The United States Postal Service is a 'sunny day friend'. There for you when days are bright and trouble is out of sight, but when something goes wrong they want none of it. They have managed to lose a package with a one of a kind item bound to a customer between New York City and Morristown NJ (some 35 miles) with tracking/delivery confirmation paid for. It's now been 15 days since I sent the package, that was shown as delivered on day later and then the following day shown as "Undeliverable return to sender" on the USPS tracking website.

15 days on now, several phone calls to an automated serviced in search of a human, two calls to the morristown nj post office, 2 face to face conversations with postal employees at two different post offices later all anyone has told me is that the other guy has he package and that I should contact them. Two of the three postal employees I have spoken with have taken my phone number with the promise to call me before the day was out, but my phone has not rung, except for my intrepid customer who went to the Morristown NJ post office at which the tracking showed the package to be where he was told it was not there it had been sent back to me in New York.

Have I mentioned that was 12+ days ago. At my local post office where the return address pointed I was told that the parcel was likely at a returned mail facility and that parcel post gets slower handling than other mail there - odd the package I sent was 2 day priority. Everyone is quick to agree that because there is tracking on the package that it should be scanned every time it moves, but seems to find no contradiction in the idea that the package is not where it's tracking says it is but somewhere else. Every postal employee has passed the buck and refused to own the problem.

The punch line of this story is, the US Post Office owns the domain LostInTheMail.com. I found this out because I wondered if there was any sort of watch dog site that I could go to and list my tracking number as one that was lost. Some aggregator of dissatisfaction where I could lend my story to what must be thousands of others just like me. Obviously someone needed to build - LostInTheMail.com. Well a quick flick of the browser and there I was, nothing. A quick hop over to godaddy.com turns up it's already owned by the US Postal Service.

Love Yelp. Love the promise of augmented reality. Unfortunately it only works in the 3GS. Thanks to Ben Parr and the folks at Mashable for this.

EASTER EGG: Yelp Is the iPhone’s First Augmented Reality App Yelp’s new iPhone app is now the first iPhone App with Augmented Reality. It takes Yelp information and overlays it into the real-world. It’s actually a secret easter egg (discovered by Robert Scoble), which may be why Apple didn’t reject Yelp’s augmented reality app. We have screenshots and a demo video to show you what this is all about.

Been getting more spam than usual lately that slips through, but this one caught my eye:

Women will bake you pies because of your mega size. The whole galaxy will be yours with the size like that.

I do like pie.

Isn't that how the advice goes to musicians. Regardless of how obscure or little known your band is, when justifying your popularity - or just talking smack, I think the line is supposed to be "We're big in Japan". Actually, ShopSavvy for iPhone and Android is made by a shop called "Big in Japan". I have no association, but I do like ShopSavvy for the Android. I have yet to try it on the iPhone.

This isn't what this post is about. Apparently, I'm actually big in China - and by big I mean, i got one visit. But it was a fairly interesting visit. Apparently Amazon MP3 Clips widget". Yeah, weird. Not a great claim to fame, but I'll take it.

So I want to document here and for all humanity. Tonight, after months of looking for a clear and simple unsubscribe link in the bottom of the useless and unwanted email I get from classmates.com, I signed on to their cursed site (hate them slightly less than evite.com) and unsubscribed from everything. What I realize now I should have done is munged my information and email to be something like youmissedthesocial@networkboatyoufools.com. Then curious I wanted to see what their traffic was like. So I bopped over to Google Ad Planner and looked them up.

Classmates.com Demographic Data on Google Ad Planner

So then I got to thinking 17M Uniques Worldwide (Nearly all of which are US) doesn't suck, but I wonder how it compares to say another their's to lose early player in the social network space, Friendster.com
Friendster.com Demographic Data on Google Ad Planner

So I guess there is some consolation for the craptastic classmates.com - they are handily beating friendster.com in the US. Now, why all the hating on classmates.com?

• They violated the I-give-you-my-email social contract of the web by not having an easy unsubscribe link in their email
• They are not remotely relevant to me, their demographic sweet spot appears to be women just shy of my mother's age who started but did not finish college
• With the information I've given them they should be able to tailor a marketing message that remotely piques my interest?
• I am never going to become a gold member! - stop asking

Finally, because it wouldn't be laughable without including the email here it is below. Note, the "One Sweet Day" reference... To my point above: Are they really asking me if I blared "One Sweet Day" in the school parking lot? The song that came out a couple years after I graduated High School sung by Mariah Carey featuring Boyz II Men. At any rate, I'll be sure and let you know when the emails show up again. I don't believe for a minute that my email-confirmed-your-settings-are-saved interaction will stick.

Surfing the NY Times on a ridiculously gorgeous July 5th - don't worry I'm on my way out. There is an interesting piece about how Twitter has turned up as something useful. Turns out the savvy brands are watching their names on Twitter. Have a look for yourself:

PRACTICAL TRAVEL

Twitter Comes to the Rescue

By MICHELLE HIGGINS, Published: July 5, 2009
From bad airplane seats to poor room service, customers are getting surprisingly fast responses to their tweets.

IE launches today - I hadn't realized.  MS hasn't made a browser I cared about beyond cross browser testing for a few years now.  But after reading what Walter S. Mossberg of the WSJ has to say, I will be checking it out.

Bottom Line
Internet Explorer 8 is a well-done advance on an important product used by most people to surf the Web. If it were faster, I would say it was the best browser currently available for Windows. But even so, it will be an improvement for current Internet Explorer users, and might even tempt some folks to switch.

Reduce costume and theme parties... ha ha hah.

First of all the piece is hysterical. As I was watching I realized the BestBuy looked familiar. And while I don't have confirmation, I'm pretty damn sure they shot it at the location below. Let's have a look at street view and see.

View Larger Map

Yep, tree, billboard, brick color, narrow street. I'd say that's the one.

I was looking into my analytics and saw a hand full of traffic from China. I had blogged a bit about Baidu's spider being hyper active and I wondered if that didn't get me on the Chinese radar. Then I looked at the landing pages they were hitting it turned out it was comment page. You see where this is going, comment spam. I guess I had turned off my Akismet off when I made some changes a bit ago. Yeah, I've put comment spam screening back in. I am curious to see what happens to my Chinese traffic once the spam door closes.

