1906 and 2006

My Dad sent this to me in an email. I am posting here as I found these facts pretty staggering. It is quite amazing how far we've come in 100 years.


THE YEAR 1906

This will boggle your mind, I know it did mine!
The year is 1906.
One hundred years ago.
What a difference a century makes!
Here are some statistics for the Year 1906 :
************************************


The average life expectancy was 47 years.

Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. .

There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!

The average wage in was 22 cents per hour.

The average worker made between $200 and $400 per year .

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per
year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME .

Ninety percent of all doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were
condemned in the press AND the government as "substandard."

Sugar cost four cents a pound.

Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg
yolks for shampoo.

Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into
their country for any reason.

Five leading causes of death were:

1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars.
.
The population of Las Vegas , Nevada , was only 30!!!!

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn't been invented yet.

There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write.

Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at
the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists said, "Heroin clears
the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and
bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health." ( Shocking?
DUH! )

Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or
domestic help.

There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE ! U.S.A. !


Now I forwarded this from someone else without typing
it myself, and sent it to you and others all over the United States ,&
Canada
possibly the world, in a matter of seconds!

Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years.

IT STAGGERS THE MIND, EH ?

Google Gadgets

I am impressed by the google gadgets product. Google has found another way to bring their code / products into the mainstream, this time in the form of personalized content for bloggers. I wanted to copy one of the widgets onto this blog, but script tags aren't allowed by Blogger.com. I wonder if google forgot to account for this, as many blogging services don't allow javascript.

Are you being watched at work?

More and more companies are watching what their employees are doing at work. They're relying on surveillance to monitor everyone in the firm, from cubicle to corner office to boardroom. More than 75% of employers monitor their workers' Web site connections, according to a survey by the American Management Association and ePolicy Institute.

Most employees still make the mistake of using their business e-mail for personal use or talk on the work phone regarding problems at work. My friend, who works for a large finance institution, told me that her work also monitors IM conversations. The employees at this company are however told that they are being monitored. Most companies don't need to tell you what they are monitoring at work. So, if you are going to take the risk of discussing personal matters on corporate channels, be ware that this can come back to bite you later.

The slideshow here is pretty interesting on what you can do to avoid being caught, although much of this reminds me of James Bond. :)

Full Story on Forbes

Five Tips to Increase Your Likeability

I love this article. Most of the advise in here is pretty sound, although not easy to implement. When I started thinking about people that are really likeable in my personal and professional life, they all seem to have most of these characteristics in one way or another.

Five Tips to Increase Your Likeability
In the office and the world

Mythbusters beat the finger print security system

How to beat the finger print security system, the Mythbusters way. They need to make these systems much more secure!

Watch the Video

Send An Email To Yourself in 2036! (Send it now, receive later!)

http://futureme.org/ automatically sends you an email of what you said on whatever date you specify. For example, I could send my self an email reminding me to have plastic surgery in 2036! (Or perhaps, sadly, I won't actually need a reminder for that). Neat idea, if you thought burying time capsules in high school were a good idea (I DID). I wanted to send an email to my husband in 2036, but have nooo clue what to say. Any ideas?

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Pretty lengthy, but has some good sites in here.

read more | digg story

Social Bookmarking sites comparison - Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about different social bookmarking sites I have used and asked for help to list any other ones you may have used. Today, there is an article on the read/write web that compares major social bookmarking sites and the features they offer.

This is really a comprehensive comparison and I discovered a few new sites along the way. Do read this, if you are a user of any social bookmarking sites:

The Social Bookmarking Faceoff

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.

The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players - del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Will they catch up? In this post we attempt to answer that question.

We also take a look at how social bookmarking has evolved since del.icio.us. (even del.icio.us itself has evolved a lot!). We compare the features and approaches of the different companies, to see which has gained popularity and what has become the norm in this space.

A short history of social bookmarking

The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today's rich and social web ecosystem.

We used the e-consultant and go2web20 lists of social bookmarking services to select the companies. Note that we did not include any company with an Alexa rank of less than 100,000. We also did not profile social news sites (like digg) or social shopping sites (like Kaboodle), as they will be profiled in separate R/WW posts.

