Technically Speaking

Delivr, is so simple to understand even for an old guy like me! I feel old this morning and like somehow technology just passed me by last week.

Mashable already covered this site last week. I just found out about this morning, and have been geeking out over it for the past hour or so. Go there (above Mashable link) to get your invite code, I’m not that privileged to have any here to give away.

One of the reasons I have been writing about whatever I feel like lately and not so much tech is that to be totally honest and in your face blunt – show me something new. Show me something that gets me up out of my seat. Lately, there hasn’t been anything new or innovative to make me go, “Oh I want to spend the next few minutes of my time on earth writing about it!”

That changed today when I found Delivr and grabbed my own Delivr URL. Even brought up some good old tunes into my head. For those of you that are old enough to remember the song “Can U Deliver?” by Armored Saint, well than you know how motivated I feel this morning.

QR Codes have been something I have dismissed as for the retail industry. I even have dismissed them even though they have been getting coverage lately even on sites I respect such as CN. I actually was going to take a day off today from blogging about something. That was until I found a way to delivr content in a cool new and interesting way.

The world is tired of the next FriendFeed – Twitter App – Mashup – Radio Ga-Ga site – that pushes to your iPhone in 25 languages as well as Romanian! Seriously that is a content crapola festival. It’s not innovation, it’s as bad as being the next hair band was in the 80’s. These guys here, if you remember them – you know exactly what point I’m trying to get across.

No time to tell the story, but somehow years later my old band mate and I were in the house of Cirith Ungol – invited to try out. Long story, no time today! True story of course, truth is so much more fun than fiction.

Technically Speaking, give Delivr a try – if this old guy can get it within a few minutes, than just about anyone should be hit over the head with a hammer and totally get why this is a great concept, as well as for the first time in 2009 – F**king Interesting!

Well I couldn’t post something like the below without actually seeing how the #STL scene is currently. @JuliaDalton was pretty persuasive via her comment (as well as others!) and convinced me to give it another chance.

Twitter has seemingly changed the landscape, as last night’s tweetup here in the STL had quite a big turn out. I could only manage this picture of @ChrisRomer – the “official” photographer of the event.

At least there was some other people taking pictures such as @KarenSTL – and yes – my blog is being stupid for some reason. So go here to view them where they were posted.

Oh, and in this picture here, the person on the left is @michaelbuchanan. He had his startup featured on TechCrunch, and I knew him from when @gorman was still in the STL before he headed for the SF where he currently resides while trying to get ImThere going again.

There are talks of the next tweetup occurring on another Friday the 13th in March. Or at least there are ideas being tossed around currently as to whether Friday is the best day to do a tweetup. If you are on twitter in the STL, you need to join the STL Twitter Users Ning site that @DoctorSound set up.

Think That Labeling Is Harsh?

I just said this the other day, under the heading Sex And Your Cat?, but seriously – if we labeled these people as sex offenders or rather put them in the same category as sex offenders, this issue might not be so prevalent! It seems like hardly a day goes by and there is news about more animals being rescued from sicko’s like these people.

Maybe it’s because while I live in the city of St. Louis, well close enough to toss a football from my front porch into the city proper, we tend to forget that there are many rural locations locally that provide the cover needed to hide all sorts of activities. I think we hear more about these kind of animal abuses due to this rural / city mentality we live in.

You may think that I’m a big animal rights activist, and in fact, I’m not. I just get tired of reading the same abuse of animals story, seeing it on the nightly local news when I watch that, and generally think there needs to be something done.

Does that make me a big animal rights activist? Not really. Just tired of sickos getting all the media attention and than nothing being done to fix this problem! Labeling. I don’t agree with it totally, but than again in this case, maybe it will work to help stop the abuse.

Going to Court Soon?

Found this great line to state, from the mouth of a lawyer, so it has to be true. I was all good with it until the last line. So basically this guy’s lawyer said, “His client got a great deal, and he was guilty as charged!” Nice of him to out his client in such a quotable way.

I guess the thing to remember is: Don’t hire this guy as your lawyer. Or maybe you will want to hire him, he was able to secure his guilty client a sweetheart deal. And on Valentine’s weekend to boot! What a nice guy.

And now a little old news…

Please don’t make another comeback attempt. Just let it go, sit on the couch – and (((( poof )))), just like magic – you’ll be enshrined in Canton in 5 years. Seriously, athletes don’t realize that even though you can probably clean up in any pick up game with people your age, you don’t have what it takes to play at the NFL level. Hopefully Brett will actually sit it out for good now.

