Nextel service in the DTC

Ever since the Sprint/Nextel merger, Nextel service in the Denver Tech Center seems to have gone to crap.  In places where I used to have full service, I now don’t receive service at all.  Furthermore, there seem to be many more instances of my receiving a voicemail message without ever having had my phone ring.  The interesting part is that Sprint and Nextel do not use the same technologies, so it’s not as if Sprint took down a bunch of duplicated towers once the merger was complete.  I can now transfer service to Sprint with no Early Termination Fee (ETF), but am wondering whether the service is really better.

DTC is the primary place where I use my phone, but I also use it in downtown Denver, and I travel frequently to Dallas, Washington, San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Cleveland, and some other major cities.  I am not out of contract with Nextel and would have to pay a ETF if I went with a carrier other than Sprint.

Any thoughts from anyone?

Washington travel

I was out in Washington over the weekend.  Unfortunately on Sunday morning there was a rock slide on the Sno Pass; I hadn’t been watching the news, so I didn’t hear about it.

I arrived at the Pass at about 10:30AM to find it was closed, but I heard it might open around 12PM.  When 12PM arrived, the new time for opening was 2PM, so I decided to take an alternate route through Wanatchee.  Unfortunately, a lot of other people decided to use the alternate route as well, so, long story short, I finally arrived at the Seattle airport around 8:30PM.  Because there were no flights out to Denver that night, I got on the 6AM flight yesterday.

Despite the inconvenience, Washington is a beautiful place to drive through.  If you ever get the chance to take the longer drive from Seattle out East and you have the time, I recommend taking the 405 to the 522 to the 2 and driving through Wanatchee — the drive is very scenic and all of the little towns along the way look like cool places to stop and/or camp.

One thing I found very interesting was that every little mom and pop gas station or store along the route I took had a drive-through espresso shack.  I guess Washington is the home to Starbucks and coffee is a way of life, it just sort of surprised me.

Auto-magically

I can’t tell you the first time that I saw the term “auto-magically,” but I guarantee that first time was on someone’s blog.  Blogs are viral.  Everyone’s using the term now.  There are now more than 900,000 results for “auto-magically” with the hyphen and more than 900,000 results for the term “automagically” without the hyphen.

Why exactly does Apple need Motorola?

There’s tons of media around Sept. 7th’s anticipated announcement of the ROKR iTunes phone.  So here’s a question: Why couldn’t Apple just release an unlocked GSM iTunes phone that they had made by a company like HTC?  There certainly seems to be a little of fighting amongst the carriers about carrying a phone that potentially takes revenue from and over-the-air download model.  If Apple were to create a GSM iTunes phone that was unlocked (i.e., would take any GSM SIM card), they would at least have a phone that would work with Cingular and T-Mobile — Verizon and Sprint/Nextel might be harder due to the fact that they do not use SIM cards.  This, of course, would open the phone for use to many overseas carriers as many of those carriers use GSM technology.

The current model for cell phones is that the carriers subsidize the cost of the phone in return for a one or two year contract commitment that is enforced with an Early Termination Fee (ETF).  If Apple were to manufacture their own iTunes phones, they would have to bear in mind that the retail cost would be the retail cost to the consumer.

To take this a step further, if Apple were to take the time to sub the manufacturing of their own phone, it is not inconceivable that PIM functions in the phone could easily sync with OSX applications — easily synchronize your contact and calendar with the built-in applications in OSX.

Here’s the big limiting factor, Apple by itself or Apple with Motorola — the damn battery!  Every phone that I have ever used burns through a battery very quickly with heavy phone usage.  Probably the best phones that I have used are Nokias that can go several days in standby mode, but still do not last any longer than any other phones when actively talking.  How long is the battery really going to last on a phone that has an iTunes player built into it?  Batteries are, of course, what make phones heavy, so it’s a matter of the right performance/weight matrix.

Perhaps Apple should focus on software development for existing platforms.  What if Apple created iTunes that would run on Symbian, Windows Mobile (it could be the “best Windows Mobile application ever!”), Palm, and RIM?  Granted not every phone has flash memory or large built-in memory, but a software model might be a good play to drive people to the iTunes Music store.  Of course, this gets away from the hardware model, but might be the best play in the long run.

We’ll see what happens on Sept. 7th.

Who's There?

Seth Godin’s promised new e-book, Who’s There is available here and here.  What is it?  Well, it’s Seth’s incomplete guide to blogs and the new web.  More importantly is what this e-book is not.  From Seth’s post:

Who's There is not an ebook about how to write better or how to follow the traditional conventions about formatting and building a blog. It's not designed to sell you one service instead of another, either.

Instead, I divide the blog world into three groups and turn my attention to one. And in particular, I try to sell you hard on how building a blog asset can have a spectacular impact on you, your career, your organization and your ideas.

I promise this ebook is incomplete. I hope, though, that it encourages you to pay attention to some of the underlying forces at work online and off.

Read and share. 

Secure RSS

This article on Internet News provides information about a company called Reactivity that has hardware solutions to provide secure RSS feeds.

Imagine what you would send via RSS if you had a secure feed — the possibilities are endless.

24 marathon on A&E

I had never really gotten into watching the TV show 24, but I did watch all of the second season during the twenty four episode run on A&E.

This is a damn good television show; I will definitely be watching season 3 and plan on borrowing the DVDs for season 1 from one of my friends.

It is programs like these that do make me want TiVo — I could have recorded all 24 episodes this weekend and watched them at my leisure, including skipping the commercials, at my leisure.

TiVo cash rebate

TiVo is running a $150 cash rebate for all TiVo boxes.  Over the weekend, Amazon, a certified TiVo seller was selling the 40 hour TiVo box for $99, which meant that you could have received $50 in cash if you had purchased the box; unfortunately, just yesterday Amazon changed the price of the 40 hour box for $199, meaning that the net cost to you is a $40.

Now, in order to qualify for the $150 rebate you need to sign up for a one year commitment with TiVo at $12.99 per month or alternatively you can sign up for a “lifetime subscription” for $299 (note that “lifetime” refers to the lifetime of the piece of TiVo hardware — if you upgrade, the membership is not for your lifetime).

Something new is this page on TiVo that instantly gives you a $150 rebate is you pre-pay for a full year of TiVo service with the purchase of a TiVo box (note that the page I link to is for the 40 hour TiVo box with the one year pre-pay).

Here’s something important to note if you are going to get a TiVo box — you need one-time access to a land-based phone line for the initial TiVo installation.  This is especially important for someone like me that does not have a land-based phone at home.  Assuming that you can plug your box in at work, a neighbor’s house, etc. for a few hours, you can then purchase a USB ethernet adapter to plug in an ethernet cable or a USB-based wireless 802.11 receiver into your Series 2 TiVo box and receive all further updates in that manner.  As a side note to all this, there is this guide on configuring your TiVo from the start without a land based phone line, but obviously I haven’t tried it, so I have no idea if it works — based on research it seems like this works well with TiVo Series 2 boxes using the 4.0 software, but not necessarily for DirecTiVo boxes.