I just discovered sumopaint.com where you can use their online image editor to do crazy stuff.  I just played with it for a second, but it seems like it has the basics of what I'm looking for when I'm doing quick image touches.You can access the app here

I've been following sweetafton23 for a bit now, after the Harvey inspired by the Bruner turned me on to her. I was working a bit late tonight and wanted a short reprieve from work so I happened over to youtube to see if there was an update. I was surfing her old posts and saw she had covered "Still Alive". It sounded familiar enough so I clicked play. Little did I know that Mike had already played the song for me after privileging me with watching him complete Portal on his Xbox 360. At any rate, it's pretty funny little song written by Jonathan Coulton. So without further ado, except thanks to Mike for keeping from falling off the edge of cult hits into the mainstream, I give you sweetafton23 doing "Still Alive". (be sure and listen to the words)

Well, it's difficult to describe what the business model was going to be. I never did launch SpamHisAss.com but I did build the software. Should I renew or go set them to expire? Is anyone interested. I'll give em to you cheap.

For the last few weeks I've been running an AdWords campaign to advertise my wife's online store selling her knit goods, www.bernicesutherland.com. It's been really interesting and has lead to sales. I am running three campaigns, one targeting just the US, one targeting just Canada and one targeting both US and Canada but is a display campaign. If you want to see the creative for the display ad head over to my home page.

At any rate, I'm killing it with impressions in Canada but am getting better performance in the US (based on Click Through Rate, CTR). I am debating what to do next, I am getting most of my clicks from Canada and while the US ad is performing better, fewer clicks mean fewer opportunities for conversion. Have a look for yourself

This is awesome and will simplify my life immensely. I routinely video chat with my grandmother, parents, sister and brother using Skype. But this just takes it to the next level.

Check the Google Blog for details. I'm dead tired of running extra software to get a video experience that isn't tightly integrated with my contacts. Finally, no more.

I'm not going to tell you what it says... You have to get a QR-Code Reader yourself.

special thanks to the folks over at kaywa.com

I don't really know how to set this up other than, The Muppets:

Tonight I attended a vloggers meet-up at the rocketboom studio here in NYC where my friend Kathleen and her producing partner Tom of Dinosaur Diorama productions spoke about the realities of producing video for the web.  It was a good time, and Kathleen and Tom did a good job of laying out there both their understanding of what it takes to get video on the web and the enormous economic and logistical challenges that they wrestle with to get their bumble bee to fly.

And then the night got interesting.  We went over to a bar called Two Eighteen and happened into what appeared to be a wise-guy convention complete with a fellow standing just outside an alcove opposite to the bar SINGING the tunes (with a microphone) over the bar's speakers.  Some serious "fly me to the moon" going on.  Kathleen remarked how fantastic this was to have what looked like a wise guy singing rat pack for us while we drank.

And then it got better.  Vinnie Vella walks up to us (yes, THE Vinnie Vella) and tells us he's the emcee for the night and that there is quite a show coming up.  He then proceeds to got on the microphone and tell the whole bar not to worry about the dozen or so dudes who look like wise-guys, they're just actors.  He then proceeds to introduce a Barbara Streisand look alike who sings a Streisand song in a full length sequined evening gown.

Well as it turns out from what I can tell the actor Vinny Vella has made living playing mob types for some pretty high powered mob movies.  He played "Artie Piscano" in Martin Scorsese's Casino.  There is a video link on his site of him talking with Martin about a scene he did with Scorsese's mother.

To circle back around it was really interesting talking to people in the independent content generation scene, i.e. vloggers, try and reason out how to monetize through the various avenues of distribution and streamlining content to keep costs down.

Finally, because I pay attention to what Kathleen says and I am unendingly willing to plug my friends work, I offer you the following thought:  Respect your independent web video content creator.  They are likely working on a shoe string trying to squeeze just a little more blood from a stone to raise the money to keep going.  So go watch theburg.tv the allfornots.com and give them your eyeballs and tell your friends.

Thanks go to Kathleen for letting me be part of her entourage.  By the way my entourage name is "Cheetah" - just so we're clear.

Well, here I am on a computer running Windows Vista using Live Writer to pound out a post.  I attempted to use Ecto with the new version of dasBlog I had deployed to no avail.  So, at this point my options are debug through why my instance of dasBlog is not playing nice with ecto or ditch the bitch (get it?) and move on.

Sadly, since my job doesn't really involve .NET any more I had hoped dasBlog would be a rewarding connection to my old flame.  But alas, it seems it will remain a reminder of how good it could have been.

So at this point I either bite the bullet and install Parallels on my Mac so I can run Live Writer - NOT.  Or I use my virtual windows box that lives inside my Linux desktop - meh, a bit better.  Or I ditch dasBlog and move on.  This is going to require some think.

Thanks to the kind folks over at worth1000.com for their 'great' photo of a dog.  I think it fits.

I have just finished upgrading this blog to the latest version of dasBlog. I have been trying to use ecto from my MacBook Pro and it kept barfing. I had looked at the source of the last version of dasBlog and decided it was too much of a hassle and that I would just use LiveWriter to do my post composition. But now, I no longer use a windows box at work and my primary carry-around computer is a Mac. So, if tomorrow, when I go to post with ecto against this blog it barfs... stand by for me to declare dasBlog a dog and move on. My buddy over at

I posted on of her video's a while ago. Here's the link if you missed it. She's pretty original, and frankly searching for "Ukelele" on YouTube.com is pretty darn entertaining.

As my regular readers will tell you, my recent posts have been less meaty than usual. Some simple cause and effect later, my direct traffic has been down. Interestingly enough, it hasn't hurt my overall traffic too badly. It has meant that my search traffic has become 59% of my traffic, and Arizona, i.e. searches for "Dave and Buster's Phoenix", has been a big part of that. It just recently eclipsed New York as my primary source of traffic.

I was also noticing search traffic from the term "Dave and Busters Tempe" so I thought I'd investigate what they could be looking for. Turns out Dave and Busters has opened a new location in Tempe, so I thought I would write a post about it.

I was looking at Google Trends after I composed this post. I searched on the term "dave and busters" to find out that the top search city for "Dave and Busters" is Jacksonville, FL followed by my old stomping ground San Diego, CA. So, I wonder what my next D&B post will be about... Perhaps sunny Florida? My only lament is apparently I'm writing a blog about an establishment I don't really like that much. I guess I understand the draw if your life is suburbia, but the one in NYC is a joke.

For those of you who got here by searching "Dave and Busters Tempe" - Welcome. The information you're looking for is below

The Dave & Busters
Address: 2000 East Rio Salado Parkway, Suite 1100, Tempe, AZ 85050
Phone: 480-281-8456
Hours:

Mon - Thurs 11:30am - midnight

Friday 11:30am - 1:00am

Sat 11:00am - 1:00am

Sun 11:00am - midnight

Happy Hour Mon - Fri 4:30 - 7pm

Late Night Happy Hour Sun - Thurs 10pm - close

Power HourTM Mon - Fri 4:30 - 7:00pm

House Policies: (6 minors to 1 adult maximum). 18 and up; Guardian age 25; Non-smoking.

Here is the map of the Tempe Marketplace from their site with Dave and Busters highlighted.

