Joseph Miller's Blog

…stranger things have happened.

Everyone loves a top ten list, right?  And what’s better than a top ten list but a top one hundred list.  What could be better than that?  Oh yeah, how about one hundred freakin’ top 100 lists.  So here you go, in relatively no particular order, the absolutely officially unofficial top one hundred top 100 lists on the ol’ interwebs.   Ok, one of the lists is a top 101.  Please don’t tell anyone.

Websites

Top 100 Science Sites
100 Most Important Online Publishers
100 Websites You Should Use
100 Best Websites for Women
Top 100 British Parent Blogs
Top 100 Food Websites
100 Best Blogs for Healthy Recipes
Top 100 Software Testing Blogs
100 Awesome Business Blogs
Top 100 Gadget Blogs
Top 100 Interior Design Blogs
BBC’s Top 100 Websites
100 Best Blogs for the Literati
The Ultimate List of Cyberpunk Sites (from 1995???)
Top 100 Language Blogs
Top 100 Classic Websites
Top 100 SEO Blogs
Top 100 Link Building Resources
100 Most Iconic Internet Videos

Software
100 Free & Useful Mac Apps
100 Essential Mac Applications
100 of the Best Open Source Applications
100 Free Windows Software
Top 100 Network Security Tools
Top 100 Free Apps For Your Phone
100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes
100 Most Popular Twitter Applications

Film
Top 100 films of the “Noughty’s”
Top 100 Films from Times Online
Arts & Faith’s Top 100 Films
Yahoo’s 100 Movies to See Before You Die
100 Greatest Films of World Cinema (starting at 100)
100 Most Significant German Films
100 Movies to See Before You Die (again)
Top 100 Foreign Films

Music
100 Greatest Jazz Albums
Top 100 Jazz CDs
100 Best Jazz Recordings
100 Greatest Rock Songs
Flux-Rad’s 100 Favorite Albums
100 Greatest Funk Songs
100 Greatest Reggae Songs
Top 100 Classical Songs from Kickass Classical
NME’s Greatest Albums of the ’00s
100 Greatest Drum Beats
100 Greatest Surf Rock Songs
100 Greatest Psychedelic Albums
100 Rockabilly Hits (actually a CD set for sale)
100 Greatest Protest Songs
100 Most Important Records Ever Made (as of 1992)
Top 100 Indie Songs of All Time
Top 100 Albums of the 90s
Top 100 (Techno) Tracks of the 00s
100 Best Indie Rock Albums Ever
Top 100 Hip-Hop Albums of All Time (circa 1998)

Books
100 Best Novels #1
100 Best Novels #2
100 Best Novels from the Modern Library Editorial Board
and 100 Best Nonfiction
and Radcliffe’s Rival 100 List
100 Best Children’s Novels
100 Greatest Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels
ISFDB’s Top 100 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels
Top 100 Social Media Books
100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
100 Best Business Books

Business
100 Best Digital Agencies
100 Best Global Brands
Top 100 Food and Beverage Companies
Top Social Brands of 2009
Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands
100 Most Innovative Companies
Top 100 Restaurants Using Twitter

People
Forbes 100 Most Powerful Celebrities
MediaGuardian 100 2010 (Most powerful people in media.  Scary!)
Top 100 Artists (Living or Dead)
Maxim’s Hot 100 (Girls) for 2010
100 Most Creative People in Business
100 Most Influential People in Finance
Top 100 Entrepreneurs Without College Degrees
100 Best Science Twitterers
Top 100 Digg Users

Places

100 Best Places to Live in America
100 Most Beautiful Places in the World
Top 100 Clubs
100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer
Top 101 City Lists

Education
100 Great Tech Talks for Educators
Top 100 Learning Tools for 2010

Design
100 Awesome Retro Wallpapers
100 Beautifull (sp) Logos

Humor
100 Funniest One-Liners
100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know
Top 100 April Fools Hoaxes

Games
Top 100 NES Games
100 Super NES Games in 10 Minutes (Youtube link)

Various
100 Best Times to Do Everything
CNET’s Top 100 Products (updated monthly)
100 Best Sewing Tutorials
Top 100 Comic Book Villians

Whew, that’s about 10,000 things to count down.  Got any more?

Even though I don’t know a ton of people in my town, I enjoy “playing” Foursquare and to a lesser extent Gowalla.  In Foursquare’s case, mayorships can be somewhat fun to pursue and the geo-specific deals can be worthwhile on rare occasion.  The people I know that are crazy about Gowalla seem to be focus more on the virtual item quest, either collecting everything or hunting down low numbered items or whatnot.