Why is TiVo doing this?  Both Dish and Comcast are pushing hard on their own brands of DVR services.  Additionally, DirecTV will be launching their own DVR service in October, which may significantly effect the number of TiVo subscribers, especially as the Comcast DVR, Dish DVR, and DirecTV DVR services all cost around $5.99 per month as compared to the $12.95 per month for TiVo.

This certainly makes TiVo more attractive to me from a price perspective, but I am still worried about of the monthly fees.  I’ll let you know if I decide to take the plunge.

First-hand accounts of New Orleans

If you are looking for information about what’s going on in New Orleans, check The Interdictor.  Be sure to check out the webcam that these guys are running at the top of the page — it shows a lot of activity going on in downtown New Orleans.

Ultimate Google search interface

Take a look at this — basically this interface lets you search everything on Google from a single interface.  Pretty cool.

Television Retardation

I just watched a Dateline special about Katrina. The reporter actually called someone trapped in their house to talk to them about being trapped. Of course, the person was talking on their cell phone and the connection dropped. It is unknown as to whether it was a signal issue or the battery died, and it was further unclear as to whether the person the reporter was talking to had power to recharge the cell phone battery. To add insult to injury, the reporter then called the Coast Guard hotline to ask about rescue for the person she had been talking to and was connected to a 911 operator that she proceeded to bombard with questions -- in other words, she monopolized the time of a 911 operator for a new story.

The whole 5 minute story made me sick. Want to really raise some money for relief? Charge the news stations that do stupid-ass stories like this for ratings.

Worried about your MPG?

In the face of rising gas prices, you may find that Fueleconomy.gov is a place to visit; if you already have a vehicle, you can check what you are supposed to be getting, but it’s probably more useful if you are looking at buying a new vehicle — yes, you might get a smoking deal on that Excursion with Family Pricing, but can you afford to drive it?

Knock Knock

In case you missed the free download of Seth Godin’s Knock Knock previously, you can download it free now from here, here, or here.  Here’s a tip: read the RSS instructions on the second page, Seth has promised to post the sequel this weekend.

Technorati cosmos search

For those of you that don’t know, a Technorati cosmos search shows blogs that are linking to a particular blog address.  I have posted recently about Technorati sucking, and so I was interested to see this post by Joy Ito that links through to this post by Dave Silfry with Technorati.  From Dave’s post:

The blogosphere has been growing at an explosive rate - Technorati is now indexing over 16 million blogs, with about 100,000 new blogs created every day. And there's over 1.4 Million new posts every day, and about 22% of those posts are from spam or fake blogs, which means that even after we pull out the spam and fake blogs from the indexes, we are dealing with about 1.2 Million posts each day.

We just weren't expecting that kind of sudden growth, both on the posting side and also on the search side, and frankly we didn't plan well enough to handle the load. We've been adding new machines to our datacenter, - over 400 now - and more coming each week, and we've been fixing bugs and making performance enhancements on the web site as well.

. . . Cosmos search (or URL search) is still being worked on, and is often timing out under the increased load. Unfortunately this is also one of the searches that bloggers find most compelling, as it helps you to all know who is linking to your blog, and it is the very first type of search that Technorati made available, so it is near and dear to our hearts. Everyone here also uses it every day, so it really sucks when it isn't working right.

Once we got our keyword search infrastructure back on track, our infrastructure team has been working 100% on fixing Cosmos search. Our current plan is to have Cosmos search back up and running by the end of September, and you'll see incremental improvement throughout the coming month. I'll keep you informed on progress of this critical project. As the project progresses throughout the month, you'll be able to see progress because you'll see fewer and fewer error messages when you do a URL search as September progresses.  

I guess I’ve been waiting this long for a Cosmos search that I can wait through September, but I do have to say that I haven’t had a cosmos search return results for the last 3 days.

What is Ojos?

I was ranging around today for alternative photo sharing sites and ran across this post on the business2blog about a service called Ojos (means “eyes” in English) that is supposed to launch soon.  Apparently Ojos uses facial recognition to help you tag your digital photos, which is really cool.  You tag one photo with a person’s face in it, and Ojos will allow you to search your photo library for other pictures that have the same person in them.  Think of this as the consumer version of the fancy facial recognition software the casinos and Homeland Security use (yes, I realize that those systems work in real-time off of video images, but this is still damn cool).

Can’t wait to try it out once the service launches.

Out of ideas?

You might want to check out Idea Generation Methods, which lists all kinds of ways to generate ideas (in alphabetical order, no less) and provides hyperlinks to resources on individual methods.

Blog Day

Here are my 5 suggestions:

1. VentureBlog
2. Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur
3. the [non]billable hour
4. Journalisimo
5. Wireless Wonders

All of the blogs above provide interesting information in many different areas.

Enjoy

If you are a Winamp user . . .

. . . you might want to check this out.  Yes, it is a leak of Winamp 5.1, and among the new feature set, according to the link, are the following:

• 5.1 surround sound
• 8X CDR ripping (on the free version)
• AACPlus encoder

Did I mention you can download it here or here?

Test Drive

Mac Mini test drive

Enough said.

Great manifesto by Tom Peters

The name of it is “Tomato TomA[h]to” and you can download it right here.  Some pearls from the manifesto:

They say “built to last.”
I say “Built to Soar.  We’re all dead in the long run . . . live your Insane Fantasy.  Devil take the hindmost.”

They say “Eighty hour weeks will kill you.”
I say “Work 35–hour weeks and the Chinese will kill you.”

They say “Install cost controls with teeth.”
I say “Ha. Ha. Ha.  Blow Up the existing enterprise and start with a Clean Sheet of Paper.”

They say “We can’t all be a Brand.”
I say “Why not?”

They say “Radical change takes a decade.”
I say “Radical change takes a Minute.”

Lots more like that above — read the manifesto.

Opera's 10th Anniversary

Go join the party and get yourself free registration codes for all operating system versions of Opera — get your codes while they last!

Just let me talk!

You’ve got to watch this clip from CNN Daybreak this morning.

Lego Factory

Download the Lego Design Studio, and you can design your own Lego object that you can send to Lego and have them ship you the pieces to build.

Yes, that’s all pretty cool, but has anyone tried to do this with their company logo?

National Disc Warranty

Before I even post about this let me just say that I do not own a video game console (XBox, PS2, etc.), all of my CDs have been ripped and transferred to iTunes and my various iPods, and I watch probably 60% of movies on DirecTV.  Ok, so with all that in mind, here I go:

According to this post on Popgadget, Discwarranty.com will sell you a policy for $59.99 per year that will replace or repair your damaged CDs, DVDs, or game discs within 3–5 days of a claim.  Reading through the FAQs this seems like it would be a good investment if you listen to a lot of CDs or watch a lot of DVDs — you would have to have 5 CDs a year (at an average cost of $12 each) repaired or 3 DVDs a year (at an average cost of $20 per DVD) repaired to make the service worthwhile.  However, if you own a game console and a lot of games, this service seems like it would be an extremely worthwhile investment with the average cost of a PS2 or XBox game being around $40.  I haven’t seen pricing on the games for XBox 360 or PS3, but I would imagine they will be in the $40–$60 range once those systems are released, and with the amount of data that they will be backing on the game discs, a small scratch could really ruin your investment.