At the time of writing this, Google maps had not posted satellite images of the center

For those of you who read my blog and didn't arrive here via searching "dave and busters tempe", I'm pretty sure you know what I'm up to.

I have been using Gmail a whole bunch lately and getting deeper into the advanced functionality. One of my favorite features is the search operators. These Ginsu Knives allow you to both find and filter email.

I found a help page that gives a great overview of the search operators that I find really useful. It's not hard to find the page but I thought I'd link you to it anyhow - Click Here.

Example:
from:Dave(friday funny) - returns email that is from Dave with the words 'friday' and 'funny' in the subject

Until I started using Gmail more I had no idea these features are there, and I think most folks are the same way. Finding email is my second biggest feature requirement for an email and this makes my life easier.

Amazon rolled out a new kind of affiliate widget recently - the MP3 Clips Widget. It's pretty cool as it allows me to put a little flash doo-dad on my page and you can sample the tunes that I'm digging. I actually have used the Amazon music service (actual name eludes me). I have no love for iTunes and their DRM bullshit. Amazon gives me what I want, tunes tunes and tunes.

So, for this installment, Vampire Weekend and their self titled album... These guys rock. Love the album. I actually blogged one of their songs a while a go Walcott Insane Mix #2 - freaking awesome. So, stream a sample and if you decide to buy, thanks, I actually got it from Amazon Download too. Otherwise head over to Pandora and check the Vampire Weekend station I'm groovin too.

Thank you Mr. Harvey... this is beautiful

Feeling like I'm neglecting both of my readers so I thought I'd offer a morsel on Patents (that I stole from Wired).  At any rate, Venice, March 19, 1474 the following law was enacted:

"Any person in this city who makes any new and ingenious contrivance, not made heretofore in our dominion, shall, as soon as it is perfected so that it can be used and exercised, give notice of the same to our office of Provveditori de Comun [State Judicial Office], it being forbidden up to 10 years for any other person in any territory and place of ours to make a contrivance in the form and resemblance thereof, without the consent and license of the author."

Interestingly enough, according to Wired, it was about attracting foreign investment.

As a "Creative Professional" who does work for hire on a daily basis, Intellectual property law is something of great interest.  I've recently had to fill out a disclosure of all "prior works of authorship" to distinguish my own creative endeavors from things I've done for hire.

In that vein, I'll pass along some advice I received from a friend who conveniently happens to be an attorney:

When describing your works of prior authorship, cut as wide a [creative] swath as you can in as few words as possible.  Put the onus on them to get clarification to try and diminish the scope of what you're claiming.

So, to give you a bad example that is completely fictitious, rather than claiming my new sock knit as a work of authorship I would claim "new solution for sox".  Pretty wide swath, eh?

This is the part where I clarify the bits you've read above:  This advice from from my friend was offered as a courtesy to me and is being paraphrased by me to you as a courtesy.  This does not constitute legal advice to you and I make no representation that I have specific expertise in this area and I further make no claims as to the validity or utility of this advice.  Should you choose to act on these statements you do so at your own risk and are advised to seek competent legal advice prior to acting. This is posted here because it just sounds reasonable to me.

I just love legalese.

Immediately after I saw Noam's post on SearchMe, I busted over to their site to sign up for the beta.  And today I'm pretty stoked to report that I got into the beta.  I think visual search is the next thing in search and I think SearchMe, by emulating the iPhone album "thumb through" interface, whether intentionally or not, hit the nail on the head.  My biggest problem with search results is something they talk about in their promo video. The constant forward back of going through the crappy results looking for the relevant one is annoying.  I love being able avoid those crappy ad site with keywords sprinkled in to draw search.

It definitely is a beta, and I was slightly disappointed there wasn't a gesture based interaction.  The index is small but the concept and overall execution are pretty huge.  I know someone is waiting in the wings to tell me that visual search is not new - true enough, but visual search that looks like it has a change to succeed is. Hmm, I wonder if the prospective buyers are already circling?

Here is their Promo Vid:

The New York Times has an article about the basics of blogging and some tips from the 'pros'.  I want to score a link to my blog on the New York Times site.  I guess I should put some ads up if I'm going to Mahir like that. (Don't remember the verb to Mahir.  Well, I blogged about it here)

So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?

By PAUL BOUTIN
Published: March 20, 2008

Successful bloggers with successful non blogging careers offer ways to think about getting into the business of blogging.

This actually is pretty straight forward and interesting. If I were to add my own tip, which is something that really helps me keep up a regular pace, it would be:

Post Ahead - When I have time to compose a couple posts I'll take one of them and kick it out into the future.

By posting ahead I can keep up my pace and also have "new post insurance" where I can skip a day or two and keep you on the line. This also gives me the ability to publish a longer post midweek when I usually have time for as I slog my way through the week

To keep this all above board, I st-borrowed this photo from The Whole Enchilada: Thoughts on life, work, tech & biz and the whole enchilada.

Okay, I'm trying to to gush here cause my wife only emailed me this about 30 minutes ago and I'm in love.  I'm sure she saw the appeal from a lot of angles, not the least of which is I use my cell phone as an alarm clock and it has an annoying alarm sound. What I'm gaga for is the Chumby and I've really on begun to investigate.

I'm not going to last the week without ordering one.  Here is what Small Space Living (where my wife found it) has to say about it:

Chumby is tricky device to classify. There are not many other devices that have the multifunction of Chumby.
Chumby is a small Wi-Fi compatible device with a 3.5 inch touch screen and a soft leather case. The Chumby is intended to replace your clock radio. But to call it a clock or radio would be so short sighted. It can be loaded with a number of widgets — the list grows daily.
There is no end to the multifunction goodness of Chumby. The Chumby can be a clock or an internet radio. It can track EBay auctions or display photos form your Flicker account.
The device sells for $179, which is the hardware break-even point for the manufacturers. It’s an unusual thing for a manufacturer to sell a product for no profit, but the intention is to make money by selling advertising on the Chumby units.
Chumby could fit well into your small space life — it’s little and has a multitude of uses.

I've created a virtual Chumby here to get a animated look see. But you really should click through and see what their site shows about this little sucker.

Just FYI, I have no association or relationship what so-ever with the Chumby, I'm just loving the concept

Turns out the web IS a small world.  A few years ago when Jonk and I started working together he read this blog forgetfoo.com (NASFW).  Over the last few years we've started referring to the content of Foo's site as 'Web Tits'.  It's sort of a mash-up of web tips and, well, tits. 

So, a couple weeks ago I run into Dylan at Mix08 (under miscellaneous) who works at ClearSpring with Foo.  I mentioned to him that I read Foo and that we referred to his site as 'Web Tits'.  He got a kick out of it and obviously passed the word along because Foo threw down a little shout out (Not entirely safe for work).

