Is USB memory a new marketing medium?

Audi UK seems to think so according to this post on Marketing VOX News.  Apparently the USB memory devices come pre-loaded with Audi ads.  Remember when you used to be able to burn additional content on AOL CDs before they actually started closing the sessions or how you would collect all the AOL 3.5" disks you could find and cover the copy-protect tab with scotch tape so that you didn't have to buy floppies?  The question is really whether or not someone will opt into viewing your ad in exchange for the stick.  I wonder if you could design the ad so that it erased all the data on the stick after it was done running.

Great fiction book just in time for the Holidays

If you are looking for a great paperback to give to someone that enjoys reading or simply looking for a book to read during the holidays, I highly reccommend The Footprints of God by Greg Iles.  Although there is some religion involved, this is not a religious book, simply a fast-paced novel.  From Amazon:

"My name is David Tennant, M.D. I'm professor of ethics at the University of Virginia Medical School, and if you're watching this tape, I'm dead." Tennant works for Project Trinity, a secret government organization attempting to build a quantum-level supercomputer. Using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques, Tennant and five other top scientists have supplied Trinity, the experimental computer, with molecular copies of themselves as models for a neurological operating system. As Trinity comes to life, the men who control the experiment begin to split into competing factions, each determined to use the computer for his own ends. When Tennant tries to shut the project down because of ethical considerations, he is marked for death by the beautiful but physically and psychologically scarred Geli Bauer, head of security.

If you are a fan of Dan Brown, you will like this book.

Happy Reading!

Restaurant ideas for the holidays

They are all over the country, but here are some of my top picks if you are looking for fine dining in any of the following cities:

Los Angeles

• Chinois on Main (Santa Monica) -- this is the original although there is one in Vegas.  Asian and French fusion done in a marvelous way.  I used to eat there 1-4 times per month when I lived in Venice and the food was consistently elegant.  My favorite dishes are the Rock Shrimp and Calamari Salad (this is usually a special, it's not on the menu) and the Szechuan Beef.  Pick of the wine list is the 1997 Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour cabernet if you are lucky enough to be there when I have not consumed their entire stock.  I go to Chinois every time I am in LA (even if it's only for a day) and it is my number one pick of this entire list.
• Mastro's Steakhouse (Beverly Hills) -- In my opinion, it's the best steak in Los Angeles.  Make sure that you ask for a table upstairs when you make reservations and arrive early so you can spend some time at the bar before they seat you.  The wine list is excellent and there's not a bad cut of meat in the place.  If you are looking for my recommendation, get a filet medium rare and be sure to ask for the sauteed blue cheese on the side (I don't think the sauteed blue cheese is on the menu, but it's the only steakhouse I've found that makes it).

Denver

• Del Frisco's (Greenwood Village) -- The best steak in Denver, hands-down.  Although it's located 15-20 minutes South of downtown Denver, the drive is certainly worth it.  Be sure to start out with the shrimp simpler platter, they can customize the number of shrimp to the number in your party so that each person gets at least 1 shrimp with each of the 3 flavors.  Get the filet with the peppercorn sauce on the side and the chateau potatoes are excellent.  I'm not a bid spinach fan, but the creamed spinach here is about the only spinach that I will eat.  The wine list is spectacular.
• The Fort (Morrison) -- Located up in the foothills, The Fort serves some of the best wild game in the state.  The views are spectacular, there's a fire pit to sit around and enjoy after-dinner drinks, and the menu allows you to be adventurous.  I highly reccommend the elk steak and, of course, if you have never had them before, the meu does feature Rocky Mountain Oysters.
• Sweet Basil (Vail) -- It is definitely worth the drive; it is the first-class menu at a first class resort.  One of the best wine menus in the state and a consistently excellent menu.  I like both the rack of lamb and the double-cut pork chop.

Nassau, Bahamas

• Graycliff Restaurant (Nassau) -- A $20 million wine cellar to start off with.  Amazing food, dry-aged beef, hand-rolled cigars on the premises.  It's hard to find anything specific to comment on because everything is so good.  I can tell you that the Caesar dressing is famous (find the recipe here).  If you have the means and the credit limit, there is a private table located in the center of the wine cellar and if you are really lucky, you may be able to convince the manager to take you on a tour of the cellars and show you the oldest registered bottle of wine in the world.

Texas

• Bob's Steak and Chop House (Dallas) -- In a place where steak is a way of life, it's hard to find the best, but Bob's is definitely one of the best.  Call early for reservations as the place is packed almost every night.  All of the meat is simply outstanding.

