Invite Share - Everyone is invited!

Looking for invites to Grandcentral.com, Google's new call fowarding service?  How about Joost, streaming TV?  48 different invite codes are available here. 

Link to Invite Share - Everyone is invited!

What jobs are Iraq war veterans coming back to?

Letter openers apparently... according to Remote Control Mail's CEO.  Interesting and useful service too.

We are entering into an agreement with a national network of non-profit employers of disabled veterans to supply us with scanner operators nationwide - all of whom will have DOD clearances. When this arrangement is up and running then customers will actually be able to select “conventional” or “super high security” scanning, the latter being handled by mostly-Iraq war veterans who have Secret or Top Secret clearances. They will be issued pocketless uniforms (similar to the kind used in federal vaults), will be disallowed from having any personal items like cell phones, or even pen and paper in the operating area, and will be working in a “clean room” environment. The entire process while the envelope is open will be filmed on a proprietary witness video system we have developed called Documentary(tm) which literally makes a movie of your document being handled, and that movie can be watched up to 30 days after a document has been scanned, through the web, by the customer. We set out to really, really solve this problem once and for all, and for the law firms, healthcare facilities and government agencies already testing our service or planning to use it in the future, this is a key feature. No one else does this that we’re aware of. Stay tuned to the website to find out when we bring this element of the service live. Besides the “double bottom line” of creating high paying jobs for disabled vets, this offering makes it possible for government agencies to meet their “set aside quotas”, and in some cases is the only way they can contract out their mail processing to the private sector.

Source: Remote Control Mail: Check Your Postal Mail on the Web

10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals — Facebook Observer

Voicemail, Conference Calls, Biz Cards, Phone books, referrals, testimonials, market research, biz profiles, all you need is a 1-800 number and an assembly line and you're good to go.

10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals

Source: 10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals — Facebook Observer

Presentation Zen: Living large: "Takahashi Method" uses king-sized text as a visual

Good (1)

Takahashi uses only text in his slides. But not just any text — really big text. Huge text. Characters of impressive proportion which rarely number more than ten, usually fewer. The goal, he says, is to use short words rather than long, complicated words and phrases. Last year Takahashi gave a presentation at a conference using the method or style that he created. People were deeply impressed by his presentation — not the content, but his slides. Over the past year, blogs across Japan have been buzzing about Takahashi and his presentation style and people began calling it the "Takahashi Method."

Source: Presentation Zen: Living large: "Takahashi Method" uses king-sized text as a visual

Dear Me: Get to work | 43 Folders

How to delegate to your future self... 

Pack winter clothes in corner of bedroom into airmail box

Ask Bob for the date of the next website revamp meeting

Review “Page Design” book for three examples of three column page layout

Send Cherry second quarter income statements (doc link in notes)

Source: Dear Me: Get to work | 43 Folders

Mini-Microsoft on Halo 3

 My wife and I went to Costco last weekend and I dropped an XBox 360 Elite into the shopping cart... and then took it out after reading the $500+ price tag.

Somehow I think I'll stick with MAME games and SNES on my PSP for awhile longer... though I really want to check out the new Halo 3.

Master Chief, Baby! Do we have a big release of some sort next week? I think we'll see a lot of sick days on the 25th and 26th. Followed by the high-fiving neener-neeners from Xbox leadership about having a profitable quarter. Yeah. $250,000,000 in the bank, what, mmm, $5,750,000,000 to go?

Source: Mini-Microsoft

Once you go Mac - Blog Maverick

Yet another net geek is raving about the Mac.  Mark Cuban's a fan.

Is the computer turning into an appliance?