Actually, a few years ago when I was interviewing for my job, the last person I interviewed with was a Vice President of Engineering.  He asks a simple yet tough question, "What do you read to get your information about new technology and or web trends?"

Seems innocuous enough, but you'd be surprised how many engineers freeze up or have no answer at all.  Well, not me.  I actually cited Foo's blog as one of the places where I get design inspiration and tidbits about what's hot on the web.  Then I proceeded to navigate the veep over to Foo's blog having not seen what the current post was.  Don't remember what it was that day, don't think it was tits, but I got hired.

And before I forget, top set of tits.

The Saitz has an interesting post about how a tribute video to his deceased dog Cookie got picked up in the YouTube copyright dragnet and how he dodged doing hard time in the hoosegow.

He does it better than I could so leap on over then roll on back for my two cents.

I guess I knew that they were doing some form of copyright violation trolling over there, but it never occurred to me what that might mean.  It has to be automated right, they can't possibly have offshore low wage workers watching YouTube videos that can identify what pop song has been stolen.

I remember that Verizon launched a music recognition service on their phones using software Song IDentity by Rocket Mobile.  You remember the cheese ball commercials where a chick is walking by a store blaring music out the front, holds up her phone for 10 seconds (I think they shortened the time for the commercial - I mean 10 seconds in a commercial of someone doing one thing, no way).  Her phone recognizes the song, she downloads it to her phone (who thought that service would be a good idea? - maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic) presses play and walks away the song magically picking up where it left off from the store.

This stuff is all circa 2006.  Actually, there is a CNET article about same (YouTube, your copyright and Google, by Harry Fuller; October 2006) that is somewhat interesting about how they were looking to automate this (sure I could find an article that is more recent, but isn't it interesting what they were planning to do and where they are now).  What I find fascinating is the database and processing power you'd need to scrub all the incoming videos to YouTube. 

More to the point, let's say I post a video today with a song by my favorite artist Raffi which is not in the You-Can't-Use-My-Work database when I upload it.  Then two months later Raffi gets wise and adds his stuff to the You-Can't-Use-My-Work database.  Does YouTube continually re-scan the massive library of videos looking for new violations as their database grows.  I'm guessing they must.  Well, I'm going to a talk on MapReduce next week - maybe I'll find some answers there.

Thanks for the inspiration Ben.

Well, they almost got there.  This is Jonk's blog in Firefox:

This is Jonk's Blog in IE 8 Beta 1:

Doh.

Ari represent, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Ari's demo was great, cut through the bullshit and straight to the code, run it, break point and show the money.

IE8 has firebug., originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Well, not really. But they built something like it.

Actually the activities functionality through the OpenService stuff looks pretty cool.

Scott Gu is a rockstar, no really, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

So Scott comes on and the place goes a little crazy. Everyone starts snapping photos... Ooooh get on the stream, they are about to show IE8.

I am currently over Kearney, Nebraska ( I would throw in a link for you but I'm not connected to the inter-webs right now).  Two seats to my left is Noam of Blog.a.lish and right behind me is Jason of soon to be some blog somewhere.  We're on our way to Mix 08 in Las Vegas - Microsoft's Big web development conference.  The next few days will be dominated by posts about happenings at the conference.  Under a cloud of Wi-Fi, armed with a Wi-Fi enabled phone with and a post by email setup through Flickr I'm going to be a buzz with conference posts.

Last year at Mix07 the buzz was Silverlight followed by the Google-DoubleClick acquisition.  This year is certain to be Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo (is it safe to call it hostile yet? or just post bear-hug?).

This year has a few sessions about online advertising, an obvious subject of interest for anyone who knows why the web is "free" and/or want's a slice of the pie.  I'm also hoping to get some more insight into LINQ, Silverlight and the MS MVC. And, while it will be tempting to rant, I'm probably going to refrain from sharing my well earned opinion that WebParts are junk.

Actually, on a more non-specific front I'm going to quiz my MS friends about testability.  The project I am currently working on is using Sprint .NET as an IOC tool and N-Mock as a mocking tool. I'm curious what the MS boys have up their sleeve in this vein.  As I start to feel the effects of the TDD Kool-Aid these things have become more important to me as part of my daily work.

Sorry about the absence of links to the various subjects here-in.  I really am at 38,000 feet.  If only there were really Internet access on planes.  Then again, where else would I get to feel cut-off from the world in a cocoon of I-can't-affect-anything - oh wait, I ride the subway to work.  Thank you MTA for keeping me relaxed when I'm powerless.

Okay, this is both intriguing me and weird-ing me out.  I am fascinated by the possibility of huge visual variety, but at the same time, what will I see in the crystal ball come screen saver that big brother has lovingly made for me?

You all judge for yourself.  I'm still deciding. I'll let you know if I go for it and please let me know if you give it a try.

SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver which shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. Yep, when your computer is idle you’ll get to see a live feed of what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s quite fascinating because of the voyeuristic element involved but also surreal because it compresses time-space.

Something is happening right at the moment elsewhere and you are a witness to it. It is real but since it’s only an image, you tend to question its verity a little more than what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look away from the screen because I’m always expecting something to happen just that moment, maybe a car accident or a cute girl would enter into the frame.

It’s these thoughts that make this screensaver (and surveillance) quite an intriguing process.

Some of you likely noticed that around late Thursday of last week, in conjunction with my lengthy post about my adventure into canning this blog went wonky and showed something that was an incomprehensible mix of two posts. The good news is no one wrote or commented telling me my writing had improved.

I think the problem had to do with using BlogJet. It seems to support dasBlog nicely but something went horribly wrong. This post is using ecto. I so, so so want to like ecto, and I do it's got that perfect mix of raw dork horse-power ( html-templating with keyboard short-cuts; solid html generation; and flickr/Amazon/YouTube buttons). But, and there always seems to be a "but", it was barfing on a post I was trying to make again my humble little dasBlog instance. I attempted to debug into the code on the dasBlog side, a big reason I chose dasBlog. In my initial look through I concluded that the problem was likely somewhere in ecto, not that dasBlog is a shining example of good code practices. 

I know, I know dasBlog is open source and I'm so critical, why don't I roll up my sleeves and dive in? The truth of the matter is, I'm not interested in writing a blogging engine, or even really fixing on this one. I've got other side-projects I want to work on and the list is already too long. While I don't believe blogging is fully mature, the issues I've been having with what seems to me a late teen set of technologies: blogging APIs and blog software) frustrates me a bit. And maybe this problem lies in the technology I've chosen. Blogging comes more or less from the PHP side of the tracks and .NET being my comfort zone I opted to use a .NET open source tool. Maybe it's time to learn PHP. (You hear that Bill?)

