Google Image Labeler is you doing work to “improve” Google image search results in the form of a game. You are paired with another “player” and you’re both shown the same image. You then proceed to enter keywords that you feel describe the image. (Sounds like tagging to me.) If you match a term that your partner also entered, you both “win” and that word gets added to the search index for that image. I played a few times and it was sun at first but got old quickly.
I just found MyWetStuff.com. (Get your mind out of the gutter!)
When MyWetStuff.com launches at 12:01 am (EDT) on Tuesday, September 5, 2006, travelers will for the first time be able to pre-order trial sizes of their favorite liquid-based toiletries and travel amenities, and have their personal selections waiting for them at the hotel when they check in.
I usually check my luggage but for short trips it does seem like a pain sometimes. Since the first 70,000 people who try the service will get $15 worth of free stuff I’ve signed up and plan on trying it for a 2.5-day trip to Idaho in early October. I promise to report the resuts of my inital test.
I’m not sure which impresses me more, the fact they someone came up with the idea to mashup the themes from The Simpsons and from Star Trek, or the fact that he decided to do it with a keyboard, a funnel, and a thermin…
Yesterday I decided to take a day off from BCR, sleep in, get some stuff done around the house, have lunch with my SO, then head over to the Friends bookstore (which I manage for those of you who don’t already know that) and shelve the new paperback Science Fiction and Fantasy books. Instead, I got a call at 8:55am from the board president saying that there was a problem at the store with the new shelving and that I needed to come over right away. What I arrived to find is pictured here.
It seems that we weren’t very smart about filling our new 7′ double-sided shelving unit. The thing is stable enough assuming you balance the load. We, on the other hand, put too many books on the one side and not enough on the other. Overnight gravity decided to raise its ugly head. Luckily, since it did happen over night, no one was around to be underneath the resulting pile.
All of the shelves survived, but the eight of the end pieces that hold the shelves to the uprights will need to be replaced. (A few close-ups of the damage can be found in my flickr account. Just click on the photo in this post.)
Should we have added additional anchors to the shelving? Of course. We’ve got more shelving on the way and we’ve already talked to the plaza’s maintenance guy. He’s got a plan to run beams from the shelving to the walls to give us the needed stability. Still, we’ll not put as many books on the shelves as we have previously.
As far as I could tell, we only had to get rid of one book due to damage from the collapse, and that was a book that wasn’t in very good shape to begin with.
I missed Blog Day yesterday. (I was a bit busy which I’ll explain in a later post.) However, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Phyllis for linking to this blog in her Blog Day post.
