This is the view from my office according to Google’s new 3D buildings in Downtown Memphis:

Have I ever mentioned that technology is freaking amazing?

The other day, Dr. Paul held a press conference with all most of the “other” national candidates and urged voters to reject the two-party system by voting for someone else.  He came together with those four candidates to agree on four principles that set them apart from the established candidates.

So, in light of that, I’ve thrown up a new site: voteforsomeoneelse.com.  It’s a blog-type thing where I’ll be posting news and thoughts that will hopefully convince a few people to not vote for the status quo.   Let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

Special Thanks to: The very fitting theme is by an old colleague, thanks James!

For that challenge, they put up a flash app with a thermometer that showed the progress of the fund raising that updated in (near) real time, showing the exact total and the name and location of recent donors. Paul fans web wide were glued to their browser that week watching the amazing speed of the mercury rising.

This quarter, the campaign is continuing the openness by “letting everyone track our progress throughout the quarter – the first campaign in history to disclose immediately every cent that is raised.” But not only can you see the current total on Ron Paul’s site, in the form of “Lighting Up Lady Liberty”, but a few people are aggregating this data and making it available in the form of some neato graphs.

Update: I’ve made a Live Title generator that will display the total raised for the quarter as the bookmark title.

Around the beginning of this year, USAA released a feature they call “Deposit@Home” (admittedly not the most original name). This service allows you to deposit checks by scanning them using an applet on their website. You sign your check and scan in the front and back and the money is instantly available in your account…. Amazing.

If you’re eligible for USAA membership, I highly recommend them for any service they offer. What other banks have a service like this (I’m sure there are others)?

The number of passwords and logins web users need makes it inevitable they will re-use phrases, warned the International Telecommunications Union.

Re-using these identifiers puts people at serious risk of falling victim to identity theft, said the ITU report.

It called on regulators and businesses to find better ways for people to identify themselves to websites.

This just re-iterates what I’ve said before: “Time is ripe for distributed authentication.”

OpenID already exists, is fairly well proven to avoid these problems and has support in several programming languages and content management systems. The only barrier to overcome is getting joe internet user to understand how it works and how it benefits them.

But whatever you do, please don’t leave it up to regulators.

Also, I’ll be putting up links to other peoples lists of generators. If you’ve got one let me know.

Dang, it’s hot… and I just had to glance at my bookmarks toolbar to know that These microsummaries are very flexible, they can be specified by site owners or generated by user xml files. This lousy blog will surely have microsummary goodness soon enough.

To get your weather, add the current weather observation microsummary generator, bookmark the appropriate XML file (not RSS) from http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/, go to the bookmarks properties and check out the drop down box for the title. Ideally, this would work with the more human readable weather page instead of the xml feed, but I didn’t feel like figuring out the XPaths to the pieces of data I needed, I’ll leave that to someone else… or maybe I’ll do it later.

As a side note, this firefox beta crashed 3 times while writing this post, but the new session restore feature brought me back almost exactly where I was… thanks to having saved periodically. Also during the course of writing this, my bookmark title changed to ‘96 F – Fair’… I thought it was late enough to be cooling off

Update: Here’s a generator for google weather (change the zip code in the url, if you actually use their form, the url will no longer match).

I think my workaround will consist of making them disabled so they cannot be editted, and enabling them via a script right before the form submits so that the values for those controls are submitted (disabled controls are not successful and are not “valid for submission”).

If anyone can explain why selects can’t be made readonly, or give me a better solution for simulating readonly-ness, please share.

Coincedence? I don’t know… just sayin’