Back to the dangle-y loose thread holding this post together. I won't be using BlogJet on a live instance without further testing. Windows Live Writer (thanks for the suggestion Ben) hasn't really gotten a workout from me, will be making an audition on a laptop near me. And ecto, oh ecto... What am I to do? I went to your help page hoping you could tell me how to tune your software for dasBlog and this is what I saw:

Looks simple right? You'll notice I've included both the left and right edge of the browser window in the screen shot. In fact, I even went so far as to view source - there isn't an input tag on the page.

I'll give it another try, cause I like it so much, but it looks like Windows Live Writer might win. While it was fun to do raw HTML and I like the spell check and ability to have drafts of future posts.

So I've been toying around with ecto as a tool to compose blog posts on my local box before I post them to my site. Here is what they have to say for themselves:

With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog's control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.

There are a couple things I'm really stoked about. First the keyboard short-cuts for definable tags, so in the rich text editor when I press Ctrl-Shift-B it wraps the selected text with

<blockquote class="withquote"><p class="withunquote">[Selected Text]</p></blockquote>

Second, it has an in browser preview capability that I don't get now using dasBlog. I have to save the post as unpublished and then return to editing. Finally, I'm really stoked about the ability to have draft posts. dasBlog doesn't really support that concept at all. The only problem is it's not free. There is a 21 day trial and then it's going to run me $17.95 or so. It may be worth it.

I've more or less figured out that if I'm going to keep up any sort of reasonable pace I need to be able to start posts in one sitting and finish them later.

I squeezed two posts out of this ritual last month, but I'm going to make it just one this time. I read Wired magazine, have for several years. I consider it my candy reading. The ritual I mentioned is around recycling my copy of Wired. I used to store magazines that I subscribed to in boxes, cause, you know you may read them again - as if. Ever since moving to NYC I have become merciless about things that take up space. So, instead of keeping them, I slice out the pages with things I'm interested in so I can go back later and remind myself. I'm endeavoring to not keep sliced out pieces any more by blogging about the items I'm interested in.

Anthology Records

This is REALLY great. Here is the link to the Wired article: Vinyl Frontier. It's a tidbit about a record label that re-releases vintage stuff. Here let's let Wired tell it.

Sure, iTunes has millions of tracks, but don't go looking there for obscure or out-of-print treasures like, say, the seminal stoner-rock stylings of Sir Lord Baltimore. Fortunately for music geeks, help is on the way. Keith Abrahamsson, an A&R rep for New York-based indie label Kemado Records, recently launched the first all-digital reissues label. At prices similar to those of Apple's square mass-market store, Anthology Recordings offers high-fidelity (320 Kbps), DRM-free rips of supercool, ultrarare titles — from late-'60s Swedish psych-rock to British postpunk and early-'80s dub.

I was doing a little browsing and came across Panama! Latin, Calypso, Panama! that sounds pretty great. And, I have no idea what this is...Thai Beat A Go-Go Volume 2.

Thinking of making my PC my TV

The OnAir GT Mobile HDTV Receiver & DVR for PC (HDTV-GT) seems to do the trick. This is my first stab at just going full on Media PC for all my entertainment needs. Right now we don't have cable and so all our TV is broadcast. It's not as bad as you think. Although we do miss our favorite channels: TLC, Discovery Channel and History Channel. I realize this isn't going to solve that problem, but I'm hoping by getting some DVR action I can do a bit of time shifting on stuff that I want to watch.

Goldfrapp, anyone? anyone?

Does anyone know anything about these guys? Opinions? I am intrigued by the 7 of 10 review that Wired gave their album Seventh Tree. Not running out to purchase (or I guess pre-purchase), but the Amazon.com MP3 downloads is definitely an option. I used it to download Basement Bhangra for $8.99 (DRM Free MP3). It's a good album (also found in Wired) I'll be using the AmazonMP3 optiont again. I still object to iTunes.

Thanks for holding the line. Now that that's taken care of. Over the last little bit I've been watching the percentage of my modest traffic from search inch up to a higher and higher percentage. As of this writing, It looks as if I'm holding steady at the top of the Google search results for "Dave and Busters Phoenix". This is a fairly interesting little trip into SEO. I'm starting to wonder if I should be detecting when people arrive here by search (dasBlog has some hooks for that) and show ads to those people. I'm not really interested in disrupting you-all, my loyal readers, with that kind of thing, but I can't help but smell the potential of essentially passive revenue at some point in the future.

For those of you catching up it all got started by the following blog posts (in chronological order)

• December 12, 2007 - Dave & Busters - Did I miss something?
• January 12, 2008 - Search: Dave & Busters Phoenix
• January 24, 2008 - Well Dave and Busters Phoenix appears to have worked

Definitely worth the read. This is long something I've realized - no talent, no company

Another Difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo Marriage: Recruiting

One risk for Microsoft is that it could spend billions to buy Yahoo only to find that many of its most talented people have already left. That is one of the perils of high-priced acquisitions in the talent economy, where the real prize is often the collective abilities of a company’s employees.

This is probably old news, but I can't stop watching it. It seems like it should be a cartoon.

I actually saw this as a demo while looking at Shadowbox.js that foo tipped me off to.

I was reading my buddy Ben's blog, the person who is responsible for me blogging, and I realized that I hadn't ever linked over to him. Let me just publicly say thank you, this has been a really great addition so my life, and something I've come to cherish. I've also added him to the blog-roll

Ben has some really great stuff about greenify-ing his home. I try and make him a daily read.

Mashable has a post Star Trek Comes To Joost, Nerds Rejoice!. I will confess I will probably be checking this out, much to the chagrin of my wife.

Joost just made some folks in the United States very happy as they are now serving up the entire original series of Star Trek (ST:TOS to those in the know).

If you haven't checked out Joost it's time. I was in on the early beta and watched a bunch of their National Geographic shows - I don't have cable and I really miss the The Learning Channel and the Discovery Channel. Their content is really becoming pretty compelling. They apparently (according to their site) have 408 channels, but that looks a lot like several flavors of different channels. Now all I need is a media PC and a 32" flat panel - why 32"? That's about all my apartment will handle.

Real Information about the location of Dave and Busters in Scottsdale is here.

First let's be clear, I have so little traffic that I am grateful for each and every one of you who visits. For my public image let's just say there are still enough of you that I could send you all an email and not entirely hate my life. That being said, I don't have control over what google.com analytics tells me my traffic is coming from. Welcome Asia and Europe and Canada!

You'll probably remember a bit ago I blogged about Dave and Busters Phoenix, and then I blogged about how I seem to be picking up a lot of traffic from that. And by a lot I mean enough that I am noticing. So In my last post I set out to create a truly useful post about Dave and Busters in Phoenix so that those poor souls who ended up here looking for real information would find it.