Its not that there arent hassles with the Mac. There are two. One there isnt a version of Outlook for the Mac. As someone who has more than 10 years and gigabytes worth of emails in multiple outlook files, the concept of exporting and importing wont fly. So i am keeping my PC Desktop purely to download my emails into Outlook so I have a master database. But I only do so after deleting unimportant emails from the server using my Macbook.
The 2nd problem is the lack of the right mouse click. I know its a Mac thing to only have one button, but its a hassle. Sure there are work arounds, none of which are quick and easy for a longtime PC user.
Both of these are easily offset by 3 simple Mac elements that make me very happy.
First is that when I close my MacBook without turning it off, it doesn't lose power. It can sit there for hours and then work when I open it up.
The 2nd is that it rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months.
Finally, i LOVE the fact that it boots up in 1/1000000000 of the time it takes my PC. It probably will add years to my life .. (ok an exaggeration).
Im not an Apple fanboy, but I love me some MacBook

Source: Once you go Mac - Blog Maverick

Wavesmash's Jottit Page: Home

Create a web site by filling in a text box.  Of course, the text box has instant preview, supports html tags, did I mention the instant preview?

It is one of the most minimalist web sites out there, next to www.zombo.com

http://jottit.com/

Link to Wavesmash's Jottit Page: Home

scottberkun.com » Asshole driven development

Which methodology does your company use?  I have worked for a couple of companies that used this one... 

Asshole Driven development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

If you liked it, there's over 200 more where that came from...

scottberkun.com » Asshole driven development

Facebook backers create $10 mln fund for start-ups: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Need another reason to build a disruptive Facebook app?  How about $100k? 

Facebook is working with its primary venture backers, Accel Capital and The Founders Fund, to create a way for people with new ideas to receive an initial funding grant of $25,000 to $250,000 that does not require the entrepreneur to give up any equity in the business they create, as venture capital does.

"We are looking for innovative and disruptive things," Mark Zuckerberg said of projects the grants might fund, in a keynote presentation at TechCrunch 40, a conference showcasing Web start-ups taking place this week in San Francisco.

Source: Facebook backers create $10 mln fund for start-ups: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Over 200+ Mac Apps

For whenever I decide to break down and buy a Macbook Pro. 

Software

Bootstrapper » Top 100 Foods to Improve Your Productivity

Will I eat Eggplant?  Probably no?

Everything else on the menu sounds good to me.

Besides eating to lose weight, why not eat to improve your productivity? Whether the following foods help sharpen your eyesight, keep your brain focused, or just fill you up without making you feel lazy, you’ll find they’ll help you keep your day on track.

Source: Bootstrapper » Top 100 Foods to Improve Your Productivity

Jerry Seinfeld likes prison?

This time management tip sounds like something out of Shawshank Redemption.  Oddly enough, didn't Seinfeld end with the gang going to prison?

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain." He said again for emphasis.

Source: Motivation: Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret - Lifehacker

Ted On Flex

 

Microsoft has removed my example streaming SWF/FLV from their streaming service. Looks like I violated the terms of service in streaming FLV and SWF files.
The example no longer works but this is how it was done:
1. Create an account over at Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service.
2. Upload this ZIP file.
3. Looks at the results page look at the JS in the last call:
function CreateSilverlight(){
Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx({
source: "streaming:/27498/SWFStreaming",parentElement: Wrapper_SWFStreaming});
}
4. Take the highlighted URL and open it in a browser like so:
http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/27498/SWFStreaming/iframe.html
5. You will get a 301 redirect, similar to how YouTube.com works to a much longer URL into the cluster at the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service.
6. Chop off the files and you are in the ZIP file you uploaded as a file system. From here on out simply call the URLS relative to the base path.
For all the talk about how the formats work together, it is a shame they do not allow the streaming service to serve FLV and SWF.
So this is the end of the experiment. A day of blogging and exploring on one of Microsoft's most state of the art services. At the end I guess I am little frustrated at the lack of a solid definition of "Streaming" by either company. "Streaming" means different things to different people. I guess in some cases "Streaming" is progressive download, "Streaming" is playback before the file is complete, full control over skipping forward in a file without delay, or others full RTSP and other protocols.

Source: Ted On Flex

Is the CN Tower shrinking?

My wife's father's brother (uncle-in-law?) worked on the electrical system for the CN Tower's exterior lights.  A former co-worker's uncle's father helped to install the antenna.  Small world just got smaller.