My guess is that Discwarranty’s business model is based on an anticipated relatively high percentage of reparable discs or is based on the assumption that most subscribers will have replacement requests that are less than what they spend annually.  Also, it is important to note that nowhere on the Discwarranty site does it say that you will receive a brand-new, factory-sealed replacement disc — yes, that means that you will most likely receive a “refurbished” disc if they have to replace it.

What's your level of urgency?

From this post by Seth Godin:

Urgent issues are easy to address. They are the ones that get everyone in the room for the final go-ahead. They are the ones we need to decide on right now, before it's too late.

Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

My guess is that your organization does not ignore the urgent.  Furthermore, I would guess that your organization always deals with the urgent.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a simple way to check:  When your company processes an invoice, does it pay on the day it’s due or does it take advantage of net terms?  Here are some other ways to check from Seth’s post:

• Do senior people at your company refuse to involve themselves in decisions until the last minute?
• Do meetings regularly get canceled because something else came up?
• Is waiting until the last minute the easiest way to get a final decision from your peers?

Lots of people love to use the saying “If it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.” — do people in your company say this?

So what’s the big lesson here?  This is simple and you’ve probably heard it before; from Seth:

You will succeed in the face of change when you make the difficult decisions first.

Difficult decisions are usually cheaper at the outset than they are at the last minute, but you have to have the balls to make the difficult decisions quickly.

What do restaurants do with used oil?

Well, if you are Glass Nickel Pizza, you filter your 240 gallons per month of waste oil and use it to power your diesel delivery vehicles.  See the full story here.

I wonder how many cars per month a single McDonald’s could power.

Apple iPod battery settlement

If you qualify for the class-action settlement, you can get instructions and the claim for right here; claims must be received 2 years after the date of purchase of your affected iPod or by September 30, 2005, whichever is later.

Watch OSX boot and run on a Sony Vaio

Right here.

Sprint/Nextel day one

With everything I’ve been able to find it appears that Day One for the combined Sprint/Nextel entity will be September 2, 2005.  According to all of the documentation I’ve been able to find, the following will occur on Day One:

• Current Sprint PCS subscribers will be able to switch to a Nextel plan with no early termination fees, but a 2 year contract extension will be required.
• Current Nextel subscribers will be able to switch to a Sprint PCS plan with no early termination fees, but a 2 year contract extension will be required.
• Because the billing systems will not be totally integrated, a number port will still have to take place when switching between Sprint and Nextel or Nextel and Sprint.
• Currently existing plans for each company will be available for either service.  For example, there should be Free Incoming plans for Sprint PCS and Fair and Flexible plans should be available for Nextel.
• There will be a $5 buy-up that allows free mobile-to-mobile between Sprint and Nextel services.
• Sprint plans to support the iDen (Nextel) network through 2010.
• There were not Initially be interoperability between Nextel PTT and Sprint ReadyLink.
• Dual network (CDMA and iDen) handsets are expected, but will not be available for at least 6 months.
• Nextel Retail Stores and Sprint Retail stores will sell both services and hardware for both services.
• Certain rate plans will have scaled pricing based on when you want your night minutes to start.

See this thread on IdenInsider for scans of all the new rate plans.  More information available here on Howard Forums.

Rosetta Stone

I’ve been looking into learning some other languages.  In middle school and high school I took Spanish every year, so that was 6 years of Spanish; some of it has stuck with me and I can make myself understood and if I spend a week in Mexico, I remember a lot more and become even more fluent.  All of that said, it would be nice to brush up on my skills in Spanish, and I also have some amount of desire to learn a Middle Eastern language like Arabic.

Someone recommended Rosetta Stone as a great place to start with self-taught language lessons.  Looking at the pricing, I can spend either $195 for the Level 1 and $225 for the Level 2 Spanish CD-Roms, or just $49.95 per month or $149.95 for 6 months for internet access to the same lessons.  Obviously the internet access seems to be the best deal, but then I do not retain the CDs to be able to use in the future.

Has anyone used the Rosetta Stone system?  If so, did you buy the CDs or do the online version?  If you did not use Rosetta Stone, did you use someone else, and why?

Any comments are appreciated.

What do you want from the next version of Office?

I hadn’t really thought too much about it, but Olivier Travers has some very specific things he wants in this post.  From the post:

• Seamless integration between Excel on the frontend and an online relational database on the backend.  And I'm not talking about just connecting Excel to some SQL source and browse it remotely (a feature I've been using once in a while), because this starts from the assumption someone created a SQL database in the first place. What I want is an internet application with a desktop frontend, with a choice of providers you can plug into, just like you can source other hosting services. The whole "internet Excel stack" should automagically normalize and synchronize the pseudo database work that most people do with it. And if it looks and tastes like a bunch of names and addresses, I should likewise be able to read/write/synch them through Outlook contacts. Wikify/blogify Outlook Today to have a mini-portal to point people to stuff and keep them on the same page (put that stuff on the private web too), and we're all set.
• ASP service as a priority, not a half-baked afterthought.
• No extra client install on top of the latest default MS Office install.
• Make it as much backwards compatible as possible.
• No crap that just doesn't happen to work on Office Mac.
• No glue grunt work necessary on my end to make the magic happen.
• Data entry starts with Excel and Outlook.
• Data goes into tidy, secure, backed-up server heaven by wizard magic.
• Integrated basic wiki/blog/portal.
• No butterfly, no dog, no silly animal whatsoever.
• Even shorter: no server, no install, no programming.
• Get back to your end-user roots, drop the full-time IT department requirement mindset, and charge a tax to your product and marketing teams every time they use the word "deploy". While you're at it, drop silly names such as "Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003" . . . really this should be how Office works out of the box.

I have a few of my own additions:

• Make Outlook work as well with Exchange as it does any other mail protocol.
• Exchange should provide as much value whether accessed by IMAP, POP3, OWA, or any other method.  For that matter, all of the previously-mentioned methods should be secure enough out of the box to make even the most security-conscious IS person perfectly happy.
• The Mac version should look and act exactly the same as the Windows version.  If you are not going to provide the functionality in the first bullet above, then this must include Exchange access.  If you don’t think this is important, pull your head out of the sand and realize that Apple is planning on making OSX work on Intel machines.
• X1–type features should be built into every application out-of-the-box.  When I pull up the Find dialog in any application, searching within a document should be the tightest scope in a list of options that go right up to searching the company intranet and the internet.
• Figure out how to make the installation smaller.  If I could fit Office and all of its components onto a USB drive and everything worked correctly while leaving no footprints on the machine I plug the drive into, I might just get rid of my laptop.
• Create a Linux version — there will be lots more people using Linux in the future.
• Integrate with OpenOffice.  If you do not acknowledge and embrace OpenOffice, it may very well kill your product.  Does this mean you will have to embrace open standards or open up your proprietary standards?  Yes!
• Open up the PST standard or start having e-mails stored in the MBOX format.  Yep, it’s that open standard thing again.

