I’m co-leading a kayak trip this Saturday in Charlestown, RI. It’s an Appalachian Mountain Club trip, and I’m representing the Young Members. (Young is a relative term, meaning approximately 25 to 35, but all ages are welcome.) AMC membership isn’t required. We’ll paddle on Ninigret Pond, eat lunch on the beach (which we'll have pretty much to ourselves) and maybe swim there too.

[Contact information removed; use my Contact link.]

A remaining kayak or two may be available for an $8 rental, but priority goes to AMC members.

After two years without my own camera (my Nikon Coolpix 800 stopped working the day the 2001 Bermuda 1-2 boat race ended) I just got a Canon PowerShot S45. So I’ve been making up for lost time with lots of pictures taken around Providence, including a few at WaterFire.

Side note: The photo pages are generated with my own export program, which uses the Python Imaging Library to rescale images. iPhoto’s HTML export didn’t look very good (technically, it wasn’t anti-aliased).

For quite a long time during the Northeast blackouts yesterday, MSNBC was running video of tens of thousands of New Yorkers leaving the city on foot, with the only caption being “Breaking News: All Broadway Shows Cancelled.” I’m not sure this was the most important piece of information to convey. The commentary was often centered on how the exodus was going, and there was no actual mention of blackouts onscreen.

When they finally rotated the headline, it said “20,000 New Yorkers Wait to Leave the City by Ferry,” which wouldn’t have resolved the confusion of viewers tuning in late either.

Google’s newest feature is full of Easter eggs. Finally, something that could replace Python as my desktop calculator, at least when I’m online.

Wouldn’t an offline version be a great idea? I don’t know of any current calculator programs that have such a simple natural-language interface. [dive into mark]

Slate: Digging for Googleholes.

If you’re searching for something that can be sold online, Google’s top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information...

The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you’ll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn’t appear in an online catalog.

Running into this problem myself, I’ve sometimes wished for a “comments-only” search option, to only show me unofficial information. The official information is always just copies of the same thing. Google Groups comes close, but it misses the vast majority of discussions nowadays, which tend to happen on web-based forums and review sites.

This idea comes surprisingly close to Andrew Orlowski’s blog-separation fixation.

Old movies look better than new movies on your TV because TV scared the Hollywood studios into making screens wider. [New York Times: Technology]

Davos Newbies quotes an article by Richard Gayle, with an insight that explains a lot about software engineering vs. management.

In a general sense, most business types are process-driven. Once you find a process, once you determine what the best practice is, you are set. If the process fails, it is because someone failed and they either need to be retrained or fired. Problems are bad. The business type is often backwards-looking and pessimistic. They know how easy it is for a company to fail.

Many scientists are just the opposite. They love problems, especially since their ego-driven approaches to life suggest that they will solve them in unique ways. They have solved them in the past and will surely solve them in the future. This engenders a more forward-looking, optimistic approach to difficulties.

[via Davos Newbies]

New York Times: Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara have devised a motion detector capable of detecting displacement on an atomic scale.

(The article unfortunately doesn’t give a great amount more detail than that.)

Scott Rafer writes:

The fully loaded cost of offering free Wi-Fi access is less than $6/day. Operating a billable hotspot costs over $30/day.... Here’s the irony in Wi-Fi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free Wi-Fi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for Wi-Fi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. According to a market study coming out this summer, retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase.

[via WiFi Networking News and Boing Boing Blog]

Washington Post: Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy. Marketers and an array of service providers are expanding their collection and use of consumers' e-mail addresses and other personal information, despite broad assurances to protect individual privacy and honor consumers' choices about how much marketing they want to receive.

Marketers also insist that they maintain the right to send messages to customers with which they have "existing business relationships." ... "Some companies, like psycho ex-boyfriends, tend to see relationships where they don't exist," said Chris Murray, legislative counsel for Consumers Union.

[via Tomalak's Realm]