The Burj Dubai tower is now 555 metres (1,831.5 feet) tall and has surpassed the 553-metre- (1,824.9-feet) CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, which held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure since 1976, developers Emaar Properties said in a statement.

Source: Dubai tower now world's tallest free-standing structure - Yahoo! News

Girl Power - Whateverlife.com - Ashley Qualls - Nabbr

She's raking in $70k/month with sponsorship and her site gets more traffic than Oprah.   Makes her money from Google AdSense and Valueclick traffic, and direct sponsors.  And Nabr, which bills itself as the 1st Social Promotion Network.  (Sounds like Amway but without the expensive products.)

She contracted some developers from India to build her a sitebuilder app - that raked in 28,000 users in the first week.  She's brought in more than $1 million dollars - and she doesn't even have a drivers license yet.

And she won't sell.

Whateverlife just sort of happened, another accidental Web business. Originally, Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14 as a way to show off her design work. "I was the dorky girl who was into HTML," she says. It attracted zero interest beyond her circle of friends until she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. So many classmates asked her to design theirs that she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens.

By 2005, her traffic had exploded; she needed her own dedicated server. Ashley, who had bartered site designs for free Web hosting, couldn't afford the monthly rental, not on her babysitting income. Her Web host suggested Google AdSense, a service that supplies ads to a site and shares the revenue. The greater the traffic, the more money she'd earn.

"She would look up how much she had made," says Jen Carey, 17, one of her closest friends. "It was $50. She thought that was the coolest."

I'm doing what everyone says they want to do, "live like there's no tomorrow." --Ashley in her blog, "The Daily Life of a Simple Kind of Gal," July 1, 2006; 2:43 a.m.

The first check, her first paycheck of any kind, was even cooler: $2,790.

"It was more than I made in a month," her mother says.

Source: Girl Power - Whateverlife.com - Ashley Qualls - Nabbr

» My Media Center parts and price list | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

 

Several readers have written to request a list of parts and prices that I used for my Vista Media Center system. Here it is, with the caveat that the prices are bound to fluctuate. A few parts are more expensive now than they were then, some are cheaper, and the Dell C521 has been discontinued but can still be ordered from the Dell Outlet.

The system itself cost a total of $668. Here’s a detailed breakdown of parts and specs.

Dell Dimension C521: $422 (Dell Outlet)

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+
• 1GB DDR2 RAM 667MHz
• 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
• Onboard 10/100 Ethernet
• 160GB SATA drive (replaced with Samsung drive below)
• 16X DVD+/- RW w/ double layer write capability

Samsung HD501LJ 500GB SATA drive: $110 (Newegg.com)

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE: $32 (Amazon.com)

Sound Blaster Digital I/O Module: $16 (Amazon.com)

AverTV Combo PCIe (m780): $88 (Amazon.com)

In addition to those parts, I used a Logitech Harmony Remote 680 that I purchased for a bargain $105 in late 2005. It’s no longer made, but Logitech makes plenty of other Harmony models that should work just fine. They just won’t have the green button.

I also added a Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 Bluetooth keyboard. At $124 (Amazon.com), it’s a little pricey, but it’s so smoothly integrated with Media Center that it’s worth it to me. Any Bluetooth keyboard should work just fine.

Update: As a reader pointed out via e-mail, I left out one part, a Media Center remote control with IR receiver. These are typically available for around $30; this model from PC Alchemy has all the hardware needed to connect additional IR emitters to two TV tuners. Although I use the Logitech Harmony 680 remote, the IR receiver is required to operate the system via the 10-foot interface.

» My Media Center parts and price list | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The FreeMiniMac has arrived and will the fun ever start?

So I'm thinking about a Mac. My sister just recently purchased a Macbook Pro, and even though I didn't bother trying it (I was afraid I would like it and get one) I still wanted to get more info just in case I may want one in the future. Plus I liked the box. Scott Hanselman (post below) talks about the OOBE (out of box experience). I like the ITBE (In the Box Experience) better right now. You can use it as a travel case.