I’m sure there’s more, but between Olivier’s and my list, that’s a lot to start from.

Pandora

I stumbled across this site called Pandora, which was created by the Music Genome Project.  Essentially you type in the name of an artist that you like listening to, and they play songs by that artist and other artists that sound similar.  The first 10 hours of the service are free and then it’s $36 per month after that.  Pandora works through your browser, so there’s no reason that you couldn’t use it everywhere you have a high-speed connection and, although I don’t have a PDA with wifi, it seems like it should work with any wifi-enabled PDA that has some sort of browser.

If you find an artist that you like, you simply click the icon of the artist and it gives you the option to buy the track from iTunes or the CD from Amazon.  Furthermore, when you click on an artist, you can create a new station from the artist or vote on whether or not you like the artist, which I believe will help customize further stations that you create.

It would be damn cool if you could use this service with XM or Sirius; that would definitely make me invest in one of those 2 services.

Macintsoh virus protection

If you don’t have virus software on your Mac, go download ClamXav — do it now, it’s free and even Apple believes in it because it’s bundled by Apple with Mac OS Server 10.4.

This guide on macdevcenter.com provides full instructions on installation.

SyncToy

SyncToy is a Microsoft Windows XP PowerToy that allows the synchronization of multiple files and directories.  I downloaded it this morning and have been playing with it, and so far have had no problems — everything works as advertised (it wouldn’t sync my PST files after I closed Outlook, but then I realized that X1 and my Blackberry software were keeping an Exchange connection open, and it worked fine after I exited those 2 programs).  It is important to note 3 things about this program:

• It is “beta” and not officially supported by MS Technical Support.
• It requires Windows Genuine Advantage verification before download (even unsupported beta programs now require this — amazing).
• XP SP2 is required.

Preview of the non-TiVo DirecTV DVR

This article on TVPredictions.com give details on the non-TiVo DVR system that is slated to debut in October.  From the article:

• The set-top has the usual features found on most DVRs, such as pausing live TV and fast-forwarding and rewinding at high speed.
• The DIRECTV Plus receiver will automatically save a program to your hard drive while you watch. This enables you to fast-forward, rewind and pause live TV. However, the DIRECTV Plus will permit you to back up 90 minutes if you haven't changed the channel while watching.
• The set-top will display a program frame-by-frame if you hit the Fast Forward button after you hit Pause.
• You can set a "bookmark" in a selected program by pressing Pause and then the "Green" button on the remote. This enables you to instantly return to a certain part of a show after you have recorded it.
• The Active channel, which will have its own channel in the lineup, will provide daily weather forecasts, lottery results and other interactive features such as channels that will have multiple screens so the viewer can watch several shows at once.
• DIRECTV has also hinted that its new DVR will have a Video on Demand feature for Pay Per View movies.
• The DIRECTV DVR monthly subscription will be $5.99, not including the cost of the hardware.

Ok, all of the above is useful information, but does not answer my burning question: Do I have to have a land-based telephone line to use it?  I’m not going to spend an extra $20–$40 per month for a land-based line in order to use a $5.99 per month service, although it would be ok if it worked over my Vonage line.  Now many of you may say that there is a way to get TiVo to work by doing the initial download over someone else’s land-based phone line and then enabling IP updates, but I really don’t want that hassle either.

How to set up Google Talk on a Mac

There is no Google-manufactured Talk client for the Mac, but follow these instructions to set it up.

Google Talk is live

Get the newest instant messaging client right here.  Google Talk supports normal text-based instant messaging, live talking, and interfaces with your Gmail account’s contact list; like most new Google applications, you can sign into Google Talk with your Google Account.

How long will it be before you can get an inbound phone number and purchase blocks of minutes to call land-based numbers?

"I have a question about your website"

If for some reason you e-mail me with this post title as a subject line in an e-mail I will not respond to you; I am getting something like 10–12 pieces of spam a day with that as the subject.

Thanks.

Aeon Flux trailer

I loved watching Aeon Flux in it’s animated version on MTV.  You can see the preview for the live action version here (note that this links you to the large, high-resolution version of the trailer) with Charlize Theron as Aeon.

What employee pricing does to me

Prior to GM’s Employee Pricing campaign, my GMC truck, which is only a year old blue-booked for about $1,000 more than I paid for it.  Now that the campaign has been running, my truck is worth about $7,000 less than I owe; this is a direct trickle-down effect of the discounted price of new vehicles and the value of my car will most certainly not be going up with all of the new vehicles that have been dumped on the market at rock-bottom prices.

So what’s this mean?  Let’s say, for example, I wanted to get an “Ultimate 4x4” Lincoln navigator (I don’t, but that’s not the point here); it retails for $57,795, is employee priced at $49,719, and I receive an additional $2,000 cash back — that leaves me $5,000 upside down, meaning that the total amount I would finance would be $54,719 for a net of a $3,000 savings.  Alternatively, let’s say I wanted to get a Chevrolet Tahoe Z71 4x4; it retails for $44,760 and is employee priced at $36,058 — that leaves me $7,000 upside down, meaning the total amount I would finance would be $43,058 for a net of about a $1,000 savings.  Finally, let’s say I wanted a base model (not 100% sure what this entails, but I’m sure it doesn’t have luxury options or 4x4 and the Jeep site doesn’t list pricing for non-base models) Jeep Grand Cherokee; it retails for $27,050 and is employee priced at $24,165 with an additional $2,000 cash rebate — that leave me $5,000 updside down, meaning that the total amount I would finance would be $29,165 for a net of $2,000+ dollars over the retail price of the vehicle.

What’s the lesson here?  Check out the Blue Book value of your car!  It was one thing when you could roll some of the debt you owed on a trade-in into a 0% financing deal, but these employee pricing campaigns are not at 0%.

I’m just waiting to see what the manufacturers start doing in October.

Do you use Mapquest any more?

I don’t.  And I don’t use Virtual Earth either.  It’s amazing to me how quickly I transitioned to using Google Maps (I think I stopped using Mapquest the day I first tried Google Maps) — it’s just that much better.

Some more useful baby ideas

I was thinking over the weekend that the following items would be useful for the new baby:

• Diapers that turn blue on the outside when they are wet on the inside.  This isn’t so much for the number 2s as it is for the number 1s; all the fathers out there know what I mean.
• A clip-in system for the Baby Bjorn (or other “tactical baby retention system,” as I like to call it).  You will wake up your baby every time you have to move her from the car seat to the Baby Bjorn, so why not just have a way that the Bjorn can unclip from the chest harness and clip right into the car seat.
• Self-applying diaper rash cream.  Seems like if they can figure out how to get Neosporin pre-applied to a Band-Aid and anti-microbial protection built into a sock, that companies should certainly be able to build rash protection cream directly into a diaper.

The new Google Desktop

It’s available now right here and it’s much more than just a search client — there is now an informational sidebar that sits on alive in Windows.  The interesting part is that the informational sidebar does a lot of things that Windows can do for you, but it does it more quickly and in an easier way, begging the question of whether or not Windows itself is really all that important; all of the data for the sidebar is really extracted from the web and your files, not the OS.

