I like pants. And other inane things.

I like pants.

Jam is good.

Sometimes I stare at the sun.

Ooohhhh. . .bubbles.

Hi doggy. Woof!

Walk to store.

Games are fun.

The ball is blue.

And round.

And bouncy.

Kitty has a rough tongue.

Would you like to play?

Run away!

I read. A lot. Usually at least one book a week. I recently read Tim Ferris’s The Four-hour Workweek. It was great validation. You could say that I’ve been on a mini-retirement for 18 months now.

I save a lot and invest wisely — in that sense I’m very conservative with my money. But I also like to enjoy my career and personal life. So I work hard, and then take time to detox or work on something I enjoy. In that sense I’m very aggressive with my money. It was nice to read a bestseller where someone espouses the same ideals.

Thanks to Amazon’s “you might also like” feature, I also purchased Your Portable Empire.

Pointless drivel. Easily summed up in four to five pages. I sincerely feel dumber for having read it. I kept expecting it to get better, but it got more pointless as the chapter numbers crept higher. I’ve got brain cells trying to shake off the fog as I write this.

Midway through the book, we began to be treated with 1-page chapters — really, 1 page — that said something like “I’m drinking coffee and typing this chapter on my laptop. Ain’t life grand?”

Gee, Kenny, look at my shiny new bike!

So I submit to you my outline for my new book project. If you can help me get it published, I’ll give you half the royalties. I’ll fill in the gaps obviously, but I can’t promise much. Apparently the bar is set very low these days anyway.

Here’s to our good fortunes.

Modu: Genuinely interesting and slick mobile phone / gadget

Modu is a tiny, credit card-sized, powerful mobile phone. Slip the modu into one of many very well-designed “jackets” to give it a new look and new functionality. These modular components remind me of the concept behind Buglabs, but whereas Buglabs had more geek appeal, with open source hardware and software, modu has much more chic appeal. These things look slick.

When is a phone not a phone? When it has “mates,” which morph the modu into various consumer electronic devices. All modu jackets are universally interchangeable, allowing you to swap modu jackets at any time, and according to the web site, with anyone. It also sounds as if some of these modu’s will be artist-branded and come pre-loaded with applications and music. I couldn’t find any price estimates to speak of, but product is supposed to ship at the end of 2008.

Photos can’t do the concept justice. Check out the Flash intro to see how these work.

Pumbby: get paid for watching ads on your mobile phone

This is a new delivery twist on an existing concept. Pumbby pays users EUR 0.44 for each ad they view, up to a maximum of 10 a day. When you create your account, you specify how many ads you’re willing to receive per day, and they arrive as text messages. Click the link to open your WAP browser and view what amounts to a full-screen banner ad.

At the current exchange rate, that’s roughly US$6.50 per day if you elect to receive all 10 messages, and I expect, if they have a large enough ad inventory to serve you 300 ads per month. That would certainly pay for that unlimited data bundle, and even justify that purchase of an iPhone.

Alas, Pumbby is only available on a limited number of networks, and apparently my phone can’t be pumbed. Pumbby is based in Brussels, which I had hoped would uncover some clues as to what the root “pumb” meant, as it seems to be used rather impartially as a noun, verb, and an adjective.

Hopefully Pumbby will soon hire a professional translator to clean up some of these gems:

• “For each visualized advertizing, you receive 44 €. You accept to receive advertizing and no advertizing messages on your mobile phone and, to thank you , you will receive money you can manage. “
• “to pumbb ? You would like to pumbb your mobile, very easy register you and discover how its walk! “

Somebody set us up the bomb, indeed!

Check out Pumbby

Heavy Cell Phone Use Linked To Cancer, Study Suggests

Wonder if it’s anything like that “link” found between cell phones and gas station fires.

Link: Heavy Cell Phone Use Linked To Cancer, Study Suggests.

Movie rental death match: Blockbuster Online vs. Netflix

I’m a huge fan of online movie rentals. It wasn’t many years ago that finding a good selection of DVD’s at a rental store was difficult. Remember that? When the “DVD section” was just one small rack in the corner? Once DVD’s became commonly available at stores, they were commonly unavailable by demand. Netflix enters the scene with their online rental service. Never go to the video store again, never wait in the weekend lines, get your movies fast. And Netflix dominated. In 2004, they held 90 percent of the online rental business. Of course, I wasn’t ready to give up that local access to movies, so I didn’t venture into a subscription until Blockbuster Online was released, and with it came quite a few exciting features.

I was reasonably happy with Blockbuster for well over a year, but then made the move to Netflix for comparison purposes. Then back to Blockbuster when the Total Access package came out (although it wasn’t branded as that at the time). Recently I decided to give the two a head-to-head comparison in a movie rental death match. I’ve used both services when they were immature and now again when they’ve matured and responded to competition with each other. What follows is my side-by-side comparison of these rental giants.

I’ve been asked why I didn’t include smaller rental houses like DVD Empire, or specialty house like GreenCine, in my comparison. Have you ever used those services? I have. They’re awful. Netflix and Blockbuster are the only two services that offer a consistent and high-quality user experience, it’s as simple as that.

[Read more]

Experience Counts

I’ll never delve into political commentary, but I had to post this. Love it.

Photo credit via PhotoBucket.

Nifty hack: turn text into images with CSS

This is a pretty slick CSS effect — hiding images in plain sight. If you’re using Safari or Firefox, this should work for you.

This post looks like plain text, right?
It is, except that many styles have been
 applied to the letters. See the styles
and the overall effect by selecting all
of the text in this paragraph.This post
looks like plain text, right? It is, exc
ept that many styles have been applied t
o the letters. See the styles and the ov
erall effect by selecting all of the tex
t in this paragraph.This post looks like
 plain text, right? It is, except that m
any styles have been applied to the lett
ers. See the styles and the overall effe
ct by selecting all of the text in this
paragraph.This post looks like plain tex

Interesting, no? Try it for yourself at http://metaatem.net/highlite/. You can select the text width and color to control resolution. BTW, this is the image that is being used as a source:

Format Change

I’ve gathered some informal feedback and have decided to alter slightly the content of my posts. In general, the detailed, specific posts are found by readers via Google — and many of those readers never return. The more generalized or basic posts are of interest to a broader cross section of regular readers and searchers.

For the most part, I avoid these general posts because I assume that they’ve already been written about ad nauseam — apparently this is a bad assumption. So expect coverage to be focused on the same types of topics, but also expect the average level of complexity to decrease somewhat.

If I’m missing the mark, or if you don’t agree, let me hear about it.

Answer to life, the universe, and everything

I was reading a blog entry today on Google search hacks, and it reminded me of a funny “calculation.” I tried to comment on the story, but comments were off, forcing me to bore you with this irrelevant tidbit.

It’s a book reference, and a very funny one if you recognize it, or just plain stupid if you don’t.

Do you think Google has the “answer to life the universe and everything?” Apparently, they do! How do you get your hands on this valuable information? Google it, of course.