mad dog in the fog

I came across this cool Web 2.0 Innovation Map on Google Maps Mania. Zoom into your part of the country to find Web 2.0 sites/services in your area. A couple of weeks ago, I created something similar to this on a much, much smaller scale (SF Bay Area only) on Wayfaring.

I’m feeling the need to rant about the Nikon Service department. A couple of months ago, I encountered the dreaded dust spot issue on my Nikon D70. I decided to send the camera in to Nikon Service for a sensor cleaning because I wasn’t comfortable with doing this myself. Fifty dollars (this is not covered under the warranty) and 6 weeks later I get the camera back. I take some test photos… and discover that the dust spot problem just got worse!!! Are there any other Nikon owners out there who have had a similar problem with Nikon Service??? And for those of you who are digital SLR users who change lenses from time to time, have you ever experienced the dust spot issue?>> discussion thread on Flickr

2/1/05 Update:

I spoke with Nikon about this and they were very responsive. They sent me a UPS shipping label and they will re-do the cleaning for free. I’m still not happy with the results of the initial cleaning but at least they are making good on this. In the future I’m going to try out the do-it-yourself approach using the cleaning kit that was mentioned in the Flickr thread.

Technorati tags: Digital SLR, Nikon D70, Nikon

Are you making the most out of your commute time? Take a look at Ravi Jain’s brilliant weekly DriveTime video podcast.

I saw Imogen Heap play tonight at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Great, great show. One of those shows where everyhing felt right: the right artist at the right time in the perfect venue. Click here for some amazing photos from this show by Gordon Lai.Set list:

Just For Now

Goodnight and Go

The Walk

Let Go

Loose Ends

Can’t Take It In

Clear the Area

Headlock

Come Here Boy

Hide And Seek

Have You Got It In You

Good To Be In Love

Daylight Robbery

Moment I Said It

Photo by Gordon Lai.

Technorati tags: Imogen Heap, Live Music

Saw this on SFist / prosaic:There is a hilarious description of the “Marina Girl” on Wikipedia. The definition is very elaborate. Here’s just a portion of it…

“…When a Marina Girl turns 30, as the majority of the population is, she goes from being known as a Marina Girl, aka Turf, and is now a “Cougar”[2]. A few places in the Marina with a high saturation of Cougars are Balboa Cafe, Cozmo’s, the California Wine Merchant, and the aforementioned Marina Safeway.”

The definition of the Marina Male is equally brutal:

“He usually wears the fashions found in Banana Republic, The Gap, or Ralph Lauren. Collared, stripey dress shirts, with varying patterned cuff usually worn tucked-into pants during the week are usually kept untucked on weekends (aka The Marina Party Shirt), in conjunction with a pair of casual Diesel Jeans, Seven, AG or True Religion jeans or zipper sweaters.”

It’s good to see Yahoo making some improvements to MyYahoo. They recently added the ability to drag & drop content. This is a standard feature on most of the new AJAX homepages. I’m not so sure where these new home pages (Netvibes, Zoozio, etc.) will be a year from now. I suspect that most of them will either be bought out by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. or will shut down due to a flimsy business model. I haven’t tried all of them but I’ve been very impressed with Protopage. All in all, the proliferation of these Ajax homepages is a good thing because they are pushing the bigger players to add more features, which ultimately benefits the users.

Filed under: Yahoo, Ajax, Homepage

ESPN is in talks with Giants slugger Barry Bonds for a new reality show. More details here.Technorati tags: San Francisco Giants, Barry Bonds, MLB, Reality Television

Yesterday, there was an article in the Chronicle about two new photographic exhibits commemorating the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: 1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures (SF MOMA) and After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (Legion of Honor).

Related to this, the Bancroft Library has created an online exhibit that includes an interactive map and a panoramic view of the earthquake destruction. And there is an upcoming exhibit at the California Historical Society featuring photos of the 1906 quake taken by Mark Twain.

Last month at Fort Funston:

In their earnings announement yesterday, eBay provided some very interesting revenue figures for their recently acquired Skype division. eBay acquired Skype on October 14, 2005 and since that time, the Skype unit has had $24.9 million in revenues. At the end of Q4 2005, they reported 74.7 million registered Skype users.This really is tremendous growth. I did some digging around and came up
with these data points for registered Skype users:

Since August 2005 (5 months), that averages out to 178,000 new Skype users per
day! Below is a chart showing the growth since the first public beta
in August 2003:

Check out Om Malik’s blog and VoIPWiki for some interesting analysis on the Skype numbers.

Filed under: Skype, eBay, Earnings