I could certainly envision this client running on an old machine that only had Firefox, a free version of Linux, and Open Office installed on it.  For that mater, I guess there’s no reason why Google couldn’t just bundle its own OS with those 4 components on it; in fact it would probably run well on older machines.

As with everything Google, there is a Developer SDK available for the sidebar.

Interesting car stories from the front line

Thought I would pass along the address of Mechanics Tale, a series of articles updated every few weeks by a real mechanic.  For those of you that drive Volkswagens or are considering purchasing a Volkswagen, you may want to read this month’s article.

Swanson's Rules

Just received my copy of Bill Swanson’s now-Written Rules of Management free of charge from Raytheon.  See my previous post on how to get yours.

Google Maps and Virtual Earth

You can search Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth simultaneously at this site.

WiFi router password defaults

Besides the evil things you might consider doing with it, this list of default passwords for various manufacturers’ wireless routers is especially useful if you have to do a hard reset and can’t find your documentation.

Seth Godin's new project

The Big Moo authored by all of these people:

Julie Anixter, April Armstrong, Dave Balter, Marc Benioff, Kevin Carroll, Carol Cone, Mark Cuban, Dean Debiase, Lisa Gansky, Malcolm Gladwell, William Godin, Lynn Gordon, Jay Gouliard, Amit Gupta, Marcia Hart, Jackie Huba, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Kelley, Polly LaBarre, Tim Manners, Red Maxwell, Chris Meyer, Jacqueline Novogratz, Tom Peters, Promise Phelon, Dan Pink, Randall Rothenberg, Heath Row, Donna Sturgess, Robyn Waters, Alan Webber, Robin Williams, and Seth Godin.

The question all of these people are trying to answer:

What does it really take to make your organization remarkable?

What would you do to get an iBook for $50?

The Henrico School District in Virginia recently offered 1,000 used iBooks (yes, “used,” as in used and abused by high school students) for sale for $50 each.  In order to facilitate an orderly sale of the machines, the sale was held at Richmond International raceway.  The gates to the sale opened at 7AM to 5,500 people trying to get a cheap iBook and it immediately turned into a crowd crush that was regulated by only 5 police officers.  Check out this coverage and videos on the Richmond NBC affiliate’s site.

Extremely disturbing stuff.

Defeat the DRM on the new DMB CD so that you can use it with iTunes

If you don’t purchase the new Dave Matthews Band CD through iTunes then the official DMB site has these instructions on how to defeat the DRM:

 If you have a Mac computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.

If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the CD to automatically start. If the CD does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer, locate the drive letter for your CD drive and double-click on the LaunchCD.exe file located on your CD.

Once the application has been launched and the End User License Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top menu.

Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC. Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.

Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher. You may also play them in any compatible player that can play secure Windows Media files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp, but it will require that you obtain a license to do so. To obtain this license, from the Welcome Screen of the user interface, click on the link below the album art that says If your music does not play in your preferred player, click here. Follow the instructions to download the alternate license.

Using Windows Media Player only, you can then burn the songs to a CD. Please note that in order to burn the files, you need to upgrade to or already have Windows Media Player 9 or greater.

Once the CD has been burned, place the copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would a normal CD.

One final note that the DMB site makes:

Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above. http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html

Seems to me that the easiest way to get the CD into iTunes on a Windows machine is to just buy the CD from the iTunes Music Store and save yourself all of the steps above.

 

Why do we treat e-mail different than voice?

From this post on Signal vs. Noise:

Why not read an email and then instantly delete it? Why do we save emails? Why do we archive them in folders for safe keeping? We don’t save phone calls. We have a conversation on the phone and then we hang up. If we need to take notes for whatever reason we do, but 99% of phone calls are completely ephemeral. And if we forget something, or we need it again, we just make another call.

Is email really any different? Are we all keeping emails around just because we can? Do we really need to have this stuff on hand so we can go back 14 months from now and dig something up? If we need to dig something up why don’t we just ask the people who we were talking to originally?

I have gigs of PST files full of every e-mail that I have sent and received for the past 5 years; I use X1 to search in between all of the PSTs.  Recently my company installed a new phone system with a unified messaging client that dumps voicemails into Outlook — I just uninstalled it this morning because I’m not using it and it was making me miss messages more than help me realize that I had them.  Furthermore, I realized that I was deleting all of my voicemails from Outlook the same way that I would from my regular phone, but it was taking longer.

My first year of work I was caught in a situation where someone was claiming that I had said something in an e-mail that I did not actually say.  I was able to go back into my saved e-mails, re-forward the original message and prove who was telling the truth, and from that day I have never deleted another e-mail.  I can’t say that I use X1 every day, but I maybe use it 1–2 times per week to search through my e-mail to retrieve information.

I don’t know that I could really start deleting all of my e-mails as soon as I read them; it’s just too ingrained in me to save everything.  The post above does have a valid point and I just wanted to share it.

You can make your own car emblem

Right here.

Hack that elevator

The trick of holding the “Door Close” button while pushing the number of the floor you want to go to in order to put an Otis elevator into express mode came out a while ago in this Engadget post.  I recently has a chance to try it out and it actually worked, so I figured I’d pass the tip along.

What's the real cost of all these employee discount pricing schemes for vehicles?

According to this post on AutoBlog it is over $5 Billion dollars.  Oh, and that $5 Billion is just for the month of July.

All the things you can Google

Google is aggressively indexing tons of personal warez (free software sites) in China.  Using this guide, not that I am advocating it, you can use Google China to find all kinds of warez (found via this digg). 

Technorati sucks today

I keep getting this message:

Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation.

I have been getting this with varying levels of frequency ever since the new site went live, but every search I have done for the last hour has returned the message above.

Baby Stuff

I just became a dad last Friday and have the following observations about baby stuff:

• The Diaper Champ rocks.  Unlike other systems that require you to use proprietary bags, the Diaper Champ will use any kind of bag that you have sitting around.
• Baby feeding cloths should be made out of chamois or synthetic chamois.  I haven’t seen any cloths made out of super-absorbent material; most of them get completely soaked after just one feeding.
• The diapers you put on your baby have to be the ones that work best for him or her.  You will read opinions on various different diaper manufacturers and find that 50% of the people like one particular brand because they work for their kid and 50% of the people hate one particular brand because they don’t work for their kid.  The best way to buy diapers seems to be through Amazon with the free 5 day shipping — just stockpile your initial amount of diapers so that you have enough to make it through 6 days (one day for the order to be processed and 5 days to ship) and you shouldn’t have to go to the store nearly as often.
• Diapers and feminine products are designed to achieve the exact same goal: liquid retention.  So here’s my question: Why don’t you see feminine product technologies integrated into diapers?  Would diapers work better with wings?  Seems like they would.
• No baby clothes are made with high-tech fabrics; perhaps that’s because they would be really expensive.  Wouldn’t it be cool to have some sort of feeding gown made out of GoreTex that would be completely waterproof, yet breathable from the inside?
• Baby soap is cool because, according to the nurse at the hospital, even if you don’t wash it all off, it won’t harm the baby.
• The Fisher Price Nature’s Touch swing works exceptionally well to put the baby to sleep.