So, based on the graphic, it looks I've made a few waves in Arizona. This leads me back to my earlier idea... what if I just wrote a blog about really specific directions to places (e.g. the Duane Reade at 7th Avenue and 14th Street)? Would I pick up specialized search traffic? Who knows. I'm sure all the SEO people are laughing at me now - they've long since figured it out.

I find all this pretty interesting. Oh, and by the way, I've moved up on the google search results for "dave and busters phoenix" I appear to be number 5!

Oh, and here is a link to Jonk's blog. Cause he's a good guy. And Welcome back Noam . Where the heck is my link on your site?

A candid view of one of the women workers touching up the U.S. Army Air Forces insignia on the side of the fuselage of a "Vengeance" dive bomber manufactured at Vultee's Nashville division, Tennessee (LOC)

This is unbelievingly cool. Flickr has begun a collaboration with the Library of Congress called the Flickr: The Commons. The stated goal being:

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

This needs little introduction if you just click through and check out the rich library of images. I'm thinking some flickr widget-ing is in order to explore these beautiful photos.

In case you're curious the Library of Congress has as blog.

Thanks to foo for pointing me to TechCrunch.

I don't know if I've mentioned it before but you've probably figured out that I have an amazon.com affiliate account. So when you see a link on my site to a product on Amazon I get a percentage (4% currently). But I logged in to check my clicks and found the following:

So, let it not be said that I have shame, and if all it takes is 7 more items to score me another 2% - sure. Here are the last 7 items I bought from Amazon

But seriously, if you're thinking about buying something from Amazon and like what you see here, think about clicking through on one of my links and making your purchase, it doesn't cost you anything - and I'm up to 6%. So, by now you're probably wondering how much I have made of the affiliate program - well I'll tell you: $ 0.48. Yep, I'm rolling in it.

Um yeah...there is nothing there. I think I might just delete (if I can) my profile.

I was reading a great post on Coding Horror, programming and human factors by Jeff Atwood, a great blog if you're looking for one, and came across some great think about the software development process. I'm being a bit coy because I am intending to make that post the subject of my next post, but I then happened over to Bruce Eckel's blog and read his post entitled Java: Evolutionary Dead End.

I got to reading and felt he makes some really great points about the thoughtfulness that goes into putting a feature into a language. I'm loathe to quote the whole thing here, but I'll give you a little sampling.

Since the beginning I've complained that, at the same time that it claims to be simple, Java is too noisy as a language. Code is read much more than it is written, and this noise directly translates to real costs in software development. Brain cycles are a very scarce resource, and anything that uses them up without benefit -- even something as seemingly innocuous as the extra verbiage in System.out.println() -- takes those cycles away from somewhere they could be useful, and reduces the programming efficiency of the language ( Steve Yegge recently wrote about this problem ).

In his presentation, Josh said that the last-minute addition of wildcards to Java generics may have pushed the complexity of the language too far. Neal Gafter has suggested that we reify generics. Both were originally unequivocal fans of Java generics, based on their responses to the criticisms I wrote about the topic. Now there seems to be a shift, and I've also seen other people begin to say "generics are still great but ..." (Although Tim Bray recently called them a disaster ).

People lived tolerably for many years, then suddenly it became essential that generics be shoehorned into the language. This was remarkably coincidental with the appearance of generics in C#, which also appeared to produce several other features in Java 5. It seems that the urgency of these features came not from solving true problems in the Java language, but in Sun trying to maintain the perception of competitiveness against Microsoft's C#. This is probably not so far off the mark, because the reason that Java had to be rushed out in rough form in the first place was the belief that there was a market window that must be captured. A programming language designed by following marketing impulses is eventually going to end up chasing its tail.

I don't pretend to be an expert on anything JAVA. Being generous, I'm a neophyte when it comes to JAVA. Being honest, I was going to pick it up this year, but never got around to it. I'm a C# guy who moved over from VB.NET who moved over after about 3 months from VB6 who had just realized that I had outgrown VBA. Quite a pedigree, I'm sure. And yes, I do give the JAVA developers at work a hard time at every opportunity, but one thing that I am sensitive to is the evolution of languages and what features make it in and what don't. I've recently started to work on .NET 3.5 after just getting used to .NET 2.0. And the way it looks from all the hoopla .NET has picked up a whole bunch of stuff that is "going to make my life easier" - and I'm sure some of it will. However I'm sure the list of things that I think are just stupid bolt-ons is going to get longer.

So as JAVA marches on and it's proponents start to proclaim to have heard it's death knell - it appears that Mr. Eckel is pushing Scala. I wonder how long it will be before I'm feeling the same way about C#. Now I know as a "Microsoft Guy" I'm supposed to drink the cool-aid and hook my WPF app up to my WCF endpoint to execute some work using WF and serializing the whole mess using LINQ, but my relationship with Microsoft is a bit more complicated than that. Sure I make my living by spinning their threads in to yarn and weaving a beautiful tapestry to fill my application space (that's for you Noam), but it's really more like:

Truly I don't get the MS zealots.

Actually, Noam had shared another post from Coding Horror entitled The Magpie Developer, also a good read, talking about the technology crush* and going on to rightfully making fun of the ramblings of some technology company blog I refuse to ink to here because of how closely their ideas correspond to Junior High social dynamics. This unnamed "thinker" (if you really want to know give codinghorror.com some traffic and the proceed at your own risk) spouts some inane drivel about the perceived ecosystem of "elite developers" fleeing to new technology as the "riff-raff" show up.

So I guess in that estimation I'm the riff-raff, wondering if my language is still what the cool kids are using. The amalgam of these two posts has inspired a technological malaise that will take several ticks to snap out of. Do I bother learning a doomed flawed language, JAVA? Is my current language of choice no longer cool? But seriously, JAVA dead or alive can pay my bills. If C# isn't being used by the cool kids anymore, what will us former drama dorks do?

Oh yeah, now I remember, if I smell something in the office, it must be the rotting corpse of Java...

*Technology Crush: if you write software you know the one - the feeling like we're close to every possible acro-nymonic combination of letters to indicate a functionally infinite number of technologies it's my business to keep abreast of, else I fall behind and have to support my family by shining shoes or apples (I'd shoot for the midtown location - shorter commute).

