October 2006

I got to do another photo shoot yesterday with some super cool soon-to-be rockstars. The Skullcranes will rock your world. Check out this preview from the shoot.

You can see the whole shoot here. It’s a little dark, by I’m a photoshop kid, so I can fix anything.

I just found this neato music service. It’s called SpotDJ. It hooks up with iTunes and lets you record a DJ spot about the song you are listening to. If there is already a spot, you get to listen, you can also add your own even if a song has a spot. It’s a chance for everybody to be a DJ and share that with the world. I’m having a fun morning, I’ve already spotted three songs. I’m DJ evoljennifer (as if you couldn’t guess that!).

And it’s definitely adhering to all social media principles, because when I joined I got to be a featured new member on the home page.

And if you squint real hard, you can see my latest spot in the lower left hand corner.

All these acquisitions of small companies into large these days reminds me of the same feeling I used to get when one of my favorite indy bands would get big. You’d think, I’m glad for the band to have gotten successful but I’m afraid about what kind of quality will now come out based on this new found success.

This Engadget story about Slim Devices today made me feel that way. I’m glad for the success of Slim Devices and the team and I have nothing against their new parent Logitech, it just means things will change. Of course, things always change, but big acquisitions are pretty much a guarantee of change. Good luck Slim team, I’ll be pulling for you. (especially since your devices are peppered throughout my home….)

Sometimes the free things are so much more trouble than they are worth. We had a very lovely and very old laptop in our kitchen that died. It became very difficult to not have a computer in that room anymore. (yes, we are addicts….) So this caused the research and decision making around yet another computer purchase. We decided on the Mac mini.

We went to one of the many local Apple stores to make this purchase. When it was all rung up, it cost $500 more than it would cost online. We had to tell them we weren’t going to buy it here because we could get the same thing from the online store for $500 less. However, the trip to the Apple store made us aware of the ‘free printer with computer purchase’ deal. I hadn’t noticed that in my online shopping. Armed with this new knowledge and a much better price point, we headed home to make the purchase online.

3 weeks later everything arrived. I finally got around to filling out the rebate form for the printer. Guess what, it’s a printer/scanner and the glass is broken. I hadn’t opened the thing yet because it was a bonus, not something we needed, so it wasn’t set up yet. Well being on an early morning tear to take care of some administrative activities in the household before starting my work day, this was my task of choice.

I called Apple 20 minutes ago about getting a replacement printer, I’m still on hold. Yes, I’ve talked to someone, she keeps checking back and letting me know ‘it will be just a few more minutes’ and ‘our systems are giving us some trouble…..’. So this free printer so far has cost in my time almost as much as it was worth in the first place.

As my grandma always used to say, ‘Kid, there’s no free lunch.’ It’s still true, more true every day.

Smoke and mirrors. It’s not real. All the images you see that make you feel like you aren’t one of the beautiful people, are fake. Nobody is one of the beautiful people.

Sometimes it is good to see how sausage is made.

Two examples of greed that pretty much messed up the people being greedy. If you have so much, my question to you is, why do you need so much more? Here are some examples of why it seems to be a bad idea:

Friendster was greedy. They could’ve sold to Google for 30 million. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Hmmmmm, wonder how much they ended up with? Probably not 30 mil.

And the leader of our fair health insurance giant, William McGuire, got a little greedy too. Turns out that multi-million dollar salary wasn’t enough. He had to get into the nitty gritty and back date options to pump it up just a little more. Consequences look to be a bit more dire for him. They are deciding as I write if he gets to keep his job. That might not be the worst of it either when all is said and done.

Why do people have to be so GREEDY? It’s nice to see consequences for this greed action come to fruition once in awhile.

My friend Les is an amazing musician. I’m not just saying that because I’m biased. He’s really talented. You can see for yourself.

I found this article about my cell phone company today. (Skip down to the second paragraph) You can get a service for your cell phone to get unlimited data downloads. However, if you read the story of Cringely, you’ll find that ‘unlimited’ to the cell phone company has a different definition than the dictionary.

You just can’t hold on indefinitely to power in the United States. Things were looking pretty grim these past 6 years. So many very bad things have been ignored because of the fear factor. But you just can’t stop the salaciousness of a scandal such as the page scandal going on right now. No matter what you do.

Somehow gutting civil liberties, ignoring warnings of terroist threats, going to war because you wanted to and lying about it, cutting taxes and putting the country into unconscionable debt, and outting CIA agents and just wasn’t enough to make people wake up.

But it really hard to get behind a party that thinks its not that big of a deal to have powerful people soliciting illeagal acts from children. Maybe, just maybe this is the one that broke the camels back? The thing that might just save us, it’s really hard for our ‘beloved’ press to ignore a ’sex scandal’. Way to go Foley and all the others that knew about it and just looked the other way. You may have just started the turn. It’s really hard to hold on to power indefinitely.

Today I discovered Netvibes. It’s like the google home page, but i like it better. I’ve been playing with it for about an hour and i’ve found almost all the tools and content i need. These aggregated views of the Internet are definitely where it’s at. You can suck in everything you are interested in. It’s the come to me web and I like it.