A new concept: share the knowledge

Krishna and Kanishka came up with a novel idea. It's like this - I spend most of my days on the web, surfing around (much like a crawler, but of flesh and blood composition) to websites old and new, and picking up some bits and pieces of knowledge I never thought I would use. So, it's probably a good idea to summarize all I learnt today and put it up right here, with a few references, so I can come back and pick it up from where I dropped off.

So what did I learn recently? Let me see.

  

Yesterday I spent a lot of time reading up on car sharing and station cars. Two concepts that are developing in urban areas, and replacing the need for every family to own a car of their own. Zipcar is a major player in this game in the US. The idea is the similar to a database threadpool for my servers - applied to cars. Instead of a car belonging to a family, and being used only once a week, the car belongs to a pool of cars, and people pay for its use as and when required. Read up on Google to learn more on it. Pretty cool, except that ZipCar charges $12 to $16 an hour, not quite as cheap as I would like it to be.

Also on recently aquired knowledge - this awesome website to find the perfect headset: Shopping.com. I found this to be way better, and way easier to narrow down by my criteria, than most other websites (such as Headsets.com, which had a lesser selection). Shopping.com allows you to filter by brand, price range, usage (consumer/professional), design (over the ear? ear bud?), compatibility (cell/computer/etc), sound mode (mono/stereo), power handling (!), and keywords. I really liked the stereo headsets, but chose the Etymotic ety.com headset for myself (no, this is not stereo, even though it shows up as one) - I am rather pleased with my ER-6 earbud headphones, so thought I'd give this a try. Received it this morning, and am loving it so far.

Then I went into some gaming, and found this. Real Arcade, though blocked by office proxy servers, is guaranteed to provide you with hours of entertainment with the huge number of games it presents. Most games have a 60 min playtime for free, from what I could see, and then it's time to hand out the money. I recommend Atomic Pongling.