David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

So I came home a day or two ago, and saw this card stuck to all of the mailboxes outside my apartment. Now I do not claim at all to have perfect grammar or spelling. However, when it is this bad I do find it impressive.

I did think to myself, “English is supposed to be a complicated language as they go, maybe I’m being overcritical.” I personally, true to being an American, cannot fluently speak anything but English. So I ask a friend in town that’s from Denmark to look at the card. His reply was, “Who wrote this? Some Chinese person?” He immediately saw the errors on the card.

Everyone screws up at some point and forgets a little punctuation, but this card obviously had zero proofreading done before they sent it to Vistaprint. I mean, if I was having cards written to do business in another country, I’d either keep it to minimal contact information that’s universal, or make sure to have a native speaker look over my poor translations a few times.

So give them a call today, and see if they will “becto your place”.

Tags: business cards, funny, humor, mistakes, opps, poor english

I always figure that I have decent business ideas. Here’s one for someone that would simply rock! Someone can make money off this if they are smart (and if they are smart and nice then they could share with me!)

There needs to be a small and lightweight program for OS X that allows you to simply hold a business card in the air near the built in iSight camera on Macs, and then takes a photo of the business card, and does OCR on it, and throws the information (and a photo of the card for backup) into Apple’s Address Book.

It can’t be THAT hard. Delicious Monster has people using the iSight as a barcode scanner. The API for making the computer take photos isn’t that bad. There’s some open source OCR stuff out there, and getting junk into address book isn’t rocket science either.

I currently have about 1000 business cards to input into a computer. I COULD always just get a business card scanner, but I already have a camera on my iSight. If I’m at a conference with my computer, I could just slide the cards past the iSight and boom. It’s done.

Other cool idea: Business cards with RFID tags in them, all with the same radio frequency (per person). Just slide the physical card over an RFID reader, and the software could go online and fetch their information (from a public site they put it on that’s associated with the number) and/or add them to LinkedIn.

Tags: business cards, cards, delicious monster, isight, money, ocr, opportunity, os x, scanning

New York times coverage/journalism preferred by me over CNN’s fluff in comparison. I’m still soo happy!

read more | digg story

Tags: Uncategorized

Gonzales quits! No time to type, but this just made my day. Condi next? Please… please please please? Or can Cheney quit? Maybe they will all quit and we’ll have Pelosi for president until 2008 when Hillary or Obama get in office. Whoo! America… FUCK YEA!

read more | digg story

Tags: Uncategorized

My blog is only around 500 pixels wide it seems. Maybe it’s just in Camino (which I am growing tired of). I have my screen at 1440×900. I wish it expanded to fit. It looks cramped. Anyone know how to fix this? Leave a comment?

Update: Made it wider. Not sure if this scales to browsers anymore. Need to make it as a % I think.

Tags: 1440x900, blogger, features, wider