The birth of BlinkStory.
As some of you know, I’ve started doing iPhone development recently. Between me and the Mikes (Old and New) we’ve thrown around a couple of hundred possible applications. We’re currently developing one called CashCurrent (in conjunction with another company, GraySail), but while I had some downtime on that project we decided to launch another one.
Yesterday at lunch, New Mike and I were watching O.J. get sentenced and it occurred to us that it would be great if there were a news site that turned everyone with an iPhone into a reporter. We would be seeing news as it actually happened, with millions of eyes out there to catch it on camera. After spending three or four hours going through various names, BlinkStory
I love you Dave!
Ok, that came out a little funny, but I just finished repairing my dryer with a part I got from the Appliance Repair site run by Dave Harnish. When my dryer stopped working last Sunday, I thought “uh-oh, Best Buy here I come”. But times are tight and I thought I’d do a little research before trashing the thing. I’m glad I did.
I found a troubleshooting guide on Dave’s site, and even though I initially mis-diagnosed the problem as a bad heating element, Dave’s prompt email diagnosis got me back on track. One $20 part later and I’m back in business. Thanks Dave!
Who does this election really hurt?
As I was driving my son to school this morning, it occurred to me who would be the most impacted by yesterday’s election: the little sign makers.
Without a pending election, who is going to buy hundreds of those little wire-frame signs? Will there be enough cheap mortgages and weight loss schemes to make up the deficit? I think not.
A picture of misery.
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I was reading the local paper on Thursday and came across the list of properties that will be auctioned by the Richland County treasurer for back taxes. I got curious, and found the list of properties on the county web site, but a big list of names and amounts just wasn’t very easy for me to picture. So I wrote a little script, geocoded the addresses, converted the results to KML, and uploaded to it to Google Maps. Hard to believe that behind every little dot there’s a story of someone’s home lost.
TMI
So I was trying to do my civic duty and investigating our presidential candidates, and I found out about this web site that Obama sponsored. It’s pretty interesting, but it’s hard to get your head around numbers that are in billions. McDonald’s hamburgers or contracting dollars, the numbers just seem so large as to be meaningless.
One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.
–Joseph Stalin
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