It is almost 2008 and looking back on 2007 I can say it has been an awesome and eventful year. My wife and I just got back from our Midwest tour which included traveling to Illinois, Wisconsin, and Northern and Southern MN.
Tonight instead of going out and going crazy we are staying in and recovering from our vacations along with my wife nursing a cold.
I look forward to blogging more next year along with making changes to the Blog that will add more information.
Thank you again to everyone for reading my blog and keeping up to date with it.
I’ve been using Winamp as a music player for a while and love it. They are light years ahead of any other music player and saved me from having to use iTunes as it allows you to sync your ipod with your music collection. It was just today that I realized that they are a part of AOL. I’ve never been a fan of AOL’s services/browser but they just got a point in my book for being behind Winamp…Llamas Rule!
In this season of giving I want to extend my digital hand and offer free hosting and bandwidth of files for someone’s project. I’d prefer if the project was open source but will be willing to accept all submissions. If you’d like to take me up on this offer leave a comment on this post. I’ll review all of the comments and select one(or two) projects to help host. I have about 5 TB of Bandwidth available/month along with 200 Gig of disk space.
Dell announced that it is coming out with Gutsy Gibbon as a part of their Open Source offering on laptops and desktops. I still think the pricing is kind of steep in comparison to the other windows offerings and is limited in regards to configuration…but I applaud their effort and progress.
The upcoming holidays are crazy as we will be jumping between a bunch of different cities visiting family and friends. Work has been keeping steady with a new release coming out of Deki Wiki along with support for customers. 2008 is the year for Deki Wiki to explode in popularity 🙂
I’ve been working with my brother a lot too lately on his recent addition to his business of live performance art. He does a painting live in front of an audience to music and in about 6 minutes. The last one he did, he painted the drawing upside down and then turned it right side up at the end and everyone in the crowd was stunned. I’m going to post his videos up here once I get them.
Other than that the holidays are looking fun and I’m excited to see everyone.
Tech Crunch just did a post about a newly added feature to Google Search that allows you to search for flight status by typing in your airline and flight number. I decided to show a few more unknown shorcuts for Google search:
Calculator – If you type any equation into Google’s search box, it will automatically solve it for you. Try 5*2+9 Also the calculator function allows you to do conversions of measurements and weights See here for full list of supported functions
Currency Conversion – Ever wanted to know how many dollars equal a Euro? You can easily do so by typing in 1 EURO in USD this works for all supported currencies
Define – Google Search can act as a dictionary too. type define: and then add the word you want to define, Google will pull up multiple source(if available) with definitions of the word available. Example define: Google
Number Searching – need to see the status of your package that was shipped, patent that was filed, or VIN of your vehicle. Here are examples of how to do that:
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UPS tracking numbers
example search: “1Z9999W99999999999”
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FedEx tracking numbers
example search: “999999999999”
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USPS tracking numbers
example search: “9999 9999 9999 9999 9999 99”
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Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers
example search: “AAAAA999A9AA99999”
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UPC codes
example search: “073333531084”
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Telephone area codes
example search: “650”
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Patent numbers
example search: “patent 5123123” Remember to put the word “patent” before your patent number.
Stock Quotes – Type the ticker symbol in and the first result will be a summary with a link to the full analysis, provided by Google Finance
Weather – Type in Weather and your city and it will give you the forecast for the next couple of days along with a current status. Ex: Weather San Diego, CA
Q and A – Ask google a question and it will try to answer it with the best available resource.
I hope this provides a few minutes of entertainment and usefulness.
There are many services available that allow your IP to be blocked by surfing the web through their site. Also configuration like cookie management and javascript blocking are included to. These services are good for sneaking around the web.
Here are a couple of sites that you can surf the web undetected:
Read Write Web wrote an article about the next killer app by Google and suggested that it should be an accounting package. There were some good comments about fear of financial records on the web. I feel the same way about this and believe there are way too many intricacies to accounting software that could be fulfilled in a supplemental SaaS offering.
In my opinion, the next killer App that Google should develop is a CRM. With Salesforce’s strong hold on the market and companies like Zoho trying to come out with a competing product, Google can position themselves to come out with a dynamic and reasonable alternative, not to mention make it a lot simpler to use. Let’s face, SalesForce has some usability issues.
I keep up on RSS feeds of my favorite blogs to keep up on technology. I share all of my favorite posts in my RSS feed that can be viewed under resources on the right hand side of my blog or you can view it here.
I wanted to give a shoutout to one of my favorite blogs out there. Lifehacker, you never cease to amaze me. Thank you for always putting out awesome posts.
I also wanted to point out another Blog that I will be contributing to on occasion: The MindTouch Blog