Bermuda

• The Plantation Club (Hamilton Parrish) -- Bring your blue blazer and tie, but you can get away with wearing your linen shorts and knee socks.  The menu is spectacular, the wine list is great, and the fresh seafood is incredible.

I'll add more to the list over time and I would be happy to provide my recommendations for any specific cities or places if you want to e-mail me or leave a comment; I haven't been everywhere, but I'm happy to help if I know anything.

Happy holiday eating!

Icemaker line

If you have don't have a water line for the icemaker in your fridge, you can easily install one yourself in most cases.  It took me about 10 minutes today to install a water line for my fridge using a self-piercing kit from Home Depot (although you can get it at most any hardware store) that cost about $15 and a 6 foot water line.

Here's the process:

• Locate an existing cold water pipe adjacent to where you want the icemaker line to be.  I located a line in the basement about 5 feet away from where I needed the icemaker line to be.
• Drill a hole through the floor to run your line.  This assumes that you are coming through the floor to feed your icemaker.
• Shut off the cold water at the main inside your house.
• Position the self-piercing saddle kit on the water line where you want it.
• Make sure that the icemaker valve is off.
• Tighten the bolts on the saddle so that the tip pierces through the copper pipe, but does not exit the other side of the pipe.
• Turn the icemaker valve on.  Although the water is still off, there will be enough water left in the pipe for water to drip out of the valve if you have effectively pierced the pipe.
• Feed the flexible copper that comes with the self-piercing kit through the hole in your floor down and around to where you have installed the self-piercing valve.  Note that if you are installing this in a basement that you want to finish at some point, you may want to drill holes thorough the studs and feed the line through those holes.
• Put the compression fitting on the end of the flexible copper and tighten the fighting to the self-piercing valve.
• Get a bucket on the fridge side of the flexible copper and slowly turn on the cold water at the main.  Once the cold water is fully pressurized into the house, inspect the self-piercing saddle for leaks.  If there are no leaks, turn on the self-piercing valve and let the water run into the bucket for a couple of minutes to clear any sediment and inspect the self-piercing saddle for leaks.
• Assuming there are no leaks, turn the self-piercing valve off.
• In my case I ran the flexible copper against the wall in back of the fridge and cut the copper close to the floor.  I then put the compression fitting on the end of the copper and installed a male-to-male fitting between the compression fitting on the copper and the compression fitting on a piece of braided PVC water supply line.  You can also choose to install the copper line directly into the back of the fridge, but you do have to worry about bends in the copper when you push the fridge back into place.  For an extra $7, the braided PVC line is well worth the investment.
• My fridge has an integral filter that filters both water and water used for ice.  I turned the ice machine off before turning the water back on at the self-piercing valve.  To clear any sediment out of the water and particulate out of the filter, I poured out about 5 48oz cups of water.  Then I turned on the icemaker and threw out the first batch of ice it made just to be sure that I was using the purest water possible for ice.

It sounds a little more complicated than it is and I certainly had the benefit of doing this project in an unfinished basement.  However, professional plummer can charge $100-$200 or more for this job, so it's worth investigating yourself before you bring someone else in to do it.

Best of luck.

O'gio is running some specials

Makers of some of my favorite bags, O'Gio, is running some holiday promotional pricing on a lot of their products.  It seems that you can only get these promotional prices through whomever you might use to do your embroidery or silk-screening, but the prices are certainly worth asking about.  Prices are valid for orders placed through December 31.

Do you like your handwriting?

I mean really like your handwriting?  If so, you can use Fontifier to scan in your handwriting and create a font.  It costs $9 to create your font and you can preview it before you download and buy it.

Link found on this post at Drink This.

Barbour jacket

If you live in cold weather or travel a lot to cold weather, I would highly reccommend the Barbour Quilted Jacket with moleskin trim (I've only be able to find it in the United States at Orvis, but if you know another place that I can get them, I would be happy to post the store).  The jacket is well insulated for cold weather -- I've been wearing today in Colorado where it's been snowing and in the 20s with a thin sweater underneath and it has kept me plenty warm.  The pockets are well insulated and actually keep you hands warm.  Unlike other quilted barn coats, this coat has both a zipper and snaps, so it is very effective at keeping the wind out.  There is a nice internal zip pocket for anything that you might be worried about falling out and the external pockets zip as well.  As it says in the name of the coat, the collar is moleskin and is very comfortable against the neck.  The coat is cut to fall well below the waist and has snaps on the back that allow you to open up the bottom of the coat if you need to fit it around items you may have on your belt.

