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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Feel free to browse A calorie counterIf you're a 5-foot, 6-inch, 43-year-old male who weighs 360 pounds, did you know you can burn through 215 calories if you played the accordion nonstop for two hours? That's just enough to eat three quarters of a single Big Mac or nearly half of a Cinnabon Caramel Pecanbon. I have no idea what one of those is, but it sounds gooey and quite yummy. This site is a gem. It's loaded with all manner of physical activities and the amount of calories you'll chew through should you perform any of them. The best part is it's cumulative. So if you figure out your day, you get a fairly good idea of your caloric expenditure. Obvious stuff like walking and running is in there, but it will take a wild guess at activities such as airplane repair, praying, saddling horses and, my favorite, attending meetings. Pure genius. Empowering employeesBusiness2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,42192,00.html That Web address is worth typing in because you'll find an inspiring story of engineer empowerment, flat organizations and tractors. It's the story of how Nokia's research and development folks drive the organization and have turned the small Finish company into a communications powerhouse. Lots of companies claim they empower their employees, but here's a story of one that actually does. Wave this story under your own management's nose, and you'll either get fired or saluted. Stuffed networkingWhat do you get if you give an MIT student a teddy bear, a network switch and some super glue? If you want to see photos, you'll have to click over to this site. And if your kids are past their stuffed animal phase and you're excited by this kind of thing, it'll show you how to convert a plush toy into a fully functional ethernet router. Maybe I could modify my Apple AirPort wireless base station and paint it like a mushroom. On second thought, maybe I won't. The weakest linkI hate to be one of those fools who longs for the old days. But when I see sites such as this, I really wish the clock could be turned back, or at least we could be allowed to round up all the morons and slap them with a clue stick. The Web spread like wildfire for two main reasons: It was easy for just about anybody to build HTML pages, and you could link to just about any publicly available resource. Fast forward 10 years and now we have boneheaded hyperlinking policies from corporations that try to stop others from linking into their Web sites. I've read a few of these policies and I sit, staring at the monitor, amazed at the depth of stupidity of some corporations. Weather obsessedwww.glu.com/products/weatherpop/ Because I try to walk or take public transportation as much as possible, I'm obsessed by the weather. It's mostly along the lines of wanting to know if I'll need an umbrella for tomorrow's excursion. Plus I need to talk to She Who Must Be Obeyed's Dad on an occasional basis and moaning about the weather is part of our routine. So I'm more than thrilled with this OS X application that sits in the toolbar. The free version displays an icon indicating the weather and the temperature; the $8 registered version will show this week's weather and all manner of weather-nerd data such as barometer pressure, dew point and so forth. It's pretty good for the cost of a lunch.
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From Tech Times
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