Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 62 of 72.

Home Depot Center scorecard

The Torrance Daily Breeze has a very interesting Home Depot Center scorecard. “The Galaxy will also make the first profit in its eight-year history, team officials confirmed Friday. The team turned last season?s $3.5 million loss at the Rose Bowl into a modest $150,000 profit.” Doug Hamilton should keep Sigi Schmid as head coach. It looks like your revenue worries are not his fault, and you need to get some quality Latinos in your starting 11, not your head coaching position. Carlos Ruiz is the top Latino player in MLS and he was the work of Schmid….

Amazon to index British Library

Amazon announced a deal with the British Library to index its entire collection of 2.55 million books. I visited the British Museum last year and the library was amazing. It will be very cool to see more of these works uniquely identified….

Let them sing it for you

New site where you come up with the lyrics and each word is mapped to a clip in a music database. A new song is created with the clips taken from the word maps….

NY Times : M.L.S. Making an Effort to Attract Hispanic Fans

M.L.S. Making an Effort to Attract Hispanic Fans Some interesting stats in this New York Times article regarding Latinos and M.L.S. “In 2002, 30 percent of the people attending M.L.S. games were Hispanic. On the field, 20 percent of the players had Latino backgrounds.” Anschutz Entertainment Group owns part of the rights to the Mexican national team as well as the Libertadores Cup….

John Mack: Demand to be Managed

In a speech to the Harvard Business School, John Mack emphasized different management approaches on Wall Street. He admits that Wall Street is a money culture, a lone wolf atmosphere, and companies use money as excuses to not care about employees….

Ditch the cubicle

San Jose Mercury News on how Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Sun are moving away from typical office designs and into shared work spaces. In a month my company will change office locations. Better location but smaller, more cramped workspaces. The noise of shared work spaces bothers me, and while an office is a status symbol, it is also a very good way to escape the noise pollution and actually get some work done. When will there be noise shields for the cubicle farm?…

BBC : 50 Places to See Before You Die

BBC has a list of 50 places to see before you die. The Grand Canyon is #1. I live in San Francisco, #36 on the list. Definitely a lot of interesting ideas….

Robotic tickler

Not sure whose turn it is to tickle? A Dutch company has the answer. A pinball with a nylon fringe hovers an inch or two above you and a computer creates a 3D map of your skin for optimal tickling….

Smartmoney.com: Hot Jobs for 2004

SmartMoney.com profiles their Hot Jobs for 2004. “According to a recent Monster.com survey, 82% of Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs.” There are a lot of people feeling trapped in their jobs right now. Some escaped to a M.B.A. or law program, hoping things would improve by the time they got back. Those graduates are coming back, as well as a stagnating group who are happy just to have a job. It will be difficult to explain to a new employer why you have been working in a less than ideal job for the past few years, whether it is…

Wired News: FedEx Delivers New Tech Lab

Wired reports on the FedEx Institute of Technology, a joint R&D effort by Federal Express and the University of Memphis….

John Locke

John Locke : “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts” Ah yes, if only women followed this thought….

20-inch Apple iMac

Apple released a 20-inch iMac today. Very cool!…

Sigi Schmid fired?

Sigi Schmid has been supposedly fired and is meeting with the Dallas Burn today about a new job. Jurgen Klinsmann as new coach? When has a top quality player other than Franz Beckenbauer been a good coach? I was not impressed with Klinsmann’s NSCAA speech on coaching strikers, but Jurgen is a nice guy and has been an assistant with the Galaxy for a few years now….

Berklee Shares

Berklee Shares is a collection of free course lessons from the Berklee College of Music. Movies, MP3s, and PDFs to help you learn bass, brass, DJ, drums, guitar, keyboards, voice, and winds. They even have lyrics analysis….

Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas

Microsoft released the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas today. WordprocessingML is out now and SpreadsheetML and FormTemplateSchemas will be available on December 5. Should make OpenOffice projects a lot easier! I currently use Apache Jakarta POI to generate Excel documents….

x-ray specs

The dream of seemingly every young man, including Bart Simpson, teasing you in the back of many magazines, is now closer to reality. $2400 buys you infrared googles for color voyeurism….

Fast Company : The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know

Wow. Charles Fishman and Fast Company have put together a kick ass article on Wal-Mart. “It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined.” 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States go to Wal-Mart. “It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut. “…

Is your work/life balance off kilter?

Is your work/life balance off kilter? “Datamonitor claimed that 12 million European workers are asking for a cut in salary or seeking to work fewer hours because they’re too stressed.” “70 per cent of IT managers are worried that their staff are approaching burnout due to their work loads.”…

Feedster Builder

Feedster Builder will help you construct an RSS feed for sites without one. If you have a free Blogger account, this means you!…

Reasons Not to Invade Iraq

Time magazine carried an interesting essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft in its March 2, 1998 issue. Interestingly it has diappeared from the Time magazine archive, but the reprint is still available….

Bombardier hydrogen powered Embiro

Bombardier has a prototype named Embrio. What will personal transport look like in 2025? Looks a lot cooler than a Segway!…

MobyDock

MobyDock is a Mac-like application dock using DirectX. Interesting!…