We had our baby at SkyRidge in Colorado.  The hospital is only around 18 months old, so everything is basically brand-new.  The delivery rooms are state-of-the-art, large, and include multiple phone lines along with a TV and DVD player. 

As a special part of the experience, I opted for the Amenity Suite as  the recovery room.  For a moderate cost, the Amenity Suites are 25% larger, feature a nicer bed for mom, have a jacuzzi tub and shower in the bathroom, include nice high-end toiletry items for mom, include a bathrobe for mom, have a dining table, have a great view of the Front Range, and include dinner for 2 with a bottle of wine cooked by an executive chef.  The dinner portion of the service was amazing as everything is cooked to order and you can order items that are not included on the regular menu; I actually was able to get the chef to make me venison osso bucco one night, while my wife had steak and lobster.  I believe that the overall service is better in the Amenity Suites, although I have not experienced the service on a normal floor, so I can’t be 100% sure.

What is xMax?

According to xG Technology:

xMax boosts the data rates of all wired and wireless communications.  xMax is not a compression technique, but rather a synergistic mix of two well-established communication approaches that dramatically improves spectrum utilization. 

By combining elements of traditional narrowband carrier systems with key elements found in low-power wideband systems, xMax delivers data rates orders of magnitude higher than other broadband approaches without causing harmful interference to neighboring spectrum users. 

xMax uses xG Flash Signaling^TM to transmit wideband data at power levels up to 100,000 times below FCC regulated power limits and up to 10,000 times below that of ultra wideband (UWB) emissions. Because xMax only requires a narrow slice of dedicated spectrum to coordinate its xG Flash Signal, it is ideally suited for wireless deployments in piecemeal, low-frequency, channel allocations.

Pretty interesting stuff, but I hadn’t every really heard about this company.  What’s interesting is that there’s a lot of information floating around about very high-speed wireless technologies and this is the first time that I had heard of xMax.

Google Maps High-Yield Explosive Detonation Effect

Using Google Maps and overlaid with high-yield explosive over-pressure data based on kiloton yield, this site will show the estimated effects of any explosion in any location you designate.

Jellybeans, Lockouts, and other useful things

From this post on Lifehacker, the Magical Jellybean Kefinder will display and allow you to change your CD keys for Windows and Office.  This is especially useful for Windows Genuine Advantage where, the first time at least, you have to type in your CD key — let me tell you how challenging this was with my Toshiba Tablet PC that I use extensively in tablet mode, which has caused a lot of the information to wear off of the bottom of it.

There’s been an update to the Gmail Drive shell extension.  Apparently there was some kind of funky URL redirection issue that caused my non-updated copy to stop functioning, but now I’m up and happy again.  For the uninitiated, this free program allows you to use your Gmail account as a virtual hard drive.  Free software + free 2 gig e-mail account used as virtual hard drive and accessible from anywhere on the internet = happy user.

All kinds of RSS start pages are available — Start preview from Microsoft and My AOL are 2 new ones, but I’m sticking with Bloglines for now.

Supremely useful Firefox extensions are even more useful when coupled together (via this post on Lifehacker) — add UndoCloseTab (allows you to undo closing a tab) to SessionSaver (allows you save all of your open tabs when you quite Firefox and re-opens them when Firefox is rebooted) and you have a very powerful antidote to the accidental Firefox close when you have 47 tabs open.  I’ve tried both together and they work great together.

 Engadget is reporting on the SpymodeX 900MHz-2.5GHz wireless jammer —this $500 device jams anything within the frequency range previously mentioned.  Want to piss off your local computer guru?  This frequency range will allow you to jam wireless networks — something that no amount of software or hardware troubleshooting can fix (unless he finds and turns off the jammer).

How do you get cold beer in the middle of the desert with no electricity and no cooler?  With the I.C. Can, of course.  Gizmodo reports on the I.C. Can, which is able to self-chill the beverages inside down to 30 degrees Fahrenheit after the cooling reaction takes place.  I’m sure they’ll be expensive, but it’s still a cool idea.

Bill Simmons provides the Idiot’s Guide to the NHL Lockout.  Enough said.

If the cold beer doesn’t strike your fancy, perhaps you could try 4.8% powdered alcohol — according to this article, you just add water and instantly have 1.5 glasses of liquor worth from a packet of powder.  The site that sells the powdered alcohol (among other things) is Subyou, but you’ll need to run a translation engine to get through the German.

PC World tells you how to reinstall Windows without losing all of your data.  I was expecting something a little bit more revolutionary, but it’s useful just the same.

Decode the barcode on your driver’s license here (via this Digg).

Happy Monday!

Mossberg gives the Slingbox a thumbs-up

From this post on Signal vs. Noise, Mossberg has this to say about the Slingbox:

I have been testing the Slingbox at home, in my office and on the road. In my tests, it worked exactly as advertised. At my office, about a dozen miles from home, I watched recorded episodes of “Charlie Rose” and “Desperate Housewives.” At an airport, I watched CNBC live on my laptop via a public Wi-Fi connection. And in a Boston hotel room, about 450 miles from home, I watched a live Washington Nationals baseball game unavailable in Red Sox country.

I’m excited about the Slingbox and I’ve posted about it before.  Why don’t I have one yet?  I’ve just been too busy this summer to screw around with it, but I certainly anticipate having one sometime in the fall.

 

 

When is it ok to unsubscribe

There’s a very timely post on Ensight about how Jeremy Wright is unsubscribing from certain blog feeds.  The reason his post is timely is that I’ve been going through my Bloglines subscriptions and doing the very same thing that he’s being doing.  My test for subscription is simple: if I won’t read the posts on a blog after I’ve been completely away from the computer for 2 days or more (i.e., if I just click the category and scroll right past the posts on a particular blog), then I drop the subscription.  Here’s the criteria from Jeremy:

If you don’t actually find value here, feel free to unsubscribe. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended.

Blogging’s about relationships, about value, about authenticity and about authority.

If we can’t be honest and only read the blogs where we find value (personal value, professional value or informational value), there’s a real problem.

Just because someone unsubscribes does not mean that they do not like you; just because I unsubscribe does not mean that I won’t ever read your blog; just because you unsubscribe from my blog does not mean that I have you.  Blogging has become more mature.  As Jeremy points out, many of his subscriptions were to people that reiterated information, but he has risen to a level or found different sources that make him feel like reading other reiterated information blogs are slow.  I reiterate a lot of information in my blog, so I would not be surprised if there are people that will eventually rise to the level where they feel I am slower than information they already know — that’s ok, it’s the nature of the blogosphere.

What does everything above mean?  It means that to retain readers, you need to attract people that come to you as a source for information that you might be reiterating; it means that we as authors need to keep our original content fresh and interesting enough to keep current readers engaged.

If you want to more about Windows Vista . . .

