:00am in the rain to reboot a server. UGH! I really need to look into an IP based KVM solution. Something like the StarTech 16 Port KVM over IP  switch.

At least once a week I deal with online product feeds from various stores. It seems to me that there needs to be a standard form for these files. The feeds should provide enough information to allow the products to be linked to a product file provided by the manufacturer.  Having a standard format for these product feels would make things a lote more acurate and easier for everyone involved.  I am not qualified to provide what this feed should look like but would be happy to give my input.

This one is going to be short and sweet. This is an idea I would love to see and have told any person who is cutting my hair this idea in hopes they would implement it. basically one would buy a RV rip out the insides and put a seat and a sink in there and drive around and cut hair.  They could pull up to a big office park and cut hair all day. With an online reservation service I am sure there would be no shortage of clients.  They got dentists why not people who cut hair?

I may be a geek but I tend to be a cheap geek! This week I acquired my first iPod. A guy at work got an iPhone and had no use for his iPod Nano. Being the cheapskate I am I offered him some money for his unused Nano. I am now a proud owner of a black 1st gen iPod Nano. It sat in my laptop bag all week but I was finally able to play with it this weekend. It works as advertised, it plays mp3 music that I have stored on there. I mostly plan to use it while in the car to and from work. Now I have to find some good podcasts.

I haven’t experienced the euphoria that people seem to over the device but it will be nice to have. For nostalgia here is the original product announce of the iPod from 2001. Boy have things changed since then.

This is actually an idea that I would implement if I had enough capital. The concept is simple find a large storefront building to rent and turn it into a place where Geeks could congregate.  Ideally I would choose a building that had two floors. On the first floor I would setup cafe type environment where geeks from around the area could co-work during the day. There would be a coffee shop the would keep the caffeine going and to supply lunch/snacks. I might see if a local computer store would want to setup shop inside so people could buy parts or get things repaired. I might also setup a small lab that other people could lease time on if they didn’t have a laptop but liked the atmosphere.  The upstairs space might have some offices that people could rent and a very large open area to hold events like BarCamp or TechCocktail or for local user groups to hold events.

The purpose is to make the GeekSpace the center of the geek community in your area.If you get really successful you could incubate a new idea and become part owner of a new company.

Minkey a new content based recommendation system surfaced today. Minkey uses a widget based approach to add personalized content to your website. From the looks of the widget it appears that they are targeting blogs and other content based websites. They claim that adding their widget will increase page views, create higher traffic, create more return visits, and of course create more revenue. The widget auto discovers content on your site and makes recommendation based upon that. I assume they are using some type of “click streaming” since there is not rating widget. Also it appears that they are using cookies to tie a user to their profile, perhaps annoying to some users who delete cookies often.

As well as offering the widget they are offering stastics based upon the widgets interaction with the users browser.

Adding the widget is easy. Create an account add your rss feed, customize your widget then insert the provided java script. I have installed this widget on the sidebar of the blog and I will watch it. This widget was much easier to install then the one by Loomia, however the Spotback widget has star ratings which I prefer. I will watch this widget and see what happens.