Pito’s Blog

From a few previous posts you know that I have a curiosity about congestion pricing as a way to allay traffic jams, while raising money to improve infrastructure and alternative transportation.

In a recent post in the Freakonomics Blog, which I recommend, there’s an interesting Q&A on that very topic that you may want to take a look at.

“Most people now recognize that congestion is a serious problem and that something can be done about it. There is also a growing movement nationally to charge drivers more directly for the use of the roads and technology. This will make charging easier and more sophisticated in the future by allowing for time-of-day, day-of-week, and level of congestion pricing.” (from What We Didn’t Know About Congestion Pricing)

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People wonder about Wikipdia and what it’s good for. This is an example from a while back, of Wikipedia at it’s best. Lots of details, edited and co-edited by many people giving you a feeling that there’s less bias: Wikipedia on the Virgina Tech Tragedy

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(Click for enlargement) Upon updating to the latest Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a Leopard, I noticed that Skype was ridiculously slow, hanging and doing other ugly things. A search of the web didn’t find any useful ideas, at least that worked for me.

Here’s what fixed it. In Skype “General Preferences” there’s an option to “Show Address Book Contacts”.

Well I have a fairly huge address book - about 3000 people. Somehow Skype was driving itself crazy trying to show them. 

Unclicking the “Show Address Book Contacts” check box solved it for me.

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Look closely at the dialog box on the right. It’s Mac OS X info sheet for an attached Windows computer. Now look even more closely at the simulated screen on the image of an ugly big CRT monitor. See the BSOD?

Who said they don’t have a sense of humor?

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Saturday Night Live is having the best season in years. Consistently much funnier than last year or the year before. Last night, Christopher Walken again was extremely funny: the writing was funny and his delivery was funnier.

But. It is extremely distracting that Mr. Walken doesn’t even try to pretend to appear to be addressing his counterpart in the skit. He so obviously is reading cue cards that no matter how hard I tried to suspend disbelief, all I could notice was how he was looking in the wrong direction.I wonder how that happens. Did he not rehearse? Is it, for some wacky reason, on purpose? Can he just not remember his lines?

It all doesn’t add up, because the way he delivers his lines is right on the money: funny, quirky — perfect.

For example, check out this post Saturday Night Live: Christopher Walken/Panic! At the Disco - VIDEOS from TV Squad:

“[snip…] Seriously, think about it. His delivery is jaunty and weird, and when he’s not awkwardly staring into the middle distance, he’s just glaring directly at the cue cards. All these elements combined should throw him in the realm of the crappiest hosts.[…snip] 

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Last week I went to the monthly “WebInno” - web innovators group - meeting at the Sonesta in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). I am quite impressed with the attendance and the quality of the people presenting.

The gathering was quite crowded and the buzz was very loud, lots of dynamic discussions going on all over the place, people trading war stories and comparing products. It was stimulating and fun, and I plan to go next month again.

In the meanwhile, Don Dodge of Microsoft writes a post “Boston Startup Events and Resources” with quite a schedule of upcoming tech events in the Boston area. I thought I was in the loop, but guess what, there’s something going on tonight in Waltham that I had never heard of, so I will be there too.

It’s the so-called “Tech Tuesday” event, organized by Dan Bricklin, apparently with the collaboration of the mass technology leadership council. In a break with convention and tradition, it is not a free event for non-members. I guess they have to keep the MTLC staffers employed Still it should be fun.

So for all you “Boston is cool but I wish I lived in silcon valley” types, I say, stop it already, there’s a lot lot going on here. You just have to look!

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I’ve wondered and written before about the ‘downside’ or ‘risk’ of building your application based on one of the excellent SAAS services from Amazon. And I do think they are excellent. But check this post Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup from TechCrunch:

"Amazon does not guarantee 100 percent uptime for its Web Services, although it does strive to achieve that. And data centers go down all the time, no matter who is hosting your data.But more and more companies are relying on Amazon to be able to scale their computing resources on demand and do it cheaply by paying only for what they need. Many Web startups are building their entire businesses on top of Amazon’s Web Services, and even an hour of unavailability is unacceptable. At least this one happened during the middle of the night."

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I just came back from the theatre, the Huntington Theatre, Boston’s, production of a brand new play called “The Cry of the Reed” by Sinan Ünel. This play and production is truly amazing, great, dramatic, thought provoking, and overall excellent.

We were discussing this play the whole drive home. Talking about war, religion, morality, ethics, human nature, theatre and drama.

I like seeing these productions before the pundits and professional reviewers decide if it’s any good. I went there tonight not even knowing what this play was about and happy not to have been influenced by some stupid reviewer. This world premiere better get a five star rating IMHO.

Em. Yeah. I liked it.

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Check this post Three on getting a job from Newmark’s Door. Where Craig turns us on to these three fun links for job hunters (Dan are you listening?):

• “Ten Things You Really Shouldn’t Do in a Job Interview“.
• “Get That Job At Google“.
• “25 Questions to Think About Before Your Next Job Interview“.

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Scott Adams as usual is hillarious in this post Doomsday Cult from The Dilbert Blog:

"A Russian cult emerged from the cave they were hiding in while waiting for the end of the world.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/01/doomsday-cult.html?ref=rss

Allow me to give you some advice: If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday."

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