gazeti

I got the opportunity to photograph a friend’s band (Pushing Red) at the Darkhorse Tavern in State College, PA. I’m excited about being their “official” photographer, and going out to more shows and taking pictures.

Taking pictures of musicians on stage in bars is hard: (1) there’s not nearly enough light and (2) they don’t hold still. Everyone I’ve shown this set to has liked a different picture. My favorites are the black and white ones, and perhaps especially the one above.

In today’s broken economy, I think America needs to look inwards and keep our money state side. If you’re going to spend on something, you should buy American. This will keep the jobs in America, and keep our stores and factories running.

So here’s what I propose: a website that only shows you goods made in America. If you’re going to spend your hard earned (and steadily dwindling) money on a t-shirt, buy one that’s Made in the USA.

Make your dollars count. Perhaps it’s as simple as passing a search term to Amazon, and only displaying results for goods made in America.

I’m reading The Algorithm Design Manual which is a easy to read, being well written and not too burdened with cumbersome mathematical proofs. It’s a nice practical guide with plenty of theory as well as useful advice.

daylife.com is a Google News competitor but with a far slicker interface. In comparison, Google News is starting to look a little fuddy duddy.

They have numerous creative features that make looking at the news an interesting activity.
They also provide what looks like a very rich and usable API for others to use. What’s really cool is the effort they’ve gone through to promote their API.

They offer motivation:

(1)  They have a contest that offers up to $3500 to interesting, original and innovative uses of their API.

If $3500 is motivation enough, but you don’t have any good ideas, they also offer ideas:

(2) The lazyweb portion of their website offers more than 15 or so interesting ideas (with mocked screenshots) of what you could potentially do with the daylife API. It lists relatively simple, but good ideas such as: a constantly updating page about the world’s most evil dictators, a mashup between news and reviews for books, and how to build a celebrity page. With some of the ideas, they even provide some notes on what API calls you’d need to make!

I don’t think we see enough of an effort like this to promote a particular platform’s API.

I think it’s great that they’re going the extra mile to not only motivate you ($3500) but also seed your mind with the sort of things that you can do with daylife.com (lazyweb). I look forward to seeing the entries that make it into the final rounds of the competition. I’ll really want to start playing with their API myself.

‘Gazeti’ is a swahili noun that means: newspaper or daily. I think it’s an appropriate name for my blog and one that was chosen after hours of searching for something that’s sufficiently interesting. If it takes this long to find a name, I wonder how long it’ll take me to actually getting around to writing a real post. Karibu!