Unhandled Perception

Collection of some of the best technologies in the restaurant and food space. From Menu Specifications to Online Ordering to Online Reservations to Mobile Apps and everything in between.

Link: http://delicious.com/stacks/view/KtB04L

OpenMenu™ has created the first standard to regulate the way restaurants store and share their menus over the Internet by standardizing the menus’ structure and format. Combined with OpenMenu Registrars, OpenMenu is providing a regulated system for sharing accurate menu information.

Link: http://openmenu.org/

Google Videos began as a video-sharing site, but it became something of a lame duck when Google bought the web’s leading video site, YouTube, in 2006. In 2009, Google stopped allowing people to upload their movies to Videos, but has continued to host the videos that are already there.

That ends on 13 May, when the videos will disappear and the service turns into a video search index. Videos that have been uploaded to the service will not be saved, so if they are not preserved elsewhere, users will have until 13 May to salvage them.

Link: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/…

No, we haven’t time-travelled to 1982. Computer company Commodore has revealed it will once again sell its line of personal computers, including the popular Commodore 64.

Link: http://content.usatoday.com/…

lIf you’re not familiar with the concept of POSH (plain old semantic HTML), the first thing to know is that producing semantic code that reflects content contextually (rather than stylistically) is a critical component of the web design process. While HTML has a whole bunch of awesome elements by which to convey meaning, a slew of purpose-built microformats (conventions) have been created to better represent the kind of content that exists on the page. This guide discusses popular microformats that can enhance the semantics and interoperability of your website.

Link: http://sixrevisions.com/…

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

At Amazon for $10.40

a student of mine (John Cintolo), created a website about “Hit Club Music Summer 2010″, with links to YouTube videos. No copyright infringment or anything illegal.

And one day later, he gets a “cease and desist” letter from HotNewClubSongs.. It has so many gems that I will list it here, for your viewing pleasure.

I bet the blog post and exposure will further push him ahead of others. Too funny.

Link: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/…

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

Link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Congrats to Jibz. Enjoy!

Have a great and safe Holiday weekend.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Outlook 2010 looked good enough for me to upgrade, finally, away from Office 2003.  The experience so far has been positive.  Little bit of growing pains, can you say ribbons, but overall a very good experience so far.

Here’s the few features that I like:

• Quick Parts – Quick Parts are pieces of text that you store to later reuse in your email.  As your typing your email you can easily and quickly insert a standard piece of text by selecting the Quick Part.  What makes this even more powerful is as you’re typing you can start typing the Quick Parts name to insert it without the need to select from the toolbar. (tutorial: Living with Outlook 2010: Quick Parts)
• Signatures - Simple, basic, makes sense, yet it took this long to work this way.  Signatures are now a recognized block of text within the email.  Switch the Send From account and your signature updates.  Select a new signature from the toolbar and the signature block updates.  This little enhancement along saves me when sending emails – I have 9 email account, with 9 signatures.  No more sending the wrong signature.
• Conversations - Emails can now be grouped by a conversation.  Its not perfect, looks at the subject line to determine a conversation.  Still a decent feature.
• Look and feel – Outlook 2010 just feels better.

This blog is now working off the lastest version of WordPress, WordPress 3.0. Very nice. Very impressed at how each version of WordPress it gets better and better.

Without getting into what’s better, I’ll just say that I’m glad they lightened the Admin area – was too dark before.

A better blogging platform means I can bring better content without adding overhead (in the way of time).  This is one of the reasons Blogger slowed this blog down – it’s a poor platform for anything more then an occasional blogger.

Is there anything you would like to see?  What type of posts would you like to see Veign make?

GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.

Currently supports:

• Blogger
  $ google blogger post --title "foo" "command line posting"
• Calendar
  $ google calendar add "Lunch with Jim at noon tomorrow"
• Contacts
  $ google contacts list name,email > contacts.csv
• Docs
  $ google docs edit --title "Shopping list"
• Picasa
  $ google picasa create --album "Cat Photos" ~/photos/cats/*.jpg
• Youtube
  $ google youtube post --category Education killer_robots.avi

Link: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/…

Apple setup a website where you can see what enhancements the new HTML5 specification will bring to browsing.

Link: http://www.apple.com/html5/

(you’ll have to use Safari to see them)

Looking for a  handy guide to HTML5. Check out the HTML5 Reference Guide.