Monthly Archives: November 2005

COW: Ning…

my brother Jonathan Hoffman is my source for all new cool things tech. when he was in college at Carnegie Mellon, he was the first person to tell me about Napster. throughout his stint programming at CMU, he gave me the scoop on all the new developments.

Logo_ning_largewhen he graduated college in 2002, i thought i might have to adopt a new brother in college because i was under the impression that Jonathan only knew about all the cool things because he was a student. boy was i wrong. i continue to get a steady stream of cool sites from him to this day.

One site he sent me last month is Ning. This is another site combining mash-ups, tagging, etc (like Frappr, Trulia, etc.) to do something useful. i love how people are taking some data and a few plug-ins from places like Google and building cool tools.

thanks Jonathan!

metric system and paper

One thing the Europeans do right is the metric system … it is so easy to figure our measurements, distances, weights, etc (everything except time is really easy to calculate). We use the English system … which has long since been abandoned by the English …

But their ingenuity even applies to the size of paper (as Alan Peterson informed me). Our standard 8 1/2 x 11″ paper makes no sense in the grand scheme of things …

In Europe, all paper is in the shape of a perfect rectangle (supposedly the most beautiful shape — basically the length = width * Phi constant). The biggest size of paper is A1 — which is in the shape of a perfect rectangle and is a total of a square meter (it is very big). Half of that is A2. half of A2 is A3. half of A3 is A4 (the standard European paper that is a competitor to our inferior American 8 1/2 x 11″ paper).

Half of A4 is A5 (which is the common large European envelop size) …

SimplyFIRED video & contest

check out the <a href="www.simplyFIRED.com/video.php
“>SimplyFIRED video & contest … Dave McClure from SimplyHired emailed me about it …

FYI: SimplyHired is a terrific company … they’ve got a great team in Dave, Gautam Godhwani, Peter Weck, Anil Godhwani, and Dion Lim