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Last week, Amazon added the ability to search the full text of books. This seems like a great idea but it is not without its annoyances. One used to be able to type in an author name and retrieve the author’s works very quickly. Now, unless you use advanced search, these results get mixed in with the full text results. It almost seems like full text search should be an advanced search option as opposed to the default.

Killer bees? No. Apparently there have been several incidents where crowds of teenagers swarm suburban parties in Australia. Using SMS to communicate, the swarms can sometimes consist of over a hundred people. A teenager died as a result of one of these incidents. On another occasion, police were the target of bottle and rock throwing by hundreds of gatecrashers. Parents are taking this threat seriously by hiring bouncers to keep out the uninvited. The Queensland Police Service has some helpful hints on how to throw a safe party.

My only question: What’s a Schoolie?

via Textually

• Grand Central Terminal is celebrating its 90th birthday
• X10 pays 4.3 Million in damages for pop-unders
• X10 files for bankruptcy protection
• The Economist declares The End of the Oil Age
• Got an extra 845K? Impress your friends with a personal submarine

Unfortunately, I missed National Take Back Your Time Day as I was at work, but I thought this was a good article about it and the burgeoning movement that started it. America is obsessed with productivity and it shows. According to the gross domestic product per capita, America is the most productive nation. Americans are working an average of nine additional weeks per year than Western Europeans. All this productivity comes at a dear price, the organizers of Take Back Your Time Day point out that Time Poverty is contributing to increased rates of heart disease, hypertension and mental disorders.

I think Take Back Your Time day is a great idea but the organizers might be better served by holding it on a weekend. After all, Take Back Your Time day is not about quitting your job altogether, it is about balancing your life. So, wouldn’t it make more of a statement to have Take Back Your Time day on a day when many people are supposed to have the day off, but find themselves working anyway?

Dan Gillmore blogs about switching his default browser to Mozilla Firebird 0.7, then switching back to Safari. I’ve been using Firebird happily for several months now. I enjoy its speed, tabbed windows and popup blocker, but my favorite feature is quick search. I use the dictionary.com quick search several times a day.

Unfortunately, some web sites do not play nicely inside Firebird. This is most problematic when trying to purchase something online. The last thing anyone wants to see at the end of a transaction is some sort of error. This has happened to me on more than one occasion when using Firebird on a site that is apparently optimized for IE. So, for now Firebird is my default browser and I use it for just about everything except sites that I have had problems on in the past. In those cased I have to revert back to IE.

This also makes Firebird kind of a hard sell to many users. Why should they use Firebird if some sites won’t work very well in it and they don’t care about the features I mentioned above? I guess the short answer is they shouldn’t use it if they are happy with IE. Perhaps the most frustrating thing here is that if a site doesn’t work with Firebird, it is probably not going to work very well with any other standards compliant browser.

I’d be interested in knowing if Macintosh users can get away with using Safari all the time, or if they need to load up the Mac version of IE for some sites.

What the hell is going on in Vancouver? The Vancouver Sun reports that 35 bars in the city are going to require patrons to swipe their driver’s license and have their pictures taken before entry. This information will then be shared with other bars in the Barwatch network. Of course, the management can also flag the person as a troublemaker if they so desire, and that information will be shared as well.

Owen Cameron who is the co-owner of TreoScope, the vendor most likely to provide the software, is quoted as saying “Most people are willing to give up a bit of anonymity for safety” and “We can start making Vancouver’s nightlife a little safer”. Privacy advocates are rightfully upset. Are the bars and nightclubs in Vancouver so much more dangerous than the nightspots in the rest of the world that they need this sort of security? Vancouver club goers would be best served by avoiding these establishments and taking their business elsewhere.

via Slashdot

Anyone familiar with a city and its transportation options can tell you when it is faster, easier and cheaper to walk rather than take the subway or bus. But what does one do when they find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings? Enter the London tube map with walklines. This map shows stations that are within 500 meters of each other making it a relatively painless walk. This geographically correct map also shows the relative distance between some of the stations.

via boingboing

A New York City man was keeping a Bengal tiger in his Harlem apartment as a pet. Police were alerted when the man showed up at Harlem Hospital with bite wounds on his arms and legs which he claimed were from a pit bull. Police were able to subdue the tiger with a tranquilizer shot through the window. The tiger is now resting comfortably at the Bronx Zoo. One neighbor was quoted as saying “He got the tiger when it was very little some three to five years ago. That was his pet. It just outgrew him.”

Outgrew is an understatement. What kind of rat problem do you have to have before you think about getting a tiger to take care of it? The man was also keeping a three foot caiman in the apartment. It sounds like he might have had visions of starting his own small scale zoo.

TVs for Movie People is an exhibition of student works from the School of Visual Arts. Each display uses televisions in some way to recreate scenes from a movie. Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg seem to be the most popular directors in this exhibition, although, Silence of the Lambs is so popular at SVA, it warrants two separate pieces. My favorits were Rear Window for best use of a 35mm camera, Usual Suspects for holding up even though it was located behind the BIG piano keys (complete with toy piano Heart and Soul soundtrack), and King Kong for the sheer size of it.

TVs for Movie People is on display at Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall through October 10th 2003.

Newsday reports that 4,100 bikers a day are crossing the East River bridges, up 1,300 per day from last year. Bike ridership is at its highest level since the DOT began tracking bicycle traffic in 1980. The DOT attributes the increase to several factors including improved bike paths on the bridges, increased subway fares and an overall trend of increased bicycle use. The DOT also points out that one of the major impediments to bicyclists is the lack of secure parking areas.

via Gothamist