Pet Peeve - Conference Calls from Cubicles

This is a pet peeve of mine. I think it is down right rude when someone is on a conference call over their speaker phone from their cubicle. It is rude to the people in cubicles next to them who have to listen to all the noise, and it is rude to the other people on the call who get to listen to all the other conversations and environmental noises in the background.

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online

Getty Research provides a catalog of geographic names. For example, here is the entry for Boise. It shows it in the following hierarchical position:

1. - World (facet)
2. - North and Central America (continent)
3. - United States (nation)
4. - Idaho (state)
5. - Ada (county)
6. - Boise (inhabited place)

Then each page for each location provides some details about it and its classification. For example Boise is classified as

• inhabited place (originated as Fort Boise in 1863)
• city
• state capital (since 1864)
• county seat
• manufacturing center (for packing houses & food processing)
• quarrying center (for stone)
• agricultural center (produces fruit, sugar beets & livestock)
• mill center (for lumber)
• commercial center
• administrative center (for federal & state agencies)
• educational center (includes Boise State University founded in 1932)
• tourist center (noted for Boise National Forest, with remnants of empty gold mines & ghost towns)

There is the ability to search the categories and browse the hierarchies. I guess the objective is to provide agreed upon and standardized categorization and labels. Most of the labels look like the kind of names you would see on a map, and they come with latitude and longitude.

Tags: [Geography] [Cartography] [Catalog] [concert] [Boise] [Idaho] [USA]

Childhood Movie Favorites

Do you ever have a movie that you remember really enjoying as a child, but you can never remember what it was? Big Trouble in Little China was one of those for me. I couldn't remember what it was called, but then when we saw at an office movie party it all came back to me. A lot of fun!

There was this other movie that I remember as being a musical about pirates or something, but I never remembered the name. It was a goofy movie where some young man signed up to be a pirate until his 21st birthday (or something) and then when he thought he was done he discovered he was born on leap year, so he really is only 5, not 21, therefore he was still a pirate. So he ends up taking on all the pirates in a big battle so that he can marry the girl of his dreams. Then at the end the girl doesn't like how the movie is turning out so she stops all the action and changes it to a happy ending. Like I said, it was goofy!

Well I was reading PVP today and they had a comic in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day where they included a reference to The Pirate Movie. I was a little curious so I went out to IMDB to read about it. This was the movie I could never remember the title of. I remember loving this movie as a kid. Guess I will either go rent it, or take it to our office movie party.

Tags: [Movies] [Pirates]

QuickTime Standalone

If you go to download QuickTime (my favorite video format) now Apple bundles it with iTunes by default. I have nothing against iTunes, but it comes with Bonjour, which after installing it on my laptop it rendered my network disfunctional (of course my attempted surgical uninstalling of of the suspected SpyWare may have had something to do with that). Uninstalling, reinstalling iTunes didn't help. Reloading the OS did.

After a lot of poking around I found QuickTime without iTunes. I forget the reference page, but you can download QuickTime Standalone here.

Tags: [QuickTime]

Sling TV Over the Internet

This looks really interesting. A guy here at PDC'05 is running it and watching the TV he missed while here. Sling Media lets you watch your TV or TiVo anywhere over the internet. I'd wanted to do this for a while.