Health 2.0

By chip

Health 2.0 is another tossfest’ buzzword like Web 2.0. Actually it’s very similar to Web 2.0 but it does have a lot more meaning - at least to me!

From the founder

…focusing on user-generated aspects of Web2.0 within health care but not directly interacting with the mainstream health care system. That means, a) search, b) communities, c) tools for individual and group consumer use.

So ultimately, Health 2.0 is a conference that discusses web applications that are focused on health. Let’s have a look at some of these applications:

Reliefinsite

This for-the-institute web application quickly monitors, evaluates and reports the level of pain of any connected patient. Brilliant if you ask me and saves the hospital money with excess hardware monitors.

MedHelp

MedHelp closes the gap between Doctors and the people with professional - but not essentially guaranteed - advise.

WegoHealth

WegoHealth is essentially a dynamic index of community approved medical information that aims to bring us better information, faster.

I’m Too Young For This

Are you under 40 and have cancer (…and I assume from North America)? Then this website tells you about all the support networks, freebies and entitlements available to you. The founder, Matthew Zachary noticed that there was no information available for this huge “market” and went about searching and reporting as best he could.

here are a couple more…

• The Health Wisdom - The Wikipedia of Health.
• The Daily Strength - Helping you anonymously stay both, mind-and-body healthy!

….and I can’t wait till Google Health becomes more popular!

Movie Reviews: Rambo, Awake, Things we Lost in the Fire, Outpost, Run Fatboy Run…

By chip

Pure unadulterated violence and gore. John Rambo is getting on in his years and his anger has only festered. He now lives as a “boatman” in Thailand, spending his time taxiing people up and down the river. When his last customers go missing, he suddenly feels obliged to help out with the rescue efforts. From then on it’s simply old school, no-camera-panning-away violence. Throat ripping, spine shattering and eye socket implosions are the dish of the day. Rambo is everything it’s supposed to be. 8/10

Clay Beresford is a billionaire heir with heart problems. During the transplant operation, he experiences, “anesthesia awareness” where he can hear and feel but his body remains paralysed. His new wife (Jessica Alba) is on site and must deal with the situation. It’s a fun film but not as claustrophobic as I had “hoped” for, nor is it as involved and thought provoking as it could’ve been, nevertheless it’s still entertaining. 6/10

Acting superstars Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro star in this rollercoaster of a drama. It’s reflective, revealing and moderately fast in plot development. Benicio Del Toro’s role was built for him as he plays the drug-rooted addict with good intentions and meager discipline. It’s not too predictive plot is captivating enough to keep you watching to the end. 6/10

Ray Stevenson from HBO’s Rome plays DC, a mercenary who is transporting a businessman to a WW2 bunker in eastern europe. Simple enough? Well, it wouldn’t be a movie if it was…so when people start dying, he needs to know exactly what he is up against! This is very B-grade, a straight-to-dvd release and a little bit regretful. If you have a day off or want a bit of a laugh then watch it, otherwise, don’t. 4/10

Simon Pegg of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead stars in a very different film, a romance-comedy, starring 007 hottieThandie Newton. It’s fun, not very romantic but definitely worth a chuckle at times. If you have a girlfriend or wife who is craving some ‘bonding’ time over a rom-com movie then this is the one you want to see. It’s just a pity we couldn’t see Pegg ’stretch his (acting) legs’ a bit more. 6/10

Digsby: Bringing People Together!

By chip

I needed an Instant Messenger to access MSN Messenger and Google Chat and from my few minutes of research, there wasn’t a longstanding killer application that dealt with this. A quick talk to my ‘finger-on-the-pulse’ friend Threatz and he was insisting that I try out Digsby.

So off I went, I downloaded, installed and I was good to go. The set up was so simple and the interface by default was quite simple, organised and appealing to the eyes. After a few changing the layout a bit as recommended by Threatz, I was on my way.

Usability: 8/10
Design: 7/10

It’s feature rich and the developers seem to be listening to their users as it’s constantly being updated. One to-do-for feature is the ability to reply to emails from within the client itself, which saves a lot of time!

Give it a try!

Google Sets: Generate a Set!

By chip

Google Sets has been in Google Labs for a while, but it’s still very new to me. This is what Google says about it:

Automatically create sets of items from a few examples.