For those of you who got here by searching for "Dave and Busters Phoenix"

Here is the information you're looking for:

The Dave & Busters (formerly Jillians - I think) is located in the Desert Ridge Shopping center at the south east corner of North Tatum Boulevard and East Deer Valley Drive. It is in the main part of the shopping center.
Address: 21001 N Tatum Blvd Suite 44-1400 Phoenix, AZ 85050
Phone: 480-538-8956
Hours:

Mon - Thurs 11:30am - midnight

Friday 11:30am - 1:00am

Sat 11:00am - 1:00am

Sun 11:00am - midnight

Happy Hour Mon - Fri 4:30 - 7pm

Late Night Happy Hour Sun - Thurs 10pm - close

Power HourTM Mon - Fri 4:30 - 7:00pm

House Policies: (6 minors to 1 adult maximum). 18 and up; Guardian age 25; Non-smoking.

If you got here because you happen to follow my blog

Over the past few weeks I've actually been getting a lot of traffic (relative to the minimal amount of traffic that I do get) from people searching for "Dave and Busters Phoenix". At some point I've seen my blog linked to as the second item on the second page of google search results. This really surprised me because the post I did on Dave & Busters (Dave & Busters Did I miss something) was about how lousy I found it to be.

So at the very least I'm pandering to traffic. I'm planning on doing a post on the web analytics and the blogging related stuff I'm using and on my site . Kind of a state of the blog thing - it is that time of year isn't it?.

Actually, the thing that interests me the most is how a random set of words can get you on the search radar. Although, those aren't really random words they encapsulate a certain intent. I guess on angle to SEO is figuring out what those intents are and lining up behind them. I'm somewhat curious what would happen if I just spent time writing posts about directions to the third tier of common places. By third tier I mean things that are not 'A' list places (e.g. Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building) and not 'B' list places (e.g. JFK, stadiums). There is just no way I'll get on that radar, it's too huge. But what about the third tier - shopping malls, Chuck-E Cheeses. Every national chain store site has their store locater but they are all driven around national coverage. What if I decided I was going to do detailed location information of Staples Stores in mid-town Manhattan ("Staples midtown")... Hmm.

I'm a web developer, and while there is a constant march of new tools and techniques that have made my life better, one thing that still tops the list is FireBug (the Firefox plug-in). Seriously, if you're developing web applications without Firebug you're working too hard.

Now, I think I may have another top 5 item. It's called Xobni (inbox backward - pronounced Zob-nee, so I can tell). I've been playing around with it for about two days now and it seems to solve really well some of the most basic outlook problems. The first and probably most annoying is the age old "I know he sent me a copy of it but where is the email". Until now I've been using Google Desktop and/or the Google Desktop outlook plug-in to do my find, usually searching on the person or something about the conversation to find a list of emails from the person. Their search results are really weak, it give me the email from the person with a from line a subject, maybe a couple lines of text and an icon indicating if there was an attachment. This approach breaks down if you're looking for something in even the semi-recent past or if there were multiple attachments flying back and forth between you and the person. You have to poke around. Xobni solves this by pulling up a file list of everything that the person has sent you in an email when you select that person when they are selected - amen.

The other problem I run into occasionally is trying to track down a phone number for someone. I'm pretty picky who I put in my contact list in Outlook but at the same time I need to find a phone number. Xobni automatically extracts phone numbers from all the email someone has sent me and displays it with a Skype tool menu. And if I have a phone number for the person in my contacts, it displays that.

Here is their little demo video that is pretty thorough:

Check it out, I'm pretty happy so far (Day 3). The Performance is good on my desktop, a little lack-luster on my laptop, but it doesn't hang up Outlook. There is a bunch more to it that I've left out and am still discovering, but I think they hit the nail on the head. I don't usually gush about stuff, but digging around Outlook has got to be one of my least favorite things ever, and this may keep me from having to do it ever again. Whoop Whoop! Give me a week or so and I'll place it in my top 5 tools of now.
hat tip to Drit for pointing it my way

Let me preface this by saying I have absolutely NO DATA support this idea, nor do I have any means to really acquire any. Let me just go further and say I have NO DATA WHATSOEVER on any subject besides what I had for breakfast. This is not an analytical piece, this is a hypothetical piece

Here is theory:
As the writer's strike continues (started November 5, 2007) the "compelling" programming available for television diminishes. This means two things about the TV watching public, there is less to watch on television and there are less people watching television because of the former. The fact that there are less people watching television is probably a bit of a farce, truly the American people will watch any crap on TV, but drip drip drip somebody is frustrated they don't have their new season of shows and may eventually turn off the television. Now, I would posit that a drop in television would very likely equal an increase in internet usage. What else is there to do but update your Facebook account, see what's going up on your favorite blog, or mindlessly surf? Since internet advertising is largely a numbers game. In display advertising more page loads = more impressions = more delivery of inventory and in text / CPC space more page loads = more opportunities to find the right ad you're going to click and when you do more $ for the site using adSense, more $ spent by the advertiser. Either way as volume increases on the internet more revenue pours into online advertising. So at what point do the advertisers and the agencies (let's call them the ad buyers) realize that television isn't reaching their demographic.

Let's talk specifically about men 18-34. Some time ago Wired magazine had an article entitled The Lost Boys (August 2004) where they looked at the difficulty in reaching males in the 18-34 range. Most telling is this quote from a Coke exec

"It's not that men 18 to 34 have stopped watching TV," explains David Raines, the Coke VP in charge of divvying up ad money. "But they're doing a lot of other stuff, too" - going online, watching DVDs, playing videogames. "The bottom line is, ad dollars will follow the consumer."

Network executives freaked at the Nielsen news, but not everyone was surprised. In the five years that Jeffrey Cole has been running the UCLA Internet Project, he's found that Net users consistently watch less TV than other people - in 2003, more than five hours less per week. This pattern has held for every age group, for both sexes, and in every country he's studied, from Hungary to South Korea. Young men are simply the advance guard. "Broadcasters used to say, Internet users are different," says Cole. "But we show that as you go online, you watch less television." Last year, when Cole did a quick survey of people who do watch TV, he found that only 5 percent of them actually paid attention to the ads anyway. "The business model of television, which is to deliver viewers to advertisers," he declares, "is as troubled as that of the music industry."

Okay, okay, so what this is an article from 2004 and some what tangential to my point. Yes, the my point is more or less a correllary to the point of the article that people are moving from TV to the web. I guess my point is, if I'm taking notice then people who are spending ad dollars and are getting Nielsen numbers for viewership on re-runs have probably long since concluded they need to find a way to reach the consumer, and my guess is online is where they are. They get the bit about the dollars following the consumers

Obviously, if this is any substance to this we're talking about fractions of a percent at this point if it's even measurable. Still, as the strike goes on fractions add up and while I'm sure we're not near the tipping point but will the reinstatement of TV really put the genie back in the bottle? While its too soon to tell what happened in Q4 and natural growth in the industry puts growth in display advertising industry in Q1-Q3 2007 up 15% against 2006 with network television down (Network TV -2.5%).

So, anyone have any numbers or research to make this unsubstantiated theory a substantiated one?