Although I have not yet had to wash it, the jacket can be cleaned in a normal washing machine and does not really have any special care instructions.  In the picture the jacket looks somewhat bulky, but it is actually well tailored in the shoulders and sleeves and does not feel bulky at all.

The jacket seems to work as well with jeans and a sweater as it does with dress pants and a button-up shirt.  Though I have not had a chance to wear the jacket in warmer weather, I think that the jacket would be fine with a long-sleeved t-shirt up to 40 or 50 degrees.

I certainly wouldn't reccommend the jacket as something that you would pack in a carry-on as a just-in-case-it-snows jacket, but it is not so heavy that you couldn't carry it to cold weather on a one to three day trip.

New version of Trillian

Both basic and pro versions of Trillian have been upgraded to 3.0.  Download here.

Looks like lots of cool upgrades.  The Pro version is still the only way to connect to use the video side of things on most IM platforms, but it's only $25 for the Pro product, so it is well worth it if you use IM with any frequency.

Wiki + Podcast = WikiCast

Found the WikiCast over at this post on Scoble.  The WikiCast is pretty much exactly as it sounds:

Call a number, leave a message, the audio is added to the Wiki, and the Wiki audio messages are available for Podcast.

Give it a try.

How do creative people market themselves?

Through creativity!  Check out this video for Marc and Tom (found via this post on Johnnie Moore's Weblog).

Being virally marketed by bloggers probably doesn't hurt either.

Got a piece of plywood?

If so, you can follow these instructions (found via this post on Boing Boing) to make a chair and desk. 

Dominos

Here's something I was thinking about yesterday:

I like my iPod, but I really wish that I could have one convergence device that did everything: phone, Internet, e-mail, audio, video.  Does this turn the cellphone companies into all-mighty gods?  Maybe.  Will this make cellphones cost $1,000 or more?  Probably, but look at what the cost of a cell phone, Blackberry, iPod, and personal video player would cost you.  Does this turn hardware manufacturers into software companies?  Again, probably, but if you have been focused on design (i.e., Apple), the cellphone manufacturers would want you to help them design the best looking and most functional device so that they can tell consumers you were involved.

I have a collection of DVDs at home.  I refuse to invest in more DVDs.  Why?  Because I think that for me as an early adopter, DVDs are a dead medium already.  In the next 12-18 months, I expect to be able to on-demand a lot of the stuff that I want to watch.  As long as I can get access to movies I want to watch when I want to watch them, I don't need to take up the space in my house with DVDs.

The stuff that I can't get on-demand initially I will probably be recording on some sort of device in the next 12-18 months.  I certainly expect that all the content I record will be recorded to a device that will allow me to take it with me on my convergence portable device.  One of the biggest factors of home digital recording is storage.

I start to question whether or not I even need to own storage.  Do I?  No.  I have a high-speed connection, which, in the next 12-18 months, should only get faster.  Why should I have to purchase hard drives and redundant systems to sit at my house and draw electricity and worry about failures?  I would much rather spend a sliding scale of dollars on storage that was based in some bomb-proof bunker somewhere that was instantly backed up, had UPS systems, etc.  $1 per month per gig of storage I use?  Seems like a hell of a deal for the provider, I mean Gmail taught us that gigs of storage just don't cost that much.  Of course, if all my storage were offsite, then I could access it over the web whenever I wanted, including with my convergence device.  And I could watch my recorded content and movies on the media player built into my convergence device and listen to my audio on my convergence device -- basically be providing my own on-demand service.

So if I don't need storage for audio and movies and pictures and files, why exactly do I need an expensive computer?  If the broadband pipe is fast enough for me to transfer data to and from my offsite storage, it's probably fast enough for me to run on-demand applications.  Think about how the application business works right now: you buy MS Office and you use Outlook (insert whichever applications that you use the most in place of "Outlook") 80-90% of the time and the other applications much less (for many of you that have purchased Office 2003 Professional: how much do you really use Access?).  One-two year later, Microsoft releases an updated Office suite and you spend a big chunk of money to upgrade again; throughout the 1-2 year gap between major releases, you are responsible for keeping on top of the upgrades to the Office suite.  What if I could just pay per use for Office applications?  At home I use web-interface e-mail over the Firefox browser, so I don't need Outlook and I hardly use many of the other applications.  If I didn't need all of the RAM and hard disk space to store all of the applications on my machine, imagine how cheap my computer would be.  For scratch memory on my computer, I would use some sort of flash card array -- you can get 5GB SD cards even now, so imagine how much they will hold in the next 12-18 months.  If I could get the majority of what I needed on a flash card, then do I really need a dedicated monitor?  maybe I would just plug my thin client PC into my plasma TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

