Happy New Years

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.

Have a Great End to 2007.

Kudos to AOL...

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!

Download Winamp for Free!

Will host File(s) for Free...

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.

I look forward to people's submissions.

Dell is coming out with Gutsy Gibbon

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.

Upcoming Holidays and Craziness

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.

The Fun shortcuts of Google Search

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:

•	UPS tracking numbers	example search: "1Z9999W99999999999"
•	FedEx tracking numbers	example search: "999999999999"
•	USPS tracking numbers	example search: "9999 9999 9999 9999 9999 99"
•	Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers	example search: "AAAAA999A9AA99999"
•	UPC codes	example search: "073333531084"
•	Telephone area codes	example search: "650"
•	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.

Be Sneaky around the Holidays

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:

The Cloak
Megaproxy
Shadow Surf
Anonymouse.org

Enjoy being sneaky :)

MindTouch Made the Final 3...

MindTouch Deki Wiki made the final three for the Open Web awards for the category of Best Application/Widgets. Help Deki Wiki win by voting for us here: http://mashable.com/2007/12/17/owa-voting-finalists-1/

Next Killer App for Google...

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.

My Favorite Posts on the Web

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

See my most recent post on the new extension making it easy to embed Google Charts into Deki Wiki.

FireFox 3 Beta Portable

I recently downloaded FireFox 3 beta portable and I am impressed with how much faster it is and the small features like removing the popup remember password dialog and instead having a non intrusive slide down dialog. Definitely give it a try. I'm looking forward to upgrading completely so that web apps like SalesForce will run faster.

Take off hoser

Since it is getting close to Christmas I will be heading close to the Great White North, so I had to throw this up. This is an awesome song.

Digitalized Catalog of DVD collection

Roy, one of the Developers at MindTouch, did an impressive blog post on how he was able to catalog his DVD collection using bar code scanners and a software program. My hat goes off to him...this is a very impressive and easy way to categorize DVDs, Music, dare I say anything that can be scanned.

Wish I would have had this 15 years ago when I started my Baseball card catalog in an Access database. I gave up after my 105th card input. :)

Christmas Post

This is my annual christmas post in lieu of a christmas card, cause I like preserving trees and saving money on postage.

This year has been quite the year for events. I moved out to San Diego with MindTouch, got married, and traveled all over the place for work and fun. LVTC hit its 100th post and is on track to hit 200 in the next couple of months. Deki Wiki has been exponentially growing in number of downloads and popularity.

I want to take this time to thank everyone that has been reading my blog, whether you are old or new to it, I like to think that I have some fun and interesting things to say.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite holiday songs that for the first time will be true this year as I will be traveling back to MN for Christmas.(ignore all the pics of elvis...it is the song not the video)

Dog humping a kid playing wii - Disturbingly Hilarious!

Nothing more needs to be said:

Everyone can take a cue from Lank Thompson...

Here is a tutorial on how you can become a better actor...by being a handsome one:

Web 2.0 bubble video - Hilarious

Here is a video that you may have seen about the Web 2.0 bubble...pretty funny

Everyone Celebrate the Repeal of Prohibition!!!

I wanted to post this before the end of the day so everyone can have a drink in celebration. Today is the celebration of the Repeal of Prohibition. Thank you Patriots for fighting the man to allow us to drink.

Addicted to Askville!!

I recently started posting to Askville at Amazon and man is it addicting. First off they have incentive for you to post and answer by give you "gold" points...you can use these points to get amazon gift cards or shirts and eventually it looks like they will be opening Questville, which allows you to spend your points on more things.

My hat goes off to Amazon for this creative way to grow and foster a community. The design of the site is good except for a couple of suggestions:

The editor kind of stinks...no way to access source to modify tables.
Too many duplicates, the service doesn't check if what you are about to post as a question has been asked...take a lesson from Digg

Copy and Paste Cleanup

There are so many times in a given day that I have to deal with Microsoft's formatting of their documents when trying to copy and paste them into other applications. I found a slick utility for Windows that runs in the background and automatically cleans content on the clipboard.

It is called Clipboard Text Scrubber Check it out!

Walmart gets a couple of points in my book

I've always been down on Walmart for various reasons including running out small businesses, questionable union breaking, and substandard wages and benefits for their employees. A couple of stances recently put them a couple of notches higher in my book though. Their support of a Linux based desktop(see post on gOS) and their support for anti-DRM music. Granted these are just stances and it doesn't change how they do business...but it is good to see them moving in a direction of support for the "open" movement of knowledge and technology.

gOS is awesome!

I had the chance to download the gOS live cd image over the weekend to check it out and man was I impressed. It is a slick operating system which piggy backs off of Ubuntu. It is the operating system that runs on the super cheap but everything you need PC for $200 at Walmart. News has it that next year there will be a gOS laptop.

I am an avid linux enthusiast and believe that Ubuntu is on the right path to being a great operating system. The one fatal flaw that I see for Ubuntu is lack of compatibility for wireless cards. This isn't a flaw on Ubuntu's end, more so on the end of the manufacturers of the wireless cards that don't take the time to come out with compatible drivers. I'm spent many a weary nights working on making the wireless work on a newly formatted and installed ubuntu laptop to find myself going back to XP out of shear lack of time.

I know there are programs that work with certain wireless cards, I guess my hardware is just old and I'm trying to hard to not have to upgrade.

Living Vicariously Through Corey is shorter!!

I decided to run my url through a shortening service so that people can find it easier. Here is the new url for LVTC: http://lvtc.notlong.com

This is manageable and easier to remember...also my current url has tendencies for spelling errors :)

It is live now so feel free to use it

Weather Comparison

I just saw a video that actually compared where I used to live and where I live now. Where I used to live, Minneapolis, is getting about 10 inches of snow and out here in San Diego we are getting rain, but it has stopped now and is 60 with partly cloudy skies...crazy isn't it?