Author: Rick Hallihan

Rockford Lhotka has a lengthy but interesting post about the history of programming languages, and the benefits of having competing languages.

From the Google Blog: Google is now offering SMS (Short Message Service) searches. You send a text message to 46645 (GOOGL) and it sends the results. Types of information available include Business listings, Residential listings, Dictionary words, Prices (from Froogle), Phone area code/zip code lookup, and a calculator that includes unit conversions!

Ok, I’m not sure exactly what kind of search engine traffic the above phrase is going to attract, but I laughed out loud when I read it, so I had to link…

Anyways, its from a post by Ed Kaim that starts out talking about Microsoft ISV Empower program (which he describes with the above phrase) and then drifts laterally and finished up talking about bovine plastic surgery. Well actually, he’s talking about phone numbers, but he does mention bovine plastic surgery. If you have any questions about that, call 1-UR-PURTEY-OX, I’m sure Ed can explain better than I can…

Related Links:

http://www.phonespelling.com/ <– Lots of results

http://www.dialabc.com/words/search <– Graphical results

http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2004/04/05/107986.aspx <– Microsoft's CalvinH tackles the phone number problem

Congratulations to Scaled Composites!

Lots of Video & Info on the X Prize Website.

John Montgomery continues the saga of the not-quite-broken-but-possibly-defective Maytag washer.

I’m not sure why I’m drawn to this story, but I read, and am either interested or amused by every post. Maybe this is the blogosphere’s answer to reality TV.

I like the effect that these types of posts have on the blogging community. I know some people complain about people posting about their dogs, their vacations, etc. I think it adds humanity to the information network. The catch is that you have to have valuable content in addition to the “personal fluff”. When I like the content someone provides, then it’s fun to get some context about the person at the keyboard.