Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there!

my stereo system, circa 2005

When I was in the US last I had a 5-disc Technics CD changer, and the main reason I had gotten that was that even then I resisted the idea of having to switch CDs every single time I wanted to listen to something different. So one of the things I got recently at the Apple Store here in Palo Alto is a set of JBL Creature II speakers. Connected semi-permanently to the iPod's dock, I drop the iPod on it when I get home at night and I can listen to any of my music. I know this sounds kind of obvious, but actually doing was a pleasant surprise at first. All my music in a tiny package that can be easily moved around the house (if necessary), or taken on the road. On top of which, the Creature speakers have really excellent sound, and they're not that expensive at around $100. This idea of data portability is partially what I wanted for my dream portable of 2005.

This post reads like an ad. Oh well. Call me a satisfied customer.

PS: Also cool: at night, the green light under the satellites makes them appear to be tiny ghosts, as in old-fashion-bed-linen-covered ghosts, hovering motionless over the carpet. :)

testing y!q "search in context"

I'm going to be testing y!q search for the next few weeks and see how it goes (thanks Jeremy for the invitation). It's an interesting concept---it's been out for a few weeks I think though. You set a few words or a paragraph and you get a search related to the text. The more text you search the less relevant the results get, unless for some reason the text is very focused on a particular topic. In my case, I'm using weblog post titles as context, since I generally have titles that are fairly descriptive. I tried using post summaries but the results weren't as good--what with my tendency to start (and sometimes to continue) off-topic and all that.

Another thing I'm doing this week, when I have some free time :), is looking at the Yahoo! search APIs and related stuff. Should be interesting.

PS: I've also taken a further look at A9's OpenSearch. When I first noted its release I thought that A9 was providing their own results in RSS as well as aggregating others, but that's not the case, or at least I haven't been able to find how to do it. Although the "search exchange standard format" idea is cool, it's a bit weird of A9 to not adhere to their own output standard. Maybe this is something that will be added in the future (one hopes...)