To me, owning a Mac is like my dream of owning a Mercedes. I go to work every day in my Nissan. It works. It's worlds better than my Ford Escort was. I don't have to work for a mechanic to keep it running. I can't justify upgrading to something with a leather seat that remembers my last ass groove position, and wipers on the headlights.

Plus the parts on a Mercedes can be expensive. And the oil change is $300 at the dealer, not that I would go there. (Applecare anyone? If your warranty comes in it's own fancy box you know there is trouble a-brewin')

Plus you have to pay extra for a nice case to keep the nice shiny finish clean. I bought a pressure washer for the Nissan that gets about 3 uses a year... and for some reason I have 2 power car wax buffers that aren't even used. Somehow I think a Silver Mercedes, like a Silver Mac, would cry out to stay clean and scratch free.

I work everyday on a PC. It doesn't work how I like it some (lately most) of the time, but I can't justify spending my own money to get what would really be just a toy for me.

Anyway, for the time when I go ahead and buy a Mac (or when MS ends up buying them out to upgrade Silverlight to OS-X) here is a link to some software with reviews.

I bought a powerbook a few weeks months ago just for the sake of deviation and exploration. .NET day and night felt a little droll even with the new things.
My take: oh my, just typing on the thing is somehow more pleasurable than typing on my wonderful A64 X2 pc will all the goodies. There's just some sort of feng shui that XP lacks in its core.
(That said, some of the keyboard nav still vexes me...)
So I decided to try and do everything that wasn't work on OS X for a bit.
I've been "using" since Win286. Flipping everything on to the mac really wasn't that hard.
I was actually amazed at how much decent small-shop software there is over there. I knew about a few things, but most of the time, when I went searching for something I liked on Windows for OS X, I found something close enough or better.
I don't know what you've found so far, but here are some of my random notes, they're free :)
- iTerm - good term replacement. Free.
- The dock goes on the left. Iirc you have widescreens, this placement seems natural to me.
- Quicksilver is totally cool, they hype seems warranted. I mainly use it launch apps right now (it makes the dock sort of an afterthought for all those second level apps you might go to the start menu for or whatever), but I've done some of the 10 minute tutorials and it's pretty cool... Nothing really like it on Windows right now.). Double command key triggering is my flavor. Free.
- FolderShare is awesome, I use it to synch my mac to a windows server that can then do the network backup thing along with the rest of my crap.
- quicksilver purists seem to grouse about spotlight a lot, but I actually use it a fair amount, it works better than any of the search I've used on windows (but I haven't used X1).
- TextMate - I thought I would use it just for ruby, but I ended up using it for text, html, everything. It's my emeditor for mac. It's even better actually, very CR-like with it's templating. Would love to see a windows version. Trial -> $45ish
- CSSEdit - best css editor I've ever used, better than TopStyle. Trial -> $25.
- RSyncx - This took some doing, but my mac came with a bad memory slot so it went back to Apple after the first week. RsyncX will let you clone your full drive onto a firewire (or other available) drive as a bootable copy. I don't know if this is as important to have laying around as it was with OS9 and earlier. Anyway, I ended up springing for one of the LaCie externals because my USB enclosures and firewire enclosures weren't working with RSyncX. Basically it was finnicky--buy other things like Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper flailed for me. Free.
- Adium - Coolest looking IM client I've ever used. Makes trillian look like a pig. Gratis.
- NNW. First I was a NewsGator lover, then FeedDemon won me over. Then I started dinking with NNW and, there it is again, it just feels nicer. I'm a NG subscriber, grandfathered or whatever... I emailed them, they will have it linked into NGO soon, but no dates. They don't have a licensing route for existing NGO subscribers yet, their advice was use NNW Lite for a few months (or pony up the $25 on the old Ranchero site)