Check out this slideshow on EWeek.  Tons of screenshots and reviews on Win-Vista.

No big surprise here . . .

. . . Windows Genuine Advantage has been cracked according this digg, which links through to this post on Boing Boing and was originally sourced from this article on The Inquirer.  Here’s the basic way to get around it (the Java code below bypasses the key check):

Before pressing 'Custom' or 'Express' buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter:

javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all')

 

Panasonic SV-AV100

Just got a smoking deal on this camera at Circuit City — open box price of $350 with a $100 mail-in rebate for a net price of $250.  Many people do not like the AV100 as compared with MiniDV because of the straight digital recording, and I would tend to agree, but I’m not trying to produce motion pictures, rather I’m trying to capture small movies with a camera that has an extremely small form factor (there’s no MiniDV camera out there that can touch the AV100 and the JVC Everio at $1000 was not an option).

One of the main quirks with the AV100 is that out of the box it will only allow MPEG2 recording on Panasonic-branded SD cards.  Luckily, there is a fix for this.  If you download this firmware update, you will be able to use all brands of SD cards that meet the speed requirements for MPEG2 recording.  Here’s how I got the firmware to work:

• Format the SD card in the camera.  My camera did not come with a Panasonic SD card, so I simply formatted a SanDisk 512MB card.
• Attach the camera to a PC with the USB cable.  Windows was able to find all of the drivers for the camera online through Windows Update.
• Open the camera through My Computer and delete all of the folders.
• Drag the firmware upgrade into the camera.
• Eject the camera and turn it off.
• Turn the camera on and it should prompt for whether or not you want to do the firmware update.  Select “Yes.” 
• Once the firmware update is done, the camera will ask you to power cycle.  When the camera reboots, it will tell you that the firmware update has already been applied and will ask if you want to format the SD card; select “Yes” and you will be ready to go.

There are more instructions on how to load the firmware on the link above.  Some people in the forum did not have quite as easy a time as I did, so a lot of this depends on your system and configuration.  Note that you will not really be able to do this on a Mac.

The other quirk in this camera is that there are no Mac drivers to address the camera directly through USB.  This is a small problem and easily overcome by getting a USB card reader that is Mac-compatible.  One small note that applies to both Mac and Windows is that the videos files on the card are stored as .MOD and really need to be .MPG to allow editing.  This program does the job of renaming on a Mac and this program will do it for Windows.  Other users have reported the MPEG Streamclip is a much better program on the Mac, but have yet to have a chance to try it.

I’ll continue to post my experiences with this camera and am happy to help try to answer any questions from all of you.

Forbes BOW

Here is the page for the Forbes Best of the Web blogs.

New inbound links

 tiny world review

 Simplicity Blog

 Clarke Ching's I Think Not, Baby Puppy 

Special K’s Trading Diary

Thanks for linking to me.

Motorola Q

The web is buzzing with the introduction of the Motorola Q (not available until Q1 of 2006).  Probably the best post to get a true view of the size of the device is this post on Engadget that shows the Q next to a Treo 650, a Blackberry, and a Blackberry 7100 series.

Konfabulator now is Yahoo! Widgets

Apparently Yahoo! bought Konfabulator and has already re-launched the products as Yahoo! Widgets.  Not surprisingly, many of the default installation widgets are Yahoo! Search, Weather, Finance, and Picture Frame.  Now to download the software, you need to sign up for a Yahoo! ID (once again, not surprising), but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of having to pay for the product — in fact if you go to the old Konfabulator site, this is confirmed (there’s a nice little comic strip on the site as well).

Google Maps competition

MSN Virtual Earth is live.  The little zoom effect is pretty cool, but I don’t see the Google Maps-like pointer that shows the exact address that I punched in so that I can get to or from directions immediately.  Also, the service does not seem to be able to find my work address — it’s mapping somewhere that’s off by about 10 miles.  I’ll stick with Google Maps for now.

Good reads from Seth's blog

An interesting story about Seth’s experience at a Starbuck’s.  Think about this quote from Tom Peters: “The Customer Comes Second.  That is — and this, dear Watson, is elementary — if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.”

A quick story about car seats.  If you think that car seats are as effective as seatbelts for children over 2, you should probably read this article on Freakonomics (actually, you should probably read the whole book, but this is a good start).  From Seth’s post:

It goes to stories. It feels like you're doing something smart and thoughtful and caring for your child. The effort gives the parent peace of mind and joy. The government gets to pass a law that seems cheap and caring. Everyone conspires to do the wasteful thing because of the story it allows us to tell ourselves.

Is good enough really good enough?  Seth doesn’t necessarily think so and neither does the Tom Peters Company in the UK.  From Seth’s post:

1. Humans tend to work on a problem until they get a good enough solution, instead of a solution that's right.
2. The marketplace often rewards solutions that are cheaper and good enough, instead of investing in the solution that promises to lead to the right answer.

The Power of 4.  From the post:

"...If merely four people of out of a hundred can make gridlock go away by choosing not to use their car, imagine the other changes that can be wrought just by four of us out of a hundred. Take a hundred musicians in a  depressed port city in Northern England, choose John, Paul, George and Ringo and you have "Hey Jude."

Seth wonders why we can’t treat people like they’re smart.  The common seduction seems to be to reduce everything to the dumbest denominator to ensure that “everyone” can understand.  Hey, I’m smart; stop treating me like I’m dumb (or asleep, depending on the semantics you choose).

The new big is really small.  This post describes exactly why small is the new big:

•  Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.
• Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
• Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

It's not Longhorn any more

It’s Windows Vista.  Read here.

What is Windows One Care?

Well, it seems to be an integrated virus, spyware, and update service.  Currently the beta is live and they are accepting applicants for the beta test.  Ok maybe there’s a little more to it, from the overview page:

• Antivirus, two-way firewall, and antispyware help protect your computer from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, hackers, spyware threats, and other unwanted software.
• A monthly tune-up takes care of routine maintenance to help improve your computer’s performance.
• Full and incremental CD and DVD backups make it easy to help protect your important data from loss or corruption from things such as accidental deletion or viruses.

Unsupported MS free program for mounting ISO

Found out about this on tech-recipes when looking for something to mount an ISO file with.  The program can be found here, and while it’s available from Microsoft's download site, the Read Me clearly states that it is unsupported by Microsoft’s Product Support.  Who cares?  The thing works and that’s good enough for me.

If you use a Nextel Blackberry 7520

You can get a free spellcheck download.  Download over-the-air by pointing your browser to:  dynoplex.com/nextel_spellcheck.  I just downloaded it and it works great (can’t beat the price).

Firefox 1.0.6 is now available

Even if the little red arrow isn’t showing up in your browser, you can download the update here.

Harry Potter

I just finished the new Harry Potter book last night and it’s really good.  However, I will have to admit that I probably should have gone back and read the previous book because I definitely did not remember some of the stuff.

For those that have not read the book, I will not ruin anything, but I will say that it is quite obvious that Rowland has teed herself up to write at least 5 more books.

