JedFonner.com

I can’t remember the last time I actually logged into Friendster. It’s hard to remember why I used to enjoy playing on the site so much, and why so many other people did too. It’s even harder to contemplate why they turned down Google’s offer to buy them for $30 million.

But there is one great feature that kind of makes up for all the time I and everyone else spent on Friendster - birthday reminders. I constantly get reminded about the birthdays of friends I’ve lost contact with or just hadn’t ever asked about their birthday. Now I rarely miss someone’s birthday, well, as long as they were in my friend group back in the day.

So thanks Friendster, for being the most overvalued, overhyped birthday reminder system, ever!

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I live and commute around the DC metro area. Our roads are pretty much at, or beyond, maximum capacity during rush hour. It’s already at the point where traffic accidents cause huge delays for thousands of people. Just this morning, they had to close all of I-495 the Capital Beltway because, I’m not joking, a tractor trailer lost its rear wheels, blocking all lanes. Check out this traffic alert from WTOP, reproduced below:

Accident: tractor trailer lost it’s REAR WHEELS. **ALL LANES ARE BLOCKED.** DELAYS BEGIN NEAR THE MERGE WITH THE 270 SPUR. 270 SOUTH IS SLOW FROM FR HURLEY BLVD TO THE OUTER LOOP.

As I can attest, traffic was indeed blocked starting from right before Route 7 (where I get off for work, lovely). According to traffic reports, the problem caused backups all the way onto I-270 (a different highway) and up into Maryland! That’s approximately 13.5 miles of backup on two different major, multiple-lane highways. My back-of-the-envelope calculations put that at about 7,000 - 8,000 cars.

Assuming some cars have more than one person per car, we’re talking upwards of 10,000 people stuck in traffic. If we assume it takes one hour of sitting in traffic waiting for them to re-open the lanes and for traffic to resume, and we assume that the average commuter gets paid $30/hour, then that adds up to over $250,000 in lost productivity.

I’d like to think we could use market forces to create an added incentive NOT cause accidents. By levying additional fines against those who cause accidents, it would be nice to think we could affect people’s behavor. But causing an accident already has a significant negative financial impact (the cost of fixing your car and paying added insurance). So clearly we need a non-monetary penalty. Maybe revoking the at-fault party’s driving privileges? Maybe just public shaming. But something.

However, I’m concerned that this might create a dis-incentive to involve police in an accident and might cause an increase in hit-and-run accidents. What we really need is better mass transit, separation of trucks and cars, or maybe just cars that drive themselves, altho we saw how well that works when the trailers full of robots attack your self-driving car.

Maybe traffic is one of those unsolvable problems, like spam, religion, people who use the term “izzle” after certain words, and teenagers.

I love del.icio.us. I don’t use it as my main bookmarks. I use it to store and categorize anything I see on the web that I want to keep. You can see my last 20 posts by going to my Bookmarks page or see all my bookmarks by going to my del.icio.us page.

I post sites many times a day, and while I appreciated the default bookmarklet provided by del.icio.us, it felt a little underpowered to me. So I added some additional javascript to give it a little more oomf.

Drag the above link into your links toolbar (IE?)(FF?) or right click and say Bookmark this Link (Firefox) or Add to Favorites (IE).

Like the default bookmarklet, the name of the site goes into the bookmark description. But now, in addition, whatever text on the page that you highlight will get added to the notes section. Try it for yourself and see how you like it.

I got the idea from this tip on Lifehacker. Thanks to Adam Pash for the JavaScript snippet that gets the current selection on the page.

Back in my early days, I worked on the Navy SIPRNet, which was great, because when people asked me what I did, I could look them straight in the eye and say, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you… or at least report this conversation to my security officer in writing within 5 business days.” Needless to say, people got the point.

But now I’m managing a team working on something a little bit more exciting. It’s called AppianAnywhere, and the goal is to change the way people build web-based applications. We’re currently targeting web-based business apps, but I hope that we’ll be able to eventually open it up to the general public for all their mash-up and who-knows-what type of applications.

I can’t speak too much more about it (it’s not quite Top Secret but we’re keeping the lid on for now), but suffice it to say it’s pretty cool. You can read Sandy Kemsley take on the whole deal (Sandy Kemsley is a BPM blogger at eBiz).

I expect big things from our team, because after all, I have people skills.

UPDATE: I just found another, albeit kind of old, post about AppianAnywhere on the BPMS Watch blog.

With all the hype and hoopla over web 2.0 and semantic web stuff starting to rot my brain, a little dose of hilarious parody helps calm the soul: The Future of Web 2.0