My Mom was flying back to Ukraine from Seattle this weekend, and on my stay in Ramada close to SeaTac International Airport. Even though we got the rooms okay, and with the exception of the magnetic keys not working every other time, everything went pretty smoothly. It didn’t go so well for the guy in Hawaiian shirt in the lobby, who arrived there with his family to find out that the hotel he booked through Hotels.com has been filled. Turns out Hotels.com uses old-fashioned faxing to book a room when it’s sold on the Web site. Nothing wrong with that except that the fax comes 3 hours after the reservation has been made on the Web site, so occasionally during high demand times, such as SeaFair those 3 hours might be crucial, as the hotel books the room for other customers. Even though Hotels.com appears to sound reliable by sending you confirmation numbers in a special e-mail message, those confirmation numbers don’t mean a whole lot to the hotel, since they’re Hotels.com-specific. I am not sure what the guy needed the hotel for (either visiting SeaFair in Seattle, or flying tomorrow morning out of SeaTec), but he sounded pretty disappointed (to put it politely) with Hotels.com service.
Between Enron and MCI/WorldCom scandals we forgot about the heroes of the software industry. SandHill.com looks into rise and fall of Informix Software.
It’s not easy to be a hardcore gamer. It’s hard. Wouldn’t it be easier if you had a job in the videogames business? Think about it: working for a software company, being able to play games during office hours, with people who share your passion. Free games, industry parties, lots of fun and good money.
Guitar Tricks is a community of guitar players who are building a library of guitar knowledge that is accessable to anyone in the world.
Follow designs and instructions to make your own mp3 player using a MMC/SD card as memory.
Back to the discussion of Emigrant Direct and ING Direct on short-term CDs here’s last week’s news about Emigrant Direct raising rates to 3.5% (ING didn’t quite match it with their 3.15% offering). Meanwhile average 1-year CD on Bankrate is 3.49%, just 0.01% below being competitive with Emigrant.
$ cd /middle_east $ ls Afghanistan Iraq Libya Saudi_Arabia UAE Algeria Israel Morrocco Sudan Yemen Bahrain Jordan Oman Syria Egypt Kuwait Palestine Tunisia Iran Lebanon Qatar Turkey $ cd Afghanistan $ ls bin Taliban $ rm Taliban rm: Taliban is a directory $ cd Taliban $ ls soldiers $ rm soldiers $ cd .. $ rmdir Taliban rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty $ cd Taliban $ ls -a . .. .insurgents $ chown -R USA .* chown: .insurgents: Not owner $ cd .. $ su Password: ******* # mv Taliban /tmp # exit
Russia’s legislation does not have a provision for any penalties for spam, but in the country where a lot of people are used to taking laws into their own hands, Russia’s top spammer was found dead in his department, dying after suffering repeated blows to his head. American English Center, the company buying spam services in bulk, was promoting their English language courses. The owner was repeatedly the target of criticism by Russian Internet users, but his reply always seemed to imply that e-mail was invented for sending out messages. Earlier last year, Russian Internet users fought against American English Center by repeatedly calling the advertised phone numbers, pretending to be interested in the English courses.
Here’s a fresh idea for struggling social network businesses - do a drug ring. Brazilian authorities arrested 10 Orkut users who used Google’s social network project to traffic drugs.
Lately I make sure I stop by Findory site at least once a day, when I feel like having a break and reading some news and blogs out there. Findory is news/blog aggregation/recommendation service, which keeps track of the stories you read and recommends the ones you might be interested in. Being a registered user, it’s easy to see my history there - I’ve clicked on 219 news stories and blog entries and launched 4 searches.
The 2-column layout (3-column, if you consider settings and ads) offers news on one site and blogs on another. Findory keeps track of the reading history, and it’s easy to delete the story from the history, if you happen to click on a story that you weren’t really interested in. Overall, the suggestions it produces (they are marked with a little spiky logo to the right of the story title) are quite relevant and many times I’ve found myself reading blogs that I would not have visited otherwise. Memeorandum seems to be in the same market, pulling news for headlines and then linking to the blogs discussing the news, but Findory just seems to be more usable. According to the company founder & CEO, there’s API in case someone wants to integrate the headlines into an application.
Few drawbacks there as well. For one, the related links just seem to be randomized. You can add some blogs to the list of Favorites, and then Findory would attempt to find a bunch of articles on a similar topic, but from what I’ve seen, it’s far from exact science. Two - if I read the story, just remove it from the list. The last thing I want to see when I load the front page is a bunch of stories I’ve read. I can always access them in my Reading History, why keep them on the front page? Overall, however, it’s a pretty interesting news/blog recommendation engine that’s also usable as a blog search.