Stefan Hayden

Keri and I just watched the Boston fireworks but not from where most people saw them. Instead we just walk up the hill our apartment is on, Corry hill. There is a small park at the top with a view that points north and we thought we might be able to see the fireworks from there.

We were not alone as 2 - 300 other people had the same idea. Police had the street block and clearly they knew this was a yearly thing. I wonder if the same people come every year though as there was on tree that was exactly in the way.

You could still see through the tree but it was amazing how many fireworks exploded in the center and expanded exactly to the edges of the tree.

I don’t know how that trees survives from year to year because just about everyone wanted to cut the tree down.

Another interesting point was how there was no one selling any type of food at this small gathering. I know almost every hot dog and funnel cake vendor must be at the river but it was surprising that some one hadn’t though to sell something there as they would have no competition. Was I not moving to Malden I might have brought a cooler of soda up and made a killing.

All and all it was one of the more unique experiences here in Boston.

Flock was an interesting idea when it first came out. I remember the first excitement that people had when the first developers preview came out. The tide turned quickly. People wondered why this needed to be a different browser and not just a bunch of extension for FireFox.

I’ve seen two developers previews so far, flock and songbird. They both had the same problems. They were cool ideas but so early in development that people just complained about the bugs.

Flock stuck with it and their first beta is much more polished then the first version was. It’s integration with del.icio.us is great. How it integrates with photo services is the most dynamic and intuitive I have seen. The dynamic search is also interesting and with some more customization could be extremely useful.

It has a very interesting feed reader. I almost think I would used it as it has a very cool way of showing posts. My test for any feed reader though is if it can handle my almost 300 feeds. Sadly It slowed the browser to a halt. I often got alerts tell me javascript was taking too long. This is the kind of message you get if the browser thinks it might be stuck in an infinite loop.

If there was some way they could integrate with bloglines I think that might even push me over the edge to use Flock instead of FireFox. It even seems all the FireFox extensions will work in flock which is almost a requirement now for any browser I want to use.

I love Wendy’s. I think out of the 3 burger chains they are by far the best. Through High School and College Wendy’s has earned a large chunk of my cash.

But now they are just being dumb. They’ve restructured their value meals to have 3 sizes of fries and drink. The old medium will now be a small, the old large (or Biggie as the term was) will now be a medium, and they have invented an even larger then large size to be the new large.

These sizes are ridiculous. Do they really need their own anti Wendy’s movie before they take the queue from McDonald’s and start getting healthy and sizing down the meals.

I think this is one of the worst moves they have made in a long time. So far this has made news headlines in several places and is for the most part being ridiculed. Hopefully with enough out cry they will restore order to the Wendy’s kingdom.

For those who want to follow the World Cup there are a couple of options.

The FIFA site has a live play by play widget that shows descriptions of what is happening:

"The striker recives the ball from CENTENO Walkter (CRC) and slips Germany's two central defender to fire past LEHMANN Jens (GER) for the second time in this match"

This format might be interesting in baseball (can’t be worse then watching it) it doesn’t really work with soccer. Reading the game like it’s a book is just not exciting.

Google has a great widget for their personalised page that is simple but has all you need. Just a search on World Cup will get you the score of the current games and there is a link for the widget.

It auto update it self with the time in the match, the score, who scored and who’s on the field. It also has tabs for standings and a match schedule.

While I am happily employed it’s been interesting watching the design job listings on 37 signals. It was an interesting choice for 37 signals to start a job posting board and to charge $250 for a 30 listing. They knew they had the eyes and ears of both people in the industry and the people who want to be in it. It’s not hard to see them hosting resumes for another obscene amount of money.

An interesting point about the listing is the order they list the categories. Design is first, followed by programming, with Miscellaneousranked above executive (which is just amusing).

Unlike craigslist all of the listings for the whole world are on the same page which creates a unique view of the world. Where are the people whounderstand the web starting their companies. It seem like all people are talking about the bay area but as the image shows there are startups all around the country.

Here’s a quick map of American and where the 30 listings on 37 signals currently are. I’ve yet to master the Google maps API for a dynamic map based off the rss feed. maybe next time.