Sifry’s Alerts

Want a fun game to play with your friends when you’ve got a few minutes to waste? Try out Webhotornot – see how good your eye for sites compares with everyone else’s. You might even stumble upon an interesting site that you didn’t know about but others have rated highly, too!

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows, perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site – sort of a “prediction market” for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we’d do an homage.

Who knows where it’ll go, it is a quick hack that Martin’s team pulled together quickly with our direction. Go check it out – and if you’ve got a hot site that you want to add, you can submit the site as well! Martin blogs about it as well.

http://webhotornot.com/

Technorati Tags: ditty, fun, hotornot, matrinvarsavsky, predictionmarket, webhotornot, varsavsky

I’m working from home today, so I kicked off something that I really needed to do for a while – I’m running a fully bootable backup of my primary computer onto one of my portable hard drives. I also dropped by the local Best Buy and picked up a 750GB Seagate drive, which I got for only $197, that’s 26 cents per gigabyte (wow). I’ve had good performance with the Seagate drives – they’re quiet, as opposed to the WD “My Book” drives, which sound like a jet engine going off in my living room. I got the extra 750GB to do a complete backup of all the photographs I’ve taken since 1999, which now total about 550GB, so that’s running at the same time. I’ve had all of that data up to 2007 backed up on DVDs, but I haven’t had time to do my annual yearly DVD backup, and I was starting to feel vulnerable – I wouldn’t want to lose all those photographs from the entire year!

So, when was the last time YOU did a full backup of your primary computer? How much valuable data would you lose if your disk went chunka-chunka-chunka-whiiiiiiiiine tomorrow?

Go back up your data. it’s amazing how little storage costs nowadays, and don’t put it off until tomorrow – there’s nothing worse than the shiver that runs down your spine when you realize that you just lost all the work you’ve been doing for the last month/quarter/year…

Technorati Tags: backup, psa, publicserviceannouncement, fullbackup, storage

Right after the big winter storm blew past, I ran down to Ocean Beach on the west end of San Francisco, and got a few shots of the sun, the rain, and the spectacular clouds and waves blowing around. I love the silhouette of the person walking dogs in the foreground, too:

I like the square crop of the next photo. It is all about expressing a mood – of solitude, of watching the remains of a massive storm, of knowing that the rocks are still there – battered, bruised, but still standing – even 85 mph winds can’t knock these guys down, and how small we really are in this world.

I also liked the compostion, the negative space, what it leaves out of the photo:

Technorati Tags: beach, california, photography, photos, sanfrancisco, storm, sunset, winter

OK, I don’t usually post podcasts here, nor do I usually talk about politics, but something special happened to me today. Have a listen to the podcast I did about it.

Technorati Tags: caucus, iowa, mittromney, podcast, wtf, romney