I guess I haven't been on the radar long enough to really get a load of comment-spam. I'm sure having a non-wordpress URL helps a bit too. Initially I as using a CAPTCHA for comment entry. Well, I'm guessing that the shared (like a two dollar lady of the evening) server that is hosting my blog didn't have enough mojo to be reliably be generating and streaming CAPTCHA images, because the didn't reliably show up making commenting impossible. That was quickly ditched.

So I was left with after the fact moderation. I get an email every time a comment hits with the full text of it and two URL's in the email. One I can click to delete the comment and another to view it. This has let me get rid of the 5 or so pieces of comment spam I've gotten to date. I have neglected to use the blacklist and blocked IP functionality in dasBlog yet.

Today, I caught a post through my friend Bill's shared feed over at Bjorkoy.com called Bulletproof protection against comment spam. This reminded me that I'd seen another post about something similar over at thekindproject.com about comment spam called comment spam part ii. In that post jonk links to Ned Batchelder's post called Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots. First of all if you don't know what a honeypot is you must look now.

Well, there is a great weath of information in Ned Batchelder's Post as well as Borkoy.com. Here are my favorite suggestions:

By watching how spammers fail to create spam on my site, there seem to be three different types of spam creators: Playback spambots, form-filling spambots, and humans.

-Ned Batchelder

Ned's piece is interesting because he focuses on using technology to counter the different approaches to delivering comment spam. Borkoy is more straight up technology.

The technique I am using, and which is working very well, is to randomise the names of the form fields.
When the form is loaded a PHP script generates random names for all the form fields and then adds a hidden element with instructions on which random form name should equal which real form name.
When the form is submitted the comment handler unscrambles the names and assigns the values. Any form fields submitted that were not included in the unscramble instructions are wiped.

-from Bjorkoy.com but apparently mentioned to him by Andrew whom I am triply removed from

Ultimately, just this evening, I have turned on the Askimet support in dasBlog and will see how this works out. My next goal is to make posting by email work. I'm aiming to be able to send in photos from my day to day directly from my phone. I see some really funny stuff in NYC and I'd love to share.

I had a nice surprise this morning when I arrived at my desk. A yet to be identified reader turn contributor to my blog left a copy of the Wall Street Journal Technology Section on my desk folded to an article entitled Glitches Bug Google's Android Software. The salient few lines for me are:

"Functionality is not there, is poorly documented or just doesn't work. It's clearly not ready for prime time," said Mr. [Adam] MacBeth, who earlier this year helped found mobile software start-up [omitted on purpose]

Looks to me like Mr. MacBeth got himself some free publicity by giving them the quote that they wanted. That being said, I have yet to really dive into the development portion of my Android efforts - still in concept stages. So I don't know how buggy or not it is.

At any rate, Anyone who's been around the block once or twice in software knows that the bleeding edge stuff is always fraught with pitfalls. There is a reason version 2 exists. Dare I tie this in to Agile Software development thinking around deliver something and improve as you go? If you gold plate everything you bloat and you'll never make it out the door. note to self - tell them about the software side project you've been working on for 5+ years because you've been compulsive about doing it all the right way. It's a bit embarrassing.

Thankfully, the WSJ decided to be even handed and get another voice:

Rick Genter a professional software engineer who is writing an Android application in his free time, said that while Google's mobile software is buggy, it isn't necessarily any worse than any other software at such an early stage.

Thank you also to my reader/contributor for bringing this in. I have purposely not linked to WSJ because frankly, they don't seem to want to let me have access to their content so I won't be giving them my "network effect" love. And I'm not really sure that a story about a new platform being buggy is news.

gigaom.com has a piece that was picked up by the NY Times technology bits blog about Ribbit a newish player in VOIP who is taking a more platform approach to telephony and the web.

Can Ribbit Finally Bring Web & Voice Together?

If you strip away the hype (meaningless blather such as the company’s claim of being Silicon Valley’s first phone company), what they have done is built their own Class 5 softswitch and back-end infrastructure and married it to front-end technologies like Flash and Flex from Adobe Systems (ADBE).

Accordingly, Ribbit is offering API (Application Protocol Interface) access to much of our switch today, allowing third party developers to create rich integrated telephony applications without previous knowledge of telephony. Currently, the Ribbit API is optimized for Flash / Flex developers because of the pervasiveness of the technology (Flash is resident on 98% of the world’s computers). This means that Ribbit communication applications written in Flash will run without the need of a client download.

I'm starting to futz with video and video conferencing and voip. I got myself a Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooksand have been having a blast. tokbox.com let's you do p2p video without any software install. And we use Adobe Breeze / Connect Pro at work and it is fantastically easy to use and has pretty good video support.

I will be using that, big time. I love me the color codes. 

GoolgeBlogscoped has an article about the Google Intranet

What the Google Intranet Looks Like

What do around 16,000 Google employees stare at in the morning when they’ve arrived at the office? They might be looking at Moma, the name for the Google intranet. The meaning of the name of “Moma” is a mystery even to some of the employees working on it, we heard, but Moma’s mission is prominently displayed on its footer: “Organize Google’s information and make it accessible and useful to Googlers.”

The article is not all that exciting a read. I don't know really anything about GoolgeBlogscoped and based on the obsessive fascinated tone of the entry I don't think I'll be reading them much.

Friending, Ancient or Otherwise

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls.

It's certainly old news that Google has released the Android SDK with a $300K bounty for "the best" app. But there are some interesting posts being made on how Google may actually be slowing development down because there are about 10M incentives not to share your expertise and help other developers out.

Is the $10 million Android contest actually slowing developers down? by ZDNet's Garett Rogers -- People with any level of programming skills and a vivid imagination are looking at Google’s $10 million dollar carrot with wide eyes — but is the contest actually working the way Google expected? I’d have to say it’s not — right now anyway. The contest has effectively caused knowledgeable developers to have an [...]

If an inexperienced Java developer is looking to create something unique, they generally start with examples provided in the SDK. When what you need isn’t covered by those tutorials, the next logical stop is to look at documentation or ask for help. Unfortunately, the docs are a bit dry for developers who learn best by example — this is where user contributed code plays a very important role.

The fact there is close to $300,000 on the line for winning projects is making most people think twice about sharing stuff with the community. PHP-like documentation with associated user contributed code would make developing on the Android platform a dream — unfortunately there is no such thing. Unless you are an experienced Java programmer with the skills to interpret the provided documentation without extra code to look at, there is a good chance you are out of luck.

Truth be told, I'm not going to disclose what I'm developing for my entry. The poker folks will tell you - "the pot odds are right". Then again, I am going to be pretty unrelenting in my efforts to get this product together as are most others I'm sure.

For Webdesigners: 359 helpful links for webdesigners