Johnny Software Blog

There is a new social web site that came out last week called ListsOfBests.com.

It offers the ability to very quickly assemble lists of favorites and bests. Lists of famous people, places, and things can quickly be assembled using the myriad of things already cataloged over at 4 other websites. The websites were created by the same team.

• people
• users on the site
• famous people (actors, actresses, singers, musicians, philosophers, etc.)
• places
• ones you have visited
• ones you want to visit
• things:
• books
• movies
• music

It all comes together rather well. It is pretty easy to try out and get started. One can browse around to check the place out without even bothering to create a free account. Creating an account is nice, though. It grants the ability to start building ones own lists and marking ones own favorite things.

Everything can be tagged. The lists can all be tagged with keywords. Items going in the lists can be tagged too, generally. It might be necessary to click on it and go to the site where it was created at, and add it as one of the items you are interested in or have consumed - but it can be done.

Once you have started to express what kind of things you are interested in and what things you liked - you can find other people who share similar interests. It is a fun site to find other people with your tastes. Of course, you have to put information in to get that much out of it. After all, the site is kind of smart but it is not psychic.

I recommend going over and checking it out - along with the other 4 sites it is connected to, as well. What Flickr is to photos - these sites to people and stuff.

Technorati Tags:
tagging, social, food, entertainment, movies, web2.0, ajax, books

I saw Ultraviolet a few days ago. The plot was kind of vague, weak, and sketchy - true.

The visuals were very cool. I hope they didn’t use any stuntmen in the movie because the things Ultraviolet did in that movie were insane. Anyway, I am hoping they used CGI for those scenes - not stuntmen.

If you take a look on Yahoo Movies, you will see that a bunch of individual users liked the movie. And a bunch disliked it. The critics, of course, hunted in a pack as usual, and disliked it.

I sometimes wonder if critics all get together and decide as a group whether they will like or dislike something before they write the review. Probably not. They probably really do all like and dislike the same movies.

Anyway, it seems like among real people, the ones who wanted to see a visually compelling movie were entertained. Those who wanted to see something that would stimulate their higher brain functions weren’t.

One of the things that was kind of silly was the name for people that were infected with The Virus. They called them: hemophages. A hemophage would be a blood virus - not a person infected with a blood virus. Small point, but a little annoying.

See how silly it sounds to complain about the technical aspects of an action movie? Might as well just enjoy. It’s a feast for the eyes, not health food for the brain.

Comments?

It has been tolerably warm the past few days. Which is good, because it was way too cold and dry in January and February.

The last couple days, I keep hearing really strong winds outside. Something was blowing around. Yesterday, I went out to check. Noticed the gate was open, so I closed it.

Heard it again this evening. Nothing on or right beside the house. I think it was the lawn furniture out back.

The stuff is pretty weather beaten already. I think I have had it out there for over 5 years. Unfortunately, I don’t have a shed for it. So I think I will be throwing it out on the next trash pickup day.

Then the March wind can blow all it wants, but at least it won’t be blowing anything of mine around!

The AllConsuming.net website got a big makeover today.

It has been changed to have a 1950s style appearance. Looks pretty retro. I kind of liked the old one better but since the change just happened a few minutes ago, the dust might not have settled yet.

It is pretty dramatically different-looking.

If you have never seen the site before, you are in for a treat if you go take a look.

It lets you record any new item you consume. Not every time you consume it. Just once. So, if you have some cereal, you can record the type/name and brand. You do not need to record it again tomorrow. Once is enough.

Eventually, after a month or two, you get a very good idea of what kind of stuff you are eating, drinking, reading, watching, and listening to.

They use dynamic HTML and AJAX to nice effect on the site. The site seems friendlier than a lot of sites for this reason.

I think the site is partly supported by advertising - from Google adsense words. I think I also heard somewhere that Amazon made a little investment in them.

Not 100% sure but I think the site is written in Ruby and uses the Ruby On Rails framework. A lot of the stuff that Robot Coop does is programmed in Ruby On Rails.

Technorati Tags:
advertising, tagging, rubyonrails, social, food, dining, database

They let you slather HTML into certain of parts of your Friendster profile/home page now.