The next big question for my thin PC is the operating system.  If all of my on-demand application could be run in a web-interface, then maybe I could just use Firefox or Linux as my OS and run Open Office applications on demand instead of paying for the name-brand Microsoft stuff.  If this were the case, maybe my TV would just come with an open-source OS built into it and a slot for my flashcard memory and I could just get rid of my thin client PC.  My TV would then ship with a remote and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and I would be covered.  Even better would be if the TV had a cable modem built into so that I didn't need a cable modem at all (TV and data over the same cord) and that the TV also had a WiFi access point and Bluetooth built in so that I could sink my convergence device, access the internet with my convergence device not having to use GPRS or pay-data, and let my friends with their old, clunky laptops access the Internet if they came over.

So why is the post called "Dominos?"  Well, imagine each paragraph as a domino.  As each paragraph ends, it falls over onto the next until there are no paragraph dominos left.  Where does the end of the current systems lie?  Hard to tell.  Am I right about how all this will play out?  Maybe, maybe not, but it will be exciting to find out.

Get podcasts on your Windows smartphone

Here's the instruction manual from Engadget.  It's really not that hard.

Treo 650 + WiFi

Got a Treo 650?  Hoping for WiFi?  This is your lucky day!  This post on Engadget links through to a hack to make a SD WiFi card work in the Treo 650.  For further usability, you can find a hack that allows you to tether to your Sprint Treo 650 via Bluetooth (wireless modem function) at TreoCentral.

Hey, if you are paying between $400 and $600 for a phone, you might as well be able to maximize its functionality.

Is the music industry getting it?

It's hard to tell, but there seems to be a ray of hope based on this post at Seth Godin's blog.  I would certainly reccommend reading the whole thing (yes, it is lengthy, and, yes, it might offend some of your virgin eyes with the language).

Here's a teaser, read the rest at Seth's blog:

It's all about permission marketing. Getting people to ALLOW you to sell to them. All the old wave marketing. On TV. It no longer works. Because of CLUTTER! Hell, I can see the same thing at MY HOUSE! I'm so INUNDATED with music that I listen to almost none of it. I need a REASON to listen. And it's not traditional. Hell, even AIRPLAY doesn't impress me. I've got to KNOW the person involved. Or else somebody NOT involved has to tell me it's happening. And these people I trust. The relationship isn't built in a day. And it's based on honesty. Ongoing veracity. And you overhype me once, break my trust once, and you're done.

What should you have known in 3rd grade?

Seth Godin starts off a list of 1,000 teachable things that every 3rd-grader should know.  Some highlights include:

• How to type.
• How to speak in front of a group.
• How to write clear prose that other people actually want to read.
• The 15,000 most common English words.
• Conversational Spanish.
• How to handle big changes, with grace.
• How to run a small business.
• How to sell.

How different is the list from a list that your parents would have made?  Even more important: how different of a list is this from what a 16-year old would make?

Somebody has to have started a Wiki for this -- let me know where it is and I'll link to it for you.

Forbes blog poll

Go and vote on the Forbes blog poll that asks; "What's Your Involvement With Blogs?"  You can pick between the following choices:

• Have my own and update it daily
• Check somebody else's every day
• Have seen one, but don't read regularly
• Have never seen one, but have heard of them
• What's a blog?

I tend to agree with Steve Rubel over on this post at MicroPersuasion that the winner is going to be the first choice because all of us bloggers are going to post about it and the majority of voters are going to be blog authors with a close second being blog readers -- just trying to do my part, Steve.

Free Sherlock Holmes radio broadcast MP3s

Come and get 'em (link via this post on Boing Boing).

The Apple-Motorola cellphone deal is official

Read more at this post on Engadget.  I'd just really like it if there was a way to put a iTunes DRM-compatible player on my Windows smartphone.  Of course that would destroy the idea of Apple hardware, but maybe if it was a mini-SD card that had some sort of FairPlay decoder built into it so that I was still spending on hardware . . .

Office 2003 Tablet Update

I didn't see this the last time I checked for Office updates, but thetabletpcweblog has a post that links to this downloadable update for Office 2003 Tablet users that apparently improves ink recognition in all of the Office suite.