In both cases, the location game is played as an individual.  I think this limiting and both services, or even maybe an API built on top of them, could be a lot more fun with a tongue in cheek gang component added and fully embracing the game aspect rather than existing in the social networking-location game hybrid space they seem to exist in now.

Here’s how it could work:

1. Gangs could form fluidly with members joining and leaving at will, perhaps with a cap on members and a gang leader approval required.

2. Replace “mayorship” with turf.  On the most basic level, the gang with the most collective checkins controls the location.

3. Virtual items provide attributes to individuals or gangs such as double points for checkins at a certain location or local business coupons.

4. When a gang takes over a location they can loot items from the previous gang that controlled the turf.

That’s the idea in a nutshell.  I think it would be a lot more fun.  As an individual user, I would have more incentive to coordinate and meet with other users and businesses could possibly see more benefits in terms of foot traffic than with either Foursquare or Gowalla’s current incentive systems.

Most importantly, I could finally break out that blue bandana in my closet.

Like many folks, I like basketball.  In particular, I like the business and news that swirls around basketball.  Unlike most of life, the world of any given sport is relatively easy to comprehend and wrap your head around.  There’s only so many teams and players to consider and each entity has individual attributes that are well known.  Of course, even within this world there are unknowns and that element of surprise is much of the fun too.

Much like the sport is somewhat of a closed loop, the media surrounding it is as well.  Each team has many a handful of beat writers, only a few of which are notable, and daily national coverage by ESPN, Sporting News, Yahoo Sports and a handful of other outlets.  Beyond that, there are only so many blogs out there that I find worth reading or find at all.  So again, it’s easy to wrap your head around this world surrounding the basketball world.

Considering all this and being somewhat of a contrarian by nature, I was as fascinated as anyone else by the coverage and instant backlash surrounding LeBron’s recent defection to Miami Heat.  The very clear narrative that has come through the opinion media doesn’t deviate very much from the core opinion that LeBron is immature and let him ego get the best of him.  Certainly, LeBron is going to be hated in Cleveland for a long time, but the instant heel turn as portrayed by the media seems like a wildly inaccurate portrayal of reality to me.

On the face of it, LeBron’s impending free agency was touted as the story of the year by ESPN and others dating back to before the season even started.  Any slight indication of what he might do garnered instant pontification from the shouting punditry on a daily basis.  Surely he was asked about it daily by reporters as well.  Both the public and LeBron knew that this story was a big deal.  So what does he do?

He decides to tap into the demand and leverage it to earn money for charity while generating “earned media” for both ESPN and himself.  To me, this seems like a generous move and in the best interest of everyone involved in the sports business except the journalists.  This act of disintermediation attacked no one except the reporters that derive income, attention, ego and power from the coverage that their scoops generate.  Their reaction was visceral because they felt threatened, not because LeBron had instantly changed who he was and become drunk with power.

Here’s the thing, most sports news doesn’t contain much information beyond the headline.  If the headline reads “Player X signs with Team Y for 3 years and 10 million dollars”, you barely need to click and read the boilerplate article.  You already know what it says.  LeBron isn’t the only one announcing his own news.  Derek Fisher recently announced his resigning via Twitter, as did Udonis Haslem his.  I think this has reporters running scared, especially those that focus on breaking news more than analyzing it.

And they should be.  But they should be mad at Twitter, not LeBron.

I spotted a van today with the signage ‘Absolute Destruction’ .  What an awesome company name.

Ok, I’m going to get with what the cool kids are doing and refresh this oft-neglected blog a bit by following these instructions to auto-post via posterous and worry less about coming up with completely unique content.  I need to work on flexing my writing muscles in an environment beyond the office.

Step one, I actually updated that most vain of blog pages: about me.

So you’ve bought an MSI Wind u100 from Newegg and you want to get up and running, but now you’re having a hard time figuring out what the most updated information is and how to get started. You keep reading that you’ll need an external DVD drive, a USB keyboard and mouse or at least two USB key drives.

Fear not! As of May 10th, 2009, you can be up and running in about two hours. Here’s what you need:

(1) MSI Wind u100
(1) Another Mac. I used my white MacBook.
(1) USB Key Drive. I used the 16GB OCZ Diesel drive that’s crazy cheap

Step 0 – Download MSIWindosx86.iso and everything else you’ll need

This file is a special version of OSX 10.5 that enterprising hackers have built just for the Wind and other variants. Obviously, it’s not kosher with Apple so you are going to have to find it by less proper channels. Google should lead you in the right direction.

The download is going to take a while, at least a few hours and probably more like 12, so do it ahead of time for your own sake.

