Stephen's Untold Stories

I know there were a few games before today, but today was opening day for most teams. Hope you got to watch some games!

Go Braves!

Seems like it works!

It appears that’s exactly what some students at the University of Texas at San Antonio did.

The goal was an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing.

But the wording in a draft by students at the University of Texas at San Antonio appears to match Brigham Young University’s code — without proper attribution.The student in charge of the honor code project said it was an oversight; he plans to include proper citation and attribution when the draft is submitted to the faculty senate.

Cheating experts say the case illustrates a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don’t know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.

Link to article

My contract with Spring is up in May, and I have pretty much decided that I’m going to get an iPhone. I am very excited about the possibility of the 3G version with GPS capability. I’ve been playing around with an iPod Touch, and it is an amazing device. The new iPhone should be even better.

A June introduction of the 3G iPhone could tie in with Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference to be held in San Francisco from June 9 to 13, especially if that event also sees the arrival of the finished version of the iPhone SDK, which is currently in beta.

What’s going to be packed into the new iPhone? GPS seems likely, as well as a dual-camera arrangement to allow 3G video calls as well as taking photos with the screen as a viewfinder. The industrial design of the handset is likely to change, as Apple and handset buyers are both particularly style-conscious.

Link to article

DreamHost just allowed me to update WordPress to version 2.5, and I’m going to be playing around with the themes in the next couple of days. I might just go back to the old one, but it seems as good a time as any to look for a new one.

As always, your input is welcome!

Yes, you can use different variations of the Google home page for your searching preferences.

• Google Latin
• Elmer Fudd Version
• Klingon Version
• Hacker Interface

And my personal favorite, the Swedish Chef version.

The Google home page has turned black for some of us today in honor of Earth Hour.

I just set up a free account. It looks pretty intriguing so far. Here is a great review from Download Squad.

We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for photos that we have ever used. Although services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing capabilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a completely different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your online photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.

What makes Photoshop Express so different is the Photoshop aspect of it all. To be clear, Adobe is aiming this service squarely at consumers — people who spend most of their time connected to the net and want a fast, effective way to edit photos — not prosumers or digital professionals. JPEG is the only supported photo format (though editing RAW in a web based app makes little sense to use anyway) Still, the editing capabilities and the smoothness of the interface are leaps and bounds ahead of any competing service. For instance, the service is non-destructive — meaning that any edits you make to your photographs can be removed at any time — and in any order. Don’t like a change you made last week? Remove it, or revert back to the original. Nothing is permanently changed or destroyed. Tools like red-eye removal, white balance, exposure, digital and color effects are all easy to use and very, very effective. There’s even a version of Adobe’s Healing Brush if you need to remove part of a photograph and remap it with something else.

Full Review Here

Once again, Georgia has done well. Our grade in Access to Technology dropped from a B+ last year to a C this year. Guess we’ll have to work on that one.

Here is a link to the complete report for Georgia (pdf)

And here is a link where you can look at other states.

Mine must have been around 27 or 28.

Here are the top 5.

1. Gawker
2. MacRumors
3. Huffington Post
4. Perez Hilton
5. TechCrunch

Here is the complete list.

I had no idea that Yahoo actually was one of the early investors in Google. Here is a great article about that whole situation.

Almost eight years ago, Yahoo decided to lend a little startup a helping hand, featuring its search technology on the Yahoo home page and giving it money at a critical juncture.

In cutthroat Silicon Valley, no good deed goes unpunished.

The startup was Google, and Yahoo’s generosity helped launch the most formidable competitor it had ever encountered. Now facing a takeover attempt by Microsoft, Yahoo is coming to terms with the punishing consequences of its complex relationship with Google, including a futile attempt to copy Google’s extraordinarily profitable advertising model at significant cost to Yahoo’s own business.

When Google was still a private company, it sent its financial statements to Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale like clockwork. Google had to because Yahoo was one of its earliest investors.

The statements showed the incredible growth of Google’s search advertising business, with sales more than doubling from quarter to quarter.

But Yahoo executives didn’t focus on the money; they were interested in how much traffic was being driven by search, recalled Ellen Siminoff, an executive who joined Yahoo in 1996.

In 2000, Yahoo agreed to use and promote Google, which it touted as “the best search engine on the Internet.” Google co-founder Larry Page described the pact as a “major milestone.”

The following year, Yahoo was even more generous, paying Google $7.2 million for its services (Google in turn paid Yahoo $1.1 million for promotional help). Google desperately needed the money, which helped push it into the black for the entire year.

n 2002, Yahoo paid Google $13.2 million, equivalent to more than a quarter of Yahoo’s annual profit of $43 million. The sum, however, meant less to Google, which had blown past its benefactor with an annual profit of about $100 million.

But the price of coddling Google would be much higher, as Yahoo soon discovered.

Complete article here

If you aren’t using Flickr, you should be. Even if you don’t want to upload your own photos, you can search for photos of almost anything you could imagine. Flickr’s own search engine isn’t so great, but there are a couple of alternatives.

• http://www.compfight.com – This is a new one to me, but seems to do a great job.
• http://flickrleech.net – This is my favorite. It gives you some great options and has a wicked sense of humor.

I’ve played tennis for most of my life, and I had never thought of many of these.

• When packing something for shipping in a box that’s too large, use tennis balls as shock-absorbing cushions that will hold the item steady in the box.
• Tennis balls can also help any laundry load dry faster – just throw two or three in the dryer and your clothes will be done quicker.
• Put tennis balls on the tops of poles to mark the edges of your driveway or drainage ditch. The bright yellow balls will be visible in the dark and help you avoid driving into the ditch or over the grass in the dark.
• Prevent your bike’s kick stand from sinking into soft dirt by cutting a small slit in a tennis ball and sliding it over the kick stand.

Here is the complete list.

Great story about a guy who just won’t stop learning. Nice to see his being able to take advantage of these opportunities.

Baxter Wood is going back to college. But the 62-year-old truck driver won’t be quitting his day job or going to discussion groups with kids 40 years his junior.

Instead, he will have his pick of professors from elite universities like Columbia, Yale, MIT and Stanford — and his tuition will be $0. How’s that for financial aid?

Wood is one of the thousands of students attending iTunes U, downloading lectures available free of charge on the iTunes Web site to his MP3 player.

“It’s amazingly realistic,” Wood said. “The sound of the pages rustling, chalk on the board … I’m convinced that the best way to learn something is to get a professor who knows more than you do to explain it to you.”

More than 50,000 lectures are downloaded every week from almost 30 universities whose professors offer their teachings to anyone with a computer.

Professor Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California at Berkeley, Wood’s current teacher, is one of the most popular picks among iTunes U students.

“I’m podcasting my course on Heidegger, ‘On Time and Being,’ which is the hardest philosophy book of the 20th century, I think, and the most important,” Dreyfus said. “That surprises me that Heidegger has such an audience.”

Link to article

I took a drive over to Rome today and got some nice shots of this hawk.

Click each photo for a larger version.

Another great list from Mashable.

This looks pretty nice. Anybody out there using it?

http://www.testdesigner.com/

18 of the top 100 fastest-growing counties in the U.S. are in Georgia. Ya’ll bring your own water with you!