Wikipedia Edits Forecast Vice Presidential Picks

Interesting ... The Washington Post reports on the findings of Cyveillance, a company that 'normally trawls the Internet for data on behalf of clients seeking open source information in advance of a corporate acquisition, an important executive hire, or brand awareness.' Cyveillance decided 'on a lark' to test its methods by monitoring the Wikipedia biographies of Vice-Presidential prospects. The conclusion? If you'd been watching Wikipedia you might have gotten an advance tipoff of Friday's announcement that McCain was selecting Sarah Palin. 'At approximately 5 p.m. ET (Thursday), the company's analysts noticed a spike in the editing traffic to Palin's Wiki page, and that some of the same Wiki users appeared to be making changes to McCain's page.

Read story at NewsCloud.

Google Maps Adds Public Transit and Walking Directions for Seattle

Google Maps adds public transit and walking directions for Seattle. Nice! The King County Metro Planner never worked as well.

Canon EOS 50D Announced, 5D Mark II to Follow Soon

Canon EOS 50D announced a bit ahead of Photokina. I suspect the Canon 5D Mark II to be announced next week or the week after.

Heather Lake Clear of Snow

Green
Originally uploaded by reifman

After last week's Lake Serene hike, Heather Lake seemed short and mild. It was beautiful up there. The trail to the lake is clear of snow. Seasonal glaciers and landslide debris on the far side of the lake.

Trail details

Canon 5D Mark II Announcement

If you want to receive an email when the Canon 5D Mark II is finally announced, sign up for the announcement group at Google Groups.

Biden Just a Smokescreen for Real Obama's VP Pick?

Howard Fineman is sure Biden will be the pick. I'm not so sure. I think Biden is sleight of hand away from the final pick. I just can't see Obama picking an older male Northeastern Congressional insider.

Read story at NewsCloud.

Lake Serene Clear of Snow

Lake Serene was beautiful this weekend and clear of snow. Some bugs. Definitely worth the hike if you're looking for something steep and challenging. The last two miles climb very quickly. Bridalveil falls is a beautiful 1mi side trip as well.

Some hiking trip report: "She said Yes!"

Looking for a hike tomorrow, I found this trip report ending in an engagement...

The new Facebook doesn't care what you're doing

I wonder if you've noticed lately that no one cares what you're doing. Facebook's new design dials down the narcissism index relegating your friends status updates to a secondary page.

The News Feed now showcases application updates and Facebook-owned applications such as the Wall. To see status updates, you now have to click Status Updates.

I'm sure Facebook Mobile and other remote applications still show status updates in the forefront, but I found it to be an interesting design change...and a welcome relief.

However, overall I found the new profile design quite complicated. For a site that built it's success on simplicity and clean design, I'm surprised to see how cluttered and unintuitive the new layouts and controls are.

Click images below to see detail.

Mac OS X Leopard is Slower and Less Stable than Tiger

Mac OS X Leopard is slower and less stable than Tiger. There I've said it. I'd been trying to hold off, unwilling to admit to the world that Apple has lost ground in the quality of their operating system. But, my experience with Leopard hasn't been that great.

Ever since I installed Leopard, I've had a handful of problems in common scenarios that are more typical of the kinds of Windows problems I wrote about here. My MacBook Pro laptop hangs waking from sleep occasionally - whereas this almost never happened under Tiger. I am still unable to use iSync to sync my RAZR phone (deliberate hint to buy an iPhone?) from my laptop.

A couple of times my laptop has gone to sleep and stayed hot - running the battery down to 0 and heating up inside my backpack. My tower Mac at home regularly goes into super high fan mode when I put it to sleep. I can no longer hit sleep and walk away. I have to wait to see if the system actually goes quiet - or the fan will run at top speed for hours.

On an unrelated note, Microsoft Office 2008 regularly hangs the system - it is one of the buggiest and least reliable applications - and I keep up with their automatic updates.

I'd really hoped Apple would fix these problems with patches to Leopard, but they have not. I updated OS X last night to the latest release and couldn't get an application to load from my laptop for 5 - 7 minutes.

Let's hope Apple works on performance and reliability in the next set of patches.