While you are at it, download the following:

10.5.6 combo update from Apple
OSx86Tools
MSi Driver Pack v1.1
RealTek WiFi Drivers
WindTrackpadBundle_v6.0.2

Step 1 – Update the BIOS

Follow the instructions borrowed from Bay-Wolf.com for making bootable USB key in Windows.  Next, download the updated BIOS files from MSI and copy them to the root of the USB key. I used version 1.0B, but many people recommend 1.09.  I couldn’t find 1.09 on MSI’s website and using a hacked BIOS is just too hardcore and risky for me.   Before you get going you need to shut down the Wind, remove the battery, and plug in the power and USB drive.

Now start it up, press F11,  select the USB drive, and you should get the DOS prompt. Then type ‘runflash.bat’ and wait.  After that’s finished you can shutdown and hook up the battery again.

Start up and press Delete to enter the BIOS. Restore the optimized defaults, save, and restart. You can shut it down again after it restarts and BIOS posts without beeping or anything scary like that.

Step 2 – Get OSX on the USB Key

Plug your USB into your other Mac and open up Disk Utility. Click the partition tab and format the USB key with Disk Utlity, selecting the format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the option ‘Master Boot Record’.  When that’s done, click the Restore tab and drag MSIWindosx86.iso to the source field (browsing won’t work), the USB key to the destination field, and click restore.  This process may take 5 – 10 minutes depending on how clunky your USB key is.  After that’s done you should also copy all the other files you downloaded over to the USB key.

Next, fire up OSx86Tools and click the Install EFI / Run FDisk button.  Select your USB key in the Disk to Use menu and select No EFI (Darwin Uploader) in the EFI to Install menu.  Then click Run FDisk and, once complete, Install EFI.  If both complete without any errors, you should be good to go.

Step 3 – Format and Install

Plug your USB key back into the Wind and start it up again.  Press F11 and boot from the USB key.  You should get the Mac installer within a minute or two.  Once the first screen is up, click the Installer menu at the top and choose Disk Utility.  Format your drive in the exact same manner as the USB drive, apply the changes, and proceed with installing OSX.

Step 4 – Installing Drivers

Assuming you have no problems with the installation, unzip the driver pack, install MSiWindBaseDriverPack_v1.0 and restart.

Once you’re back, mount the 10.5.6 combo update and run the Installer, but DO NOT restart once it finishes.  You need to install ‘MSi10.5.6UpgradeDriverPack_v1.0′ or else you are screwed if you don’t have a USB keyboard or mouse.  After both are installed, restart again.  Next, install Trackpad drivers from WindTrackpadBundle_v6.0.2 to get a preference pane in System Preferences that will enable two finger scolling.

If you don’t yet have WiFi working, install the RealTek WiFi driver and restart yet again.  I haven’t tested Bluetooth yet.

Now you should have everything working, up to date, and be done!  So simple, right ?

Credits and Sources

There is an incredible amount of knowledge about this on the MSIWind.net Forums.  I relied on information from threads including these to get up and running: MSi Wind OSX86 Install [Driver Pack], Triple Boot setup [GPT+MBR] [Retail Mac OS X, XP & Ubuntu], Sentelic/Synaptics 10.5.6 Driver Bundle. Cybergreg is a genius.

Let me know if this works for you.  I think you’ll be happy with the end result, an amazingly snappy and competent little OS X netbook that’s gotta be a precursor for something Apple is working on.

I had a horrible great idea today while driving by a defunct Sonic style restaurant today. Karaoke meets the drive-in movie. Pull up in your car and you are greeted with a flat screen tv and some ordering process. Once completed, you get wireless microphones for everyone in the car and a Japanese karaoke remote that let’s you order songs on the unit. Queue up some songs, tune the radio to your personal station, and start rocking the Prius!

My gut says that this would be a complete failure as a business, so someone will probably try some variant of it with great success.

Alternate name for Bum Genius cloth diaper brand: Smart Ass.

I’ve been meaning to blog this forever.  Here’s the sign in process for my US bank account.  Step 1, enter user name and password.

That’s pretty much it.  Punch in your password and you or whoever gleams that your password is your dog’s name are in.  This is pretty weak considering what’s at stake.

Contrast with the sign in process for my Japanese bank account.  Step 1, enter your account number, pin number, and password.

Oh yeah, it also defaults to forcing you to key in everything with your mouse instead of the keypad and the option to use the keypad doesn’t work in Firefox.  I could also give you all three credentials right now and you still wouldn’t be able to get into much account because of step 2, which requires entering three random keys from a bank-issued security card.

Finally I’m in.  The Japanese style is clearly more time consuming, but I think it’s worth the piece of mind.  What do you think?