Jamie Thingelstad

I seem to be on a string of complaints about screens being placed everywhere (annoying ads and zip codes. I admit that being the gadget geek I am, I’m surprised by how offensive I find these intrusions to be. This one I’m a bit divided on though. It seems that the majority of New York taxis have gotten these screens installed that give you the weather, news, location and map information and other stuff.

Find missing image NY Taxi flickr.com/2408/2341902786_5ec8e84dc9_m.jpg.

I find these things incredibly annoying. You get into the cab and immediately start having this thing blast at you. It’s rude. You should have to press it to activate it. Thankfully you can turn it off and I do that with vigor whenever I get into the cab.

However, there is a great value add here since you can now charge the cab fare on your credit card. This is absolutely great. I love not having to figure out the tip and just swipe the card. In fact, on the last business trip to New York this function saved me from expensing $133.01 in cash. Great! Now if they just quit making you sign the receipts!

I’ve been working with financial news for years now and there is a really common problem in financial news, deduplication. The issue is when several news outlets will cover the same story or even redistribute another sources story, creating duplicates that readers find annoying. As the web becomes more mashable, I saw the first sign of this same problem on FriendFeed today. One of the people I follow had both Twitter and Tumblr feeding into his FriendFeed. But, he also had Twitter feeding Tumblr. In flowed the dups!

He removed the Twitter to Tumblr feed to stop this, but it was a glimpse of a feature that FriendFeed is going to need to consider. In this instance, deduplication would be pretty easy since the content is exactly the same.

A couple of weeks ago my aging 1999 Audi A6 Avant decided to start flickering a little red light at me. Kind of like the car was winking at me. A couple of days later, it decided to just blast the light at me. You can see it in the image here, it’s the “Air Bag” light. Sadly, that doesn’t mean your air bags are great. It means they are totally broken, kaput.

Resurrect missing image "Airbag Light flickr.com/3209/2361334568_d8d9e60801_m"

I took it into the shop for other work and got an estimate to fix this air bag situation. Turns out the controller card fails a checksum validation. I had the exact same thing happen with my ABS controller card too and had to replace that. The air bag controller card weighed in at $1,200 to replace. Ouch!

On one hand, this is safety and you shouldn’t cut corners. $1,200 is a small price to pay if the air bags keep you safe. On the other hand, $1,200 is a boat load of money to pour into an older car and I wear my seat belts all the time.

What would you do?

It’s annoying when sales people are so obviously trying to figure out a “tickler date” to call you back.

Just spent 90 minutes rerouting cables, moving peripherals and optimizing my desk.

Five more hours to go before it’s all nice.

• Installing drivers for my ancient HP ScanJet 5500c.
• Scanner heading to be recycled. Drivers are PowerPC only. Ugh.
• New scanner ordered — and a new amplifier to make the audio happier.

Yeah - found a plugin to block registration spam. I’ve been getting hammered with it the last few days.

Watching MacBook Air commercial and experiencing lust.