• My Favorite Nerd Memory

    … has got to be sneaking into a computer lab at the University of Manitoba in highschool (around ’95 or ’96) with a couple of friends to play Warcraft II:Tides of Darkness over their IPX network.

    The worst part was, because the machines were ghosted (or some archiac version of ghost) on boot up, we had to do a fresh install of the game everytime. Though this did do a great job of covering our tracks when we left.


  • Google: Now With Forum Detection

    Today I noticed that google is now recognizing forum threads and returning related data in the search results.

    Note the “5 Posts – 4 Authors – Last Post: 18 Apr”

    Pretty cool.


  • Boingo: The Best $10 I’ve Ever Spent

    Last week I was stuck at O’hare overnight. I noticed a bunch of large signs proclaiming “free wi-fi terminal wide.” Upon trying to connect to the internet, I discovered that these hotspots were run by boingo and only “free” for customers of certain telcos. While I feel that wifi is an amenity that should always be free, like public restrooms, Boingo was only $10/month. I had some calls to make and figured I’d probably save money by using Skype instead of my $1.95/min roaming cell phone.

    After signing up for boingo, I realized that had a 3 month free promo running. So I actually only paid $2.50/month. Even better!

    It was not until I came back home that I realized the genius of boingo. Turns out, boingo is actually a partner on all the major wifi networks in North America. Meaning that I can use my boingo account to log in to any Bell hotspot at Starbucks and various other random places around the city.
    In case you’re not aware, Bell normally charges $8 PER HOUR!