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the life and work of dirk watkins

August 9, 2006
by Dirk Watkins
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Milwaukee Gas Prices

Here is a list of the cheapest gas stations in Milwaukee. Entries come from site visitors so there may be some discrepancies in what the actual prices are but otherwise it’s pretty helpful if you’re a cheapskate like me.

http://milwaukeegasprices.com/

This is really prime for a mash-up with Google Maps.  It’d be really sweet to see a map with all of the different prices color coded to see which areas have high prices (Shorewood maybe?) and which have low. Maybe I’ll get on that with my so-called “copious amount of spare time” – then again…

August 8, 2006
by Dirk Watkins
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AOL Loves Privacy

On Monday a worker bee at AOL released data on 658,000 peoples search queries within a research section of their site. This is just one reason I don’t use AOL’s search.

Although the data doesn’t show screen names it still marks queries to a particular user via a random ID. Unfortunately, even with my copious amount of spare time, I haven’t looked at the data myself but I can imagine the kind of queries in there. The article below gives a sample of what was found but they tended to give some pretty “clean” queries. There’s gotta be some crazier queries than that. Maybe someone out there can let me know.

AOL Exposes Search Data On 658,000 People – From TechWeb

Update (8/10/2006): Someone got the data that AOL released and created a search tool to search through the search results. Kind of ironic don’t you think? You can find the AOL Data search application here: http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/

It’s pretty crazy. You can search for a particular keyword or website found and then get a person’s unique identifier (which doesn’t give the location of that user). Then take that ID and go back to the search and you can get a listing of all of the searches done by that “ID” – and in turn find out that user 672897 has a broken brake cable on a Plymouth Breeze, is most likely female, wants to model and is tanning for it, lives in Connecticut, and wants to buy a monkey.

August 2, 2006
by Dirk Watkins
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Save the Power

My energy bills really are becoming a pain. The last one was around one hundred bucks so I was happy to go and read this article I saw while scanning my RSS feeds. It gives a couple pointers that I thought were kind of interesting. I’ve heard that any kind of power adapter draws power even though the device that it attaches to isn’t around and this article says so too. When I get home I’ll spend a couple minutes searching around the house trying to see how many I have plugged in. I’m sure it probably won’t do much for my bill since my house was built in the 50′s and is insulated with tin cans and old newspapers but every little bit counts.