Category: News

I’ve never been all that keen on all those little social buttons that one sees cluttering nearly every web site you visit these days. You’ve seen them – Facebook’s “Like” button, Twitter’s iconic blue bird, and the like. As a web user I find them distracting. I suppose they make a certain kind of sense – Web Site A generates revenue through advertising; the more page views/impressions and ad clicks Web Site A can muster the more money Web Site A’s owner makes – those little buttons help support this ecosystem.

But that’s another reason you haven’t seen any of those buttons on this site. My goal isn’t to make money on ads, in fact you won’t ever see ads on this site. My goal is simply to share information and experiences to whomever can benefit from it. And it’s to that end that I’ve decided to add Google’s +1 button to this site.

Adding the +1 button will hopefully give you an easy way to recommend the content you’ve read. Your friends and contacts, when logged into Google will see your recommendation when it’s most relevant — in the context of Google search results. +1’s can also be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of the content to a user’s query and may be used to determine its relevance and ranking.

In short, my goal is to share information with people who can use it. The Google +1 button strikes me as a tool that could help meet that goal.

Any geek worth his or her cred knows about Folding@Home, the distributed computing project started by Stanford University to help understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences, including diseases such as Alzheimer’s, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers and cancer-related syndromes. People from around the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer cycle takes the project closer to its goals: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.

I think Folding@Home is a great cause and created a Folding@Home team to serve as basis for contributing some of my spare CPU cycles. How about you? If you have a few cycles to spare how about dedicating some to their efforts? I would also consider it an honor if would join my team. To join, simply enter the team number 78746 when you install and configure the client.

I’ve finally got around to implementing a mobile version of this site. Those of you that navigate here using your mobile device (Android, iPhone, etc.), will automatically be detected and served up the mobile version of the content, hopefully to find it a better experience. No worries though, there is a link to get back to the desktop version if the look and feel isn’t for you. I suspect I’ll be tweaking on this for some time so please report any issues you encounter. You can leave a comment on this post, catch me on IRC or send me an e-mail.