Don Wilson thoughts and ideals of an internet magnate

Just a reminder to myself, Yahoo will be holding their financial earnings report tomorrow (4pm CST) and should return interesting results.

Whether or not they’re real is unknown, but damn these are awesome.

Enjoy.

So, Google announced tonight their venture into cloud computing, database crunching, and, all things considered, a bad ass approach to helping development of web apps significantly easier. See Scoble’s Qik stream of the announcement here.

Basically Google will host a certain amount of storage, computation limit, and bandwidth for each developer and will eventually provide opportunities to PHP, RoR, and possibly other languages. The current beta cycle is limited to Python, which is definitely a plus in my favor since I’ve been looking to dive into Python for quite some time. What’s odd is that I literally purchased Learning Python yesterday and brought it to read between classes today. Little did I know that I would have a chance to really start using it on a quite limited (10,000) userbase platform.

What am I going to write using Google Apps Engine? I’m not too sure right now. Depending on it’s ability to communicate with the outside world, I might develop something with my new friend, Twitter. In the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about what services are already out there and a few that haven’t been invented yet (at least that I know of). Perhaps some type of centralizing system for geographic location, so that you could add “DallasTwit”, ping @DallasTwit, and in turn, DallasTwit relays the same message to all of it’s followers. Message relays will be limited to one relay per XX minutes, allowing for the service to work but not spam.

Hopefully no one steals that idea, but if they do, I’ve got a few hanging under my wing that I could venture into as well. If you’re interested in working with their API, check here.

As I previously posted, Best Buy were true on their word and sent me the $50 gift card for purchasing the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive however many months ago.

Now to figure out what to waste it on…

Cause:

Before:

After:

Effect:

(happy)

To be honest, I have at least 20 projects that I can spend all of my time on. The hard part of my life is figuring out what project/idea I should devote most of my time.

The project that has peaked most of my interest lately is TagItFunny, a digg-like site that allows users to post links, videos, images, jokes/stories, et al. There is a lot of rewriting that I must go through if I want to optimize it enough for it to be useful to me again. I started work on it before I started learning Smarty templating and how useful Smarty’s cache features can be. It was before I saw Snap, the primary source for the automated screenshots, pulled the plug on a service. It was before I realised that I should work on things that I really believe in and can grow into something useful to it’s users instead of forcing content-based sites down users like I’ve done in the past.

Waiting on a project and luckily coming up on the previously mentioned news piece regarding Snap and gaining more knowledge has allowed an actual future for the project. I could’ve walked in blindly, continued what I’ve been doing in the past, and run into too many problems that might have caused my exit.

Whether or not I actually pursue TagItFunny (the name is going to get a definite change) is for the future to decide.

Within a week’s time I’ll be publishing a few blog posts specifically targeted to How-tos. In one post I’ll demonstrate how I make my life easier by installing and using uSirius to listen to all of my favorite Sirius channels while I browse and work on my computer(s).

The other post will focus on how I use Stylish to my leverage to hide annoying ads on websites that I frequent. I’ll include codes for Facebook and MSNBC.com as well as demonstrate how I go about making them.

I just found a great blog that provides recent real estate information of the stars and utterly rich - the Real Estalker. Here’s how they describe their antics:

Let’s face it, for better or worse, we as a culture are obsessed with celebrity and celebrity lifestyle. We all want to know where they go, what they wear and who they’re sleeping with. And of course, where they live. This blog is focussed on who lives where, who’s buying and selling and for how much. Enjoy. But children, have some sense. Do not knock on any of these doors. These people do not need you ringing their bells and tripping their security. Seriously.

The author provides housing prices, square footage, photos, the real estate salesman’s cheesy description of the house, as well as humorous commentary.

Definitely an interesting find and I’ll be sure to subscribe to their RSS feed.