interwebs!

now at home. cox cable finally sent out a technician who diagnosed that we'd been accidentally disconnected when they hooked up somebody else in the neighborhood. yay rah.

jesse's car is back in commission, too. so transportation issues involved in participating in a bit of dirt cheap blues tonight are largely solved. i asked google maps for public transit directions for getting to beach-side virginia beach... it said i could get there on monday at 9 a.m.! i'm estimating it's actually closer to 3 hours to get there on weekend schedule, but that was amusing.

when i asked my friend kristin (who had to cut off the conversation to head out for a triathlon -- go matt and kristin!) whether she figured wal-mart would let me bring my bicycle inside long enough to shop for a bike lock (my old one rusted out), she sent me this story. tempted to try it anyway...

knols?

google knol, apparently designed to compete with wikipedia, is open for business. i just found out, haven't explored much yet, and it seems mostly empty thus far... but it seems an awful lot like everything2, concept-wise. guess it's time to start analyzing what shape i want the public's sum knowledge to take... any opinions on the strengths/weaknesses of the different models?

**

a few minutes later... actually, i don't think knol's likely to compete with wikipedia at all... more complement. with wikipedia, you wind up with the consensus on anything or everything -- the schoolbook version. knol, i imagine evolving into the sort of place where you go read the original texts, listen to the voices behind them, get some perspective via the ratings and credentials, make up your own mind. not good for getting acquainted with a subject quickly, but rich. my favorite history class in college had two textbooks... one was a standard textbook, and the other had sets of three essays on various problems in american history. it gave us a basic structure, but also a way to go in depth in places where there were snarls and where things really weren't that simple. history's a lot more fun when it's about finding the story rather than memorizing dates. i hope that kind of system is what evolves out of having both, rather than one website killing the other.

reload... reload...

the first act of dr. horrible's sing-along blog, joss whedon's latest project, is supposedly up today... but fan enthusiasm has apparently crashed the website. meanwhile, this site has the teaser. doogie howser vs. captain mal... it's gotta be fun, right?

in other news, i'm awake in the middle of the day because i finally got a call from a company. going in for some talking and some skills testing tomorrow...

mturk

an afternoon piddling on amazon's mturk for a grand total of about $3.50 is enough to convince me that it's not -- at least not yet -- any way to earn a living. but there's something strangely addicting about taking assignments to rewrite sentences for about 4 cents each. not as much fun as project gutenberg's distributed proofreading, but a little more profitable.