Feature comparison

Note: Mouse over the column headings to see full text

Site	Imp	Pop Rec	Rel Dir	Frd	Rat	Pri	Tag sug	RSS	Wid	Brw	API	Pros	Cons
BlinkList Alexa: 3,600 Technorati: 63,794	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x		BlinkSpaces - create a community out of your links, nice browser toolbar, all and all really nice.	A few broken links in places, a bit underdesigned for my taste.
Blogmarks Alexa: 9,000 Technorati: 48,331	x	x										Nicely designed, generate a post of your bookmarks for your blog	Seems incomplete compare to other sites. Injects ads. Crashed several times during my tests.
del.icio.us Alexa: 155 Technorati: 1,597,818	x	x	x	x		x	x	x	x	x	x	Easy to use, intelligent, tons of useful features, not in your face	Not fancy, might not appeal to the main stream.
Site	Imp	Pop Rec	Rel Dir	Frd	Rat	Pri	Tag sug	RSS	Wid	Brw	API	Pros	Cons
diigo Alexa: 13,750 Technorati: 2,262	x	x	x			x	x	x	x	x		Post to other bookmarking services, supports annotations with sticky notes, flexible blog integration.	A lot of options, might not be easy to learn for everyone, mixes a lot of things together.
Furl Alexa: 2,400 Technorati: 126,000		x			x	x		x	x	x		Has archiving, simple browser add-on, has some additional options associated with the post.	Lacks related items, could use a re-design.
Ma.gnolia Alexa: 9.400 Technorati: 82,800		x		x	x	x	x	x	x		x	Beautiful design, nice implementation of groups, well thought through	Does not look very active, lack of browser add-ons and imports, lacks unique features.
MyWeb Alexa: 1 (for Yahoo!) Technorati: 76,000	x	x				x	x	x	x	x	x	Nice look and feel, could work for main stream.	Too many things in the toolbar, falls short of del.icio.us on many features.
Site	Imp	Pop Rec	Rel Dir	Frd	Rat	Pri	Tag sug	RSS	Wid	Brw	API	Pros	Cons
Shadows Alexa: 13,000 Technorati: 11,140	x	x		x	x	x		x	x	x	x	Fairly comprehensive set of features, clean design	Popular is done by tags instead of by links, site is somewhat slow, does not feel as connected as del.icio.us
Simpy Alexa: 14,600 Technorati: 35,000	x	x	x	x		x	x		x		x	Instantly view current page history, browser export	Could use UI improvements, no popular links, similar links are not cross users, too many first level menues in Firefox extension
StumbleUpon Alexa: 617 Technorati: 33,500		x		x	x				x	x		A different approach, that seems to be successful, given the number of users. Nice browser toolbar.	Would be great to have directory and browse related.

Full Article

Social BookMarking - what do you use?

There are plenty of social bookmarking sites out there to help you keep track of what you're reading, finding interesting, as well as see what others are reading and tagging. Even Yahoo recently got in this area too, with their My Web.

So, which site do you use? I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm listing a few here that I've tried myself:
Furl.net
del.icio.us
Yahoo - MY Web

Both Furl and del.ici.us have comparable features and I think are really geared towards the tech community. They are both pretty feature rich. Yahoo's My Web has a simpler/ easier to use interface, but is lacking some of the desirable features (like the ability to easily save a new article/ story from across the web). They do allow you to save stories found thru my web search.

If there were only 100 people in this world

Sorry for the long sabbatical. A new job and a promotion kept me busy over the last few months. I've made a promise to myself to write more frequently.

So, I was looking at my networks' del.icio.us stories today and noticed this intriguing site:

http://www.miniature-earth.com/

We always hear about problems in the world, but find it hard to grasp the numbers and the severity of the issues. This site reduces the world's population to 100 to help us better understand the important issues in this world. Please take a look at the flash movies....It's extremely interesting and really makes you think.

Find your pub in nyc

This google map shows you all bars in the vicinity of your neighborhood in Manhattan. A heaven for drunks! You can search for an address and all the bars around that area, with info will be displayed on a map:
http://newyorkontap.com/subways.asp

Find your pub in nyc

This google map shows you all bars in the vicinity of your neighborhood in Manhattan. A heaven for drunks! You can search for an address and all the bars around that area, with info will be displayed on a map:
http://newyorkontap.com/subways.asp

Find out what bloggers are talking about

Technorati is a search engine that lets you keep track of what's going on in the weblog world. It lets you search for blogs, create tags, search keywords mentioned in the weblogs etc. Very cool site...A google of the weblogs!

Hopstop: A Must for all around NYC

If you've ever had a hard time finding out how to get someplace around New York CIty via subway or walking, you'll appreciate this site: www.hopstop.com
I can't remember last time I was this happy finding a new site. If you live in or around NYC, I know you will be as ecstatic as I was.

Why do we DEBUG computers?

A friend of mine shared intersting history on why we call fixing computers or bugs DEBUGGING computers? I am posting his email here, with his permission:


I've always wondered why we 'debug' computers, and in a bit of
recreational reading last weekend, I came across the answer.

It seems that before the advent of solid state transistors, computers,
like radios, used modified light bulbs to amplify electric signals and
perform calculations (the explanation of that in and of itself is a
fascinating story, but off topic here). So, you get the following:

"The University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Computer], the first important digital computer, never lived up to
its potential because tubes kept burning out in the middle of its
computations. The Army, which used ENIAC to compute artillery
trajectories, finally stationed a platoon of soldiers manning grocery
baskets full of tubes at strategic points around the computer; this
proved little help, because engineers could never quite tell which of
the machine's 18,000 vacuum tubes had burned out at any particular
time. The warmth and the soft glow of the tubes also attracted moths,
which would fly through ENIAC's innards and cause short circuits. Ever
since, the process of fixing computer problems has been known as debugging.

The transistor, invented two days before Christmas 1947 by William
Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen of Bell Labs, promised to
eliminate all the bugs of the vacuum tube in one fell swoop. ..."
-The Chip; T.R. Reid

Best,
Ken