- Speaking of NNW, Brent Simmons (the developer) is manning the support channels over on the NewsGator forums if you want to ask him about how Mac devs really do it (this is not a bumper sticker suggestion)
- I don't know how they do it. I like TextMate and I've got my little rails rig working well and so on. I do a lot of typing, I have to lean on tdd so fricking hard because I feel naked without a nice compile check, intellicrack, etc. Basically I run my tests after every third keystroke, or so it feels.
- Consolas, Vera Sans Mono... Must have even with nice complement of mac fonts (Lucida Grande is great). Mac proportions are different, so sometimes Vera is too big, Consolas to stout. Georgia is great on any platform or serif.
- DEVONthink - sort of like OneNote. I like it better, but I'm actually not a huge OneNote fan (I want to like it, It's just a little too loose for me, I like more folders and notes). I'm using it for a lot of other pim-type stuff and as a document manager. Was $70, overpriced but good.
- Cocoalicious. Don't know if you do the deli.cio.us thing. Like Bloc Party, I didn't get this the first time around, but it won me over (and I own OnFolio). Cocoalicious adds a lot of automation hooks, most notably you can do post to blog from in NNW and throw it into delicious. Free.
- Fugu. Tried transit. Tried Yummy FTP. I have an account with TextDrive so I do the scp/sftp thing for file transfer. Transit really barfed a lot and the other two didn't. Fugu's free but awkward and doesn't do remote editing that well (WinSCP blows all three away for my money). Maybe Yummy is worth paying for, jury's out over here.
- ecto - the Ranchero folks make a blog client that also might come into NGO subs hands someday. Ecto is one of the better blogjet type clients, I've used but it's been a bit flaky for me lately--it's wysiwyg/html modes can be annoying for things like bullets. I may revisit this one, but it has some neat things that some of the Window clients could learn from, at least as far as UX and tagging go.
- Mail- Mail.app is neat sometimes, I've used t-bird for personal mail for a while. But my friend/host moved me onto Exchange for personal mail recently and Entourage->Exchange is the best thing going. It's not as good as Outlook, but it's pretty much better than everything else (and now I have contacts, tasks, cal, etc for personal--before it was tedium on my main box because of profile limits).
- CandyBar - It's not a mac if it's not pretty with cute icons.
- RDC, VNC for remote. Regular old shell beats putty any day. Keys can be a pain, SSHKeyManager helps with this.
- Xcode. Do this first, do this before Fink. Save mostly obfuscated headaches. Once I got Xcode installed, Fink went on fine and then I could start fixing OSX's default ruby install.
- I switched up and installed lighttpd to do my local webdev instead of apache. Lighty is pretty cool. I still haven't grokked this whole fastcgi world where we bang rocks together and don't have a reliable worker process.
- CocoaMySql makes the shame of working with mysql more bearable.
- Synergy is your MaxiVista. I haven't gotten to this yet, but it's apparently about the same deal. There's a service piece and a Cocoa GUI piece iirc.
- KVM. I ended up getting this addlogix powerreach unit. I'm not wild about it, the keystroke switching is cumbersome compared to the Belkin SOHO I've used for several years and liked. I couldn't find something that was dual-dvi, usb k+m and supported at least 1920x1200. This was my best option.
It's good, but it was pricey at like 250 and I use the front buttons to switch. Also, some of the higher order mouse buttons get caught in the wash.
I lost mouse 5 and 6 or 6 and 7 on my logitech on the mac, they work directly. Good news was: at least I didn't need to buy a bunch of kvm cables, just another dvi cable.
I didn't intend to right a novel, but you're "good tools people", what the hell. You'll find one thing useful in here, you've done the same for a lot of the other folks out there :)

Source: Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The FreeMiniMac has arrived and will the fun ever start?

Facebook is a pyramid scam

With built-in email functionality. 

Facebook is a multilevel marketing platform where you agree to pay attention to people's gestures in the hopes that those people will pay-attention to your gestures in the future. It's a gesture bank.

Source: Social Network Exhaustion (or Facebook Bankruptcy Redux)