Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

Burberry Kisses, good or evil?

Here is something I have mixed feelings about:

Thanks to modern technology you can connect with your loved ones by sending a quick note, a photo of your cat, even a smile :) around the world in seconds. But one of humanity’s most iconic forms of communication—the kiss—has been left out in the cold. Now, though, you can send a kiss to anyone, anywhere in the world, through Burberry Kisses, a new campaign from Burberry and Google. And not just any kiss, but your kiss.

On one hand, this is sweet and romantic.  Yet, on the other, Google is so well known for its crowd-sourcing experiments, that it makes me wonder – what’s behind this one?  After all, when Google wanted to fix all those bad scans in Google Books project, they’ve started the Google Captcha service that used everyone on the web.  When Google wanted to teach it’s voice recognition of all the accents (at least in the States), they’ve opened up a directory service.   And they’ve done more of the same for images, artificial intelligence, and even maps.

So, what is a possible usage for a huge collection of lip images?

The darkest version I have is somewhere around fingerprinting.  Lip prints are probably as unique as finger prints.  And when you mix it up with, say, face recognition that they already have, who knows where that can lead.  Oh, by the way, now that I thought of face recognition, Android’s face recognition lock sounds suspicious as well.  Oh, crap.  I think I’m going paranoid!

Minor site updates

… just because there is nothing better to do at 5am, and WordPress 3.6 is not here yet.

  1. Replaced Lightbox 2 plugin with Fancybox for WordPress.  Lightbox worked fine, but had an annoying conflict with the images in the “About me” section.  Now it all looks nice and dandy.
  2. Removed featured posts section from the header.  I keep forgetting to use those, and having featured posts from last year seems a little awkward.  Maybe I’ll bring them back later.

I’ve also wanted to try the Infinite Scroll plugin from WordPress Jetpack, but apparently my theme does not support it yet.  So I’ll leave it for Facebook and Twitter for now.

Goodbye Google Reader

Today, June 30th, is the last day of Google Reader availability.  If you completely ignored all the noise around the matter, run quickly, export and backup your feeds.  Tomorrow Google Reader will be no more.

Google Reader

 

Of course, I’ve been on a quest for the Google Reader alternative.  Of course, I found plenty.  And, of course, none of them are exactly the same.  I’ve decided to stick with Bazqux, and I’ve paid my yearly subscription fee a few month ago.

It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of work went into many of the alternatives over the last months, as more and more people started looking for the new RSS home.  Some of that work was quite noticeable.  For example, Feedly changed in the last 100 days so much that I had to re-evaluate it completely.  And, also, new services were introduced – such as Digg Reader.

Still, with all that, it’s sad to see Google Reader go.  I’ve used it every single day and relied heavily on it for years.  Paraphrasing the classic quote: so long, and thanks for all the feeds.