What a very short description for a company who loves to keep things simple. Well rightly so, because it is extremely easy to use. Type in: heineken, becks and carlsberg and hit “Large Set” and you’ll receive a long list of beers.

Now, why is this handy?

Can’t remember the name of a musical group but you know a lot of similar acts? Have you forgotten all the countries that play in the World Cup but know a few of those involved? Know a few jargon terms for your industry and want to know more?

Go here, enter in a few examples and give this a go, it’s pretty sweet!

Have a go here

Firefox 3 Beta 3: Get it!

By chip

Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now released and ready to download and use!

Initially, there’s no shocking changes to the interface but this can usually change when a product is released in its final state.

A few things I’ve noticed:

• Auto-Complete now reads from Bookmarks and from titles and tags. This means that you can get to those more frequently viewed websites a lot quicker!

• When you click on the favicon in the address bar, you get to easily see who owns the website etc

• Change Search Engines with a preceding keyword to cut your search time in half! So if I want to all of a sudden start to search wikipedia for something I’d precede it with a wiki.

Now, there’s probably a lot more but I haven’t stumbled across them all yet but give it a go!

Read more here

Google Docs: Easily Create and Publish your own survey!

By chip

Google Spreadsheets now makes it easier to create an online survey.

At this stage it’s simple, you give your survey a name, add a few questions and select whether they are single choice(radio button or drop down list), multiple choice (check boxes) or text and then you save it and send it out to your friends.

You can’t group or separate the different areas of the survey, nor can you insert your own styles to have a custom look, but this is free, so why should Google offer that anyway?

Google has continued their “keep it simple and they will come” approach and that alone makes survey creation beautiful. The Ajax souped survey maker allows you to quickly edit on-the-fly with little load time and immediate results.

To access the survey creation, you’ll need to:

1. have a Google account
2. Click on Documents
3. Create a new spreadsheet and then click on the Share tab
4. Click the “to fill out a form” radio button
5. …get crazy

Google Docs Surveys aren’t something you’ll want to link to in your next company prospectus, but if you want to quickly collect information from within your company (making sure it isn’t too confidential),for university or amongst your friends then it’s perfect!

Sign up for a Gmail account now!

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Upcoming Movies to Watch

By chip

The Eye
Jessica Alba stars in this remake of Japanese horror film Gin gwai (2002). Plot: A blind girl is given the opportunity of sight through an eye transplant, although what she sees isn’t normal… Trailer

Rambo IV
Stallone graces our screens once more in this blood lust epic that is being released 10 years after his predecessors. Plot: Violence. Trailer

Jumper
Hayden Christensen is a dude with teleporting skills, apparently samuel l jackson is against that. Plot: A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them. Trailer

Time Filler: Desktop Tower Defense

By chip

This beautiful little game runs in your browser, and is super addictive!

The aim of the game is to prevent an armada of creeps from running across your battlefield by purchasing a towers (up to 9) with different defense systems (pellets, darts, swarm (anti-air)) to stop these incessant creeps from breeching your perimeter.

The opening paragraph for Desktop Tower Defense in Wikipedia says:

Desktop Tower Defense is a Flash-based browser game of the tower defense genre created by first-time game designer Paul Preece in March of 2007. In the span of a few months, the game had been played over 15.7 million times as of July 2007. The game was among one of Webware 100’s top ten entertainment web applications of 2007.

Play it here

2008 / Off to a start!

By chip

Oh yes, it’s 2008 and we’re already into February. It’s about time to start this blog again!

I’m using an awesome new theme by Web-Kreation that I will be mildly tweaking over the new couple of weeks and I’m using free photoshop brushes to render a new WCD logo to sit up top left on all pages.

Let’s get rolling!

Internet Archive: Crawl back in time!

By chip

Ever since I first heard about the Internet Archive website and the Way Back Machine I have had an on again, off again fascination with it.

So, what is it?

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

Now, I primarily used it to a) look at older, crappier versions of websites I already visit or b) use as a primitive backup reference if I needed information required from yesteryear.

Now that they have RSS Feeds, I get the daily/weekly update on what badass dollop of information their WaybackMachine has just stumbled across.

At the moment, I can download (legally!) a recording from a 1985 Grateful Dead live concert from the Live Music Archive section, have The Adventures of Tom Sawyer read to me or watch the 1950’s short film spectacular What To Do In A Zombie Attack, all for free!

I recommend looking around this expanding, infinite and eternally fascinating resource as much as possible!

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