Archive for the ‘IT’ Category
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
Even though I’ve been more like a public transit rider than a city walker, walkability is still the important factor when I decide a place to live. This website, Walkscore.com tells you the walkability score of your neighborhoods by just inserting the address you want to search. The degree of walkability, “walkscore” is measured in the scale of 100. The higher the number you get, the more walkability in the neighborhood. However, some flaws in Walkscore.com is that the “quality” of the neighborhood isn’t into consideration. Walkscore primary depends on ”quantity;” how many stores, parks, restaurants, in the neighborhood. Apparently, 24 hours grocery stores are preffered to stores that close at 7pm.
Also, Walkscore.com provides ranking of cities in the United States in terms of walkability. Thankfully San Francisco has been ranked in the highest. However, although I believe that San Francisco has been one of the most walkable cities in naiton, I am highly suspicious about the result. San Francisco’s public transportation system, Muni has been said the worst metropolitan transit system in the United States. Some parts between in the neighborhoods are actually very far or dangerous to walk by yourself. Compared to New York and other cities, steep hills in San Francisco force you to wear walking shoes and sneakers unless you drive a car.
If they put these quality issues into consideration, I think this website would be very useful. I love the idea of walkable city. And I would like them to keep on promoting that. It may possibly lower the crime rate, improve public transit (=less car dependency), and solve obesidy.
Find out your neighborhood’s walk score.
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Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
ThinkFree.com has been my most favorite online service to manage my documents over the internet for the last few years. Basically after you sign up for an account, which is free (yay!), you can store many types of documents (such as MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF and etc…) for up to 1GB. You can also rearrange your documents if you install software from ThinkFree, but if you have Microsoft office tools on your computer, you can also just download the documents you like and rearrange it in a traditional way. The primary difference from Google Docs is that you can download the file from your account on the website and upload them again.
It’s very useful as online document storage, and you have an access from anywhere and any computers in the world as long as you have internet available. No need to worry about losing memory of your documents by your computer’s crash, loss of your flash memories you put the documents in, or simply forgetting where you saved. I also like their sophisticated interface looks. And it’s very simple to use.
As well as Google Docs does, ThinkFree.com provides documents sharing service, ThinkFree Docs, which I don’t use quite often. The major difference here is also that in Google Docs, people can only view the shared documents, but in ThinkFree Docs, you can download the documents onto your computer. There are so many online sharing tools today. Flickr and Picasa let you share photos. In Youtube and Crunchyroll, people share videos. iMeem and eSnaps allow you to share music and etc. And finally Google Docs and ThinkFree Docs let you share documents. This might be a nice tool for people who write long stories and books, or people who like to share arts of writing. But, for people who do not want to share your documents, you have options not to publish them.
Overall, ThinkFree.com is very useful (and free!) tool.
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008
A couple of months ago, I received an invitational e-mail from Verve Earth.com. They caught sight of my blog and invited me to this interesting website. At Verve Earth.com, you can see registered users’ profiles geographically represented across a map of the world, and if those users have their own blogs with RSS feeds, their locations are designated with an RSS feed logo on a Google map. If you click on the icon, a mini-blog summary is displayed, and you then have the option to continue on to their actual blogs. You can also add people to your favorites, becoming a “fan” of theirs, which is bound to make the author feel appreciated!
In a way, Verve Earth is a great tool to get to know people geographically through reading blogs and visiting their websites. Especially for people who have a healthy dose of curiosity and are eager to obtain knowledge and a greater understanding of the world around them. You might very well find an awesome blog easily using this resource! You also may find bloggers right in your very own neighborhood. All this and it’s free! This is also a fantastic tool to sign up for if you’re interested in generating traffic on to your own websites. As well a job as blogs have done facilitating communication among people of disparate geographies and viewpoints, Verve Earth could possibly promote even better communications through spatial recognition.
But if you write a blog just for your own purposes, or if you are scared of stalkers gaining information of you, this may not be for you. However, whether you decide to continue posting your blog on Verve Earth or not, it’s worth a try. It’s awesome.
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