Plus, they also give you the ability to change the CSS it uses. You can use one of the predefined ones, or, if you know CSS like I and a lot of web developers/programmers do - you can just directly plug in the CSS you want.

If you don’t know CSS, fear not. Friendster has a little help link you can use to get tips/tools on how to do that.

The easiest one one I found is to use the Friendster Profile Editor (Advanced) page that some kind-hearted person put up on the web for people to use.

It gives total control over the CSS that gets created, and generates decently looking CSS no less - and it makes it easy to create it too.

I changed the style and added lots of handy links in the sidebar.

I like the new features I put in the sidebar. I am not crazy about the purple shading, though.

Anybody know if there is a way I can tweak the color to something a little more masculine, without changing to another style or or layout - just the color?

There is one caveat, though. I don’t want to switch to a paid blog - I realize I can do anything if I do that. But it seems a bit pricey for what is, after all, just a fun/social blog for me.

I like the overall look. I just hate the color.

This is really strange. An hour or so ago, I was putting away some groceries in the kitchen.

My cat came in the kitchen and yowled at me or looked up expectantly while I was putting things in the fridge.

I said, with no small amount of exasperation, “Okay, okay, I’ll get it and bring it upstairs”. I was referring to her food that I had just bought at the store.

Without the slightest hesitation, she turned and walked out of the kitchen without stopping to look over her shoulder, and walked part way up the steps leading upstairs.

There I found her waiting for me a couple minutes later when I walked upstairs with the box of cans of cat food in tow.

I should find that weird, right?

Technorati Tags:
cats

Fruits and vegetables apparently aren’t what they used to be. Compared to now, fruits and vegetables a few decades back had up to 38% more of important nutrients than they do now.

A recent study on nutrition value of produce revealed:

A biochemist at the University of Texas, Austin - decided to do a little research on the nutrition value of modern produce. What he found, is it has gone downhill. He got his data from U.S. Department of Agriculture. He believes there have been decreases of up to 38 percent in various important vitamins, minerals, and protein.

So good nutrition might be getting more difficult - and expensive - to achieve.

Technorati Tags:
health, food

There is a pretty neat web site I have been using since its inception a few months ago.

The site is called Yahoo Answers.

While everyone knows, if you kind of know about something, and there are some unique words used to describe it, you can find out more about it by doing of search of the whole web using Yahoo, or Google, or whatever.

The problem is, some questions are not easily or quickly solved by searching. Good reasons for this are things for which all the descriptive terms are very common words. Other things could just be very obscure or arcane subjects. Things which people with certain experience might know, but it is not something that reference books typically hold.

So, this new site from Yahoo seeks to deal with that. They have already gotten a lot of kudos from the media and bloggers out on the web. Everybody seems to be starting to notice the site.

It is useful, fun, and helpful. Everyone likes to be helped sometimes. The big shocker is that people like to be helpful too. While this really is not explained well by economics, it has been demonstrated in practice.

One possible reason for this is that each person gets a score. It is kind of a role-playing game (RPG) in that sense. As your score rises, you get promoted to different levels. With each promotion, you gain more privileges. Generally, these privileges let you ask - and answer - more questions. The more good answers you give, the more points you get!

Who decides what answers are good is the community. The other Yahoo Answers users themselves, in other words.

While not all the answers are right, or even serious, many of them are. Asking a question can usually get one unstuck. And that is the point of this site - and why it works.

Try it!

Note that if you have your own blog, they have a little snippet of HTML on the site that you can copy and paste into the template for your blog. That way some of your recent stuff on the site can appear on the sidebar of your blog. You do not have to do this. Most people do not bother. But, if you want to do it, it is just one more benefit of using the site.

Technorati Tags:
blogging, social, reference

It looked so surrealistically beautiful this morning.

Just now, only a half hour after my last glance at the sunny bliss that was outdoors, I was stunned to see a heavy rainstorm and a uniform light gray covering the previously blue, sunny sky.

Well, I will still probably go see my movie tonight. And I am glad I saw the weather at its best.