Feedburner Adsense for feeds

I have also added AdSense for Feeds to my FeedBurner RSS feed.  Here are the quick directions for this:

• Log into your FeedBurner account.
• Select the Burned Feed that you want to add AdSense for Feeds to by clicking “Edit”.
• Scroll down to “Commerce Services”.
• Check the box next to “Google AdSense”.
• Log into Google AdSense.
• Click the “AdSense for Content” tab.
• Under “Ad Type” check the radio box next to “AdSense for feeds unit”.
• Scroll down to the AdSense Code box and look at the last line of code.
• You are searching for the number preceded by “pub-”.
• Copy the number out of AdSense and paste it into the “Your AdSense Client Identifier” box in FeedBurner.
• Input your “Channel” from AdSense if applicable.
• Scroll to the bottom of the FeedBurner page and click “Save Feed Settings”.

Figured it out -- Adsense for Feeds on Blogger

For anyone that’s trying to add Google AdSense for Feeds to their Blogger site:

• Log into Blogger.com.
• At your Dashboard, select the blog to which you are trying to add the AdSense for Feeds.
• Click the “Settings” tab.
• Click the “Site Feed” sub-tab.
• Copy the AdSense for Feeds code out of your Google AdSense site (note that you must be signed up for AdSense and have received activation of AdSense for Feeds in order to access this code).
• Paste the AdSense for Feeds code into the “Article Footer” box.
• Click “Save Settings.”
• Click “Re-Publish Index” once it says your settings have been saved.
• Do a test post and view it through a feedreader like Bloglines to ensure that everything worked correctly.

Note that unless you paste the AdSense for Feeds code into your Blogger template, the ads will not be visible on the HTML version of your site.

Google RSS advertising

So the first thing I noticed is that the Google ads are way too long for the way my sheet is set up — I’ll have to play around with my sheet or see if I can configure the size of the ads for the page.  The second thing I noticed is that the ads are not getting picked up in the ATOM feed — not sure what to do about this; does anyone have any suggestions?

What kind of car do you drive?

You may want to take a look at the list of the most-stolen cars of 2004.  Looks like there’s an awful lot of Acuras on the list.

OpenBC

I’ve gotten a lot of invitations from people that I am linked to with LinkedIn to join OpenBC.  OpenBC seems to be a more global version of LinkedIn with many of the same services.  Anyone using this and liking it better than LinkedIn?  Should I be on both of these services?

Couple of things with iTunes

This digg describes how a company is trying to distribute PDFs through iTunes — the best part is that it is working, I tried it myself.  Now it would be really cool if Apple put some of the Spotlight features into iTunes so that you could search inside PDFs from within iTunes (Windows or Mac).

This digg describes how you can use a program called Handbrake to extract DVDs and organize them in iTunes.  Handbrake only work on Mac, but my guess would be that you could find a Windows program that does the same thing and organize your video files in iTunes for Windows.

Experimenting with Google feed ads

I received approval from Google a few months ago to participate in their advertising for feeds program, but have just gotten around to activating and playing around with it.  You’ll probably see ads show up starting with this post if you read my blog via a feedreader.  Please leave comments with your thoughts on this service.

Google Moon

Google now provides locations of lunar landings on Google Moon.  Hint: zoom all the way in.

Portable Firefox 1.0.5

Portable Firefox 1.0.5 had been released here.  What is portable Firefox?  It is a version of Firefox optimized to run on a USB keychain drive.  Before you get too excited, bear in mind that a 1.0.6 upgrade of Firefox is just around the corner because the 1.0.5 screwed up something in the API and broke a bunch of 3rd party programs.

Interesting comments on Google

Yes, it’s more than 1 year old, but there is a fascinating post on the Topix.net Weblog about Google.  From the post:

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

RSS screensaver

I am usually suspicious of free screensaver downloads as they normally contain adware.  However, the RSS Screensaver from NuParadigm doesn’t seem to contain an adware and supports multiple RSS (Atom, RDF, and RSS to be exact) that float over a picture background.  The Microsoft .NET framework is required to run the screensaver.

Free copy of Bill Swanson's rules courtesy of Raytheon

Click right here and they’ll mail it to you in 7–10 days.

Thanks to Ramon Martinez for pointing this out.

I would like a pizza with a Cingular Blackberry 7100g

And you can have it!  According to this post on BBHub, Papa John’s is giving away a free Blackberry 7100g with any online pizza order.  Here’s the fine print from the post:

Of course you'll have to commit to a two-year voice and data service agreement at $74.98 a month. The Cingular Wireless contract consists of an email data plan at $34.99 a month plus a $39.99 a month voice plan.

The voice plan offers 450 anytime minutes, plus 5000 night and weekend minutes and mobile to mobile unlimited calling.

You pay $150 up front and you'll get  a $150.00 Mail-In Rebate when your Blackberry 7100g arrives.

Full details from the Papa John’s site here and note that you have to order your base pizza, a Papa John’s side item, and 2 20oz beverages (Coke product, of course) to get the offer; still cheaper than the $349 bas price of the 7100.

Live8 Video Downloads

Straight from this Digg, you can find them here.

Wolfgang Puck self-heating can dissected

See the dissection complete with pictures right here.

Yahoo RSS search

It’s live right here (at least the test version is).  My favorite part?  The language below the search box:

This Yahoo! Search service finds lorem ipsum doler itum foo bar blah blah blah mktg spiel.

Front Pages

You can view the front pages of newspapers from 47 countries on this site — it’s pretty interesting to see how many papers run the same headlines on global events.

Tinyapps

Check out this site of small applications — think putting stuff onto your thumbdrive.  Almost all the programs are freeware.

56 Ideas/Suggestions for presentation excellence

From Tom Peters himself — find the presentation (about presenting) right here.

Do you have a waiting room?

If you do, do you provide wireless internet access?  Please tell me that you are because the idea is out there and the cost is minimal if you are already paying for internet access to your office.  Think about doing this today — you are already behind the curve.

Tablet PC OS memory leak fixed

Now I can finally get rid of that .bat file that I had to use to correct this problem throughout the day.  Download the patch right here.  Note that the download requires a Windows Genuine Authentication before it will allow you to get the .exe file.

Bowflex Revolution

The Bowflex Revolution is a radically designed home gym from the people you expect to see selling radically designed home gyms.  The machine uses the same kind of technology that is used by astronauts to work out in the space station.  The interesting thing about this Bowflex is that it seems configurable into a full upper body workout machine that can easily convert into a rowing machine.

The Revolution is available for pre-order now and should be available by the holidays at a cost of $2,399.  Get ready for the Treadclimber and Bowflex Extreme ads and infomercials to be replaced with the Revolution.

Tollhouse s'more

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this, but yesterday I came up with a pretty tasty desert treat.  Here are the simple instructions:

• Cook some chocolate chip cookies; it’s better if they are softer.
• Toast marshmallows to desired temperature.
• Put cooked marshmallow on top of cooled cookie.
• Eat and enjoy.

The nice part is that there’s not nearly as much mess involved as normal s’mores and the cookie is not nearly as prone to breaking as a graham cracker.