This blog here just came online yesterday for people interested in starting a new life as a franchise owner. It’s written by the #1 Lawyer in America (for 2005, 2006) in that particular legal niche of franchises(ing). So if you have been laid off, downsized, or out of work with some money to invest into a future business, you might want to read up on it.

Finally, it would be great to see SNL pick up on this and do one of those fake commercial skits. I think it would be great, and I think it has skit material written all over it.

Technically Speaking, if you didn’t know what day it was (besides Saturday!!), Happy Valentine’s Day!

Well at least according to this post, that I found this morning first on Om’s blog, there are more single females in the STL than single males. That lead me to the actual place where you can test for the best place to live.

Again, this map is from February 2007!

I wonder how many things have changed since that time? The thread of comments on this post are pretty interesting to read. You should scroll down and read about how all Australian men are the worst in bed! This poor girl was ready to move from down under to Minneapolis! Can anyone in the STL help out?

To continue on, you can take the Kiplinger test here. This test is suppose to pick the best city to live in by some choices you make and questions you answer. Real easy, and once you get your list back, you can keep going back and making adjustments. Kind of fun to play around with for a few minutes.

This lead me to find out more as far as the best cities to live, work, and play in for 2008. That list is right here. I haven’t lived nor have I desired to live in any of the top 10 list there, but it’s interesting to read why they were picked and for what reasons. They even had an honorable mention city by the reader’s. I guess the reader’s of Kiplinger didn’t agree with the above list either?

Iron Butt Rally

Now that I have had a day on tweetdeck, I’ll say it does rock over other twitter external tweeting systems. I highly recommend getting it and trying it out at least.

This morning, there was someone I started following the other day who said they didn’t know it was Friday the 13th. I of course called BS on that, being the person was a female figured they had to know that Valentines Day is the 14th and that is tomorrow! I was again proven wrong. After a short “@” exchange, we went to “DM“.

In that conversation, she had stated she wasn’t into V-Day at all, and I said casually “Oh, you are IBR?” IBR in my mind, because people that know me will verify that I do this all the time – make up 3 and 4 letter acronyms for phrases, means “In Between Relationships“. She came back a little bit later and said “Iron Butt Rally?” – with a link to IBR on this site. Apparently there are official definitions for 3 letter acronyms, so I better be careful. Well actually they might get a lot of submissions from me – yes, I submitted the above IBR definition.

Do You Know Everyone?

Total impossibility. Some people just happen to make connections, who have connections, and so on. That’s what LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace is really for. The connections you know can lead you to other connections. At least that is the main premise of social networking in that later part of this decade. At first glance in the early years of social networks they were only for hooking up with all your friends, but it’s become much bigger.

The reason I’m even talking about this is due to a tweet I received last night. The guy said, “Man you really do know everyone!” I had to deflate my own ego and let him in on the truth. The truth wasn’t a bad thing, just that on twitter you can have more than one identity. So if you know the real identity, you’ll probably know their alias twitter account. Mystery solved! I do not know everyone. Just a few people who in turn have linked to other people. It’s all in the master evil plan of social networking taking over the way we live heading into decade number 2 of the 21st Century.

Party over, oops out of time..

Enjoy your one second of Unix bliss this afternoon. At 6:31:30pm Eastern time – there should be a party, but you have exactly one second to celebrate it. If you are reading from the STL, you might be driving so a honk of the horn is just fine, please keep your eyes on the road!

Lastly, while it seems that twitter mania is about to go into overload, which should be followed by a crash around the corner soon, this I did find interesting. I wonder who in the STL is up to that challenge?

Technically Speaking, whether or not you are in an Iron Butt Rally mode, have a great Valentine’s Day weekend!

I just happened to be reading Dan Lyon’s article in Newsweek this morning. Of course by the time I just saw it in my feed (which I share here), I also saw that Dave Winer already wrote a good piece on this. It’s the truth, if you think in terms of TechCrunch numbers and making a few million off of blogging, it’s unfortunately– probably— and more than likely – NOT going to happen!

Being that Lookery use to be an ad network at one time, the publishers that made a ton of money had astronomical page views or ad impressions. Trust me, the only blog that ranks up there in that realm are blogs like TechCrunch, Dooce, etc. When Dan was talking in his article about 500,000 pv on the day he was outed, that is nothing in the ad world the way it stands today.

Yes, unlike Dave’s blog, I run the usual Google Ad Sense ads on here. I also run TextLinkAds. I’ve done the pay me to put your ad in a post thing for a few dollars. All of that and it pretty much just funds my iTunes music buys. That’s about it.

Now for A Little Music

Nothing wrong with that, my music still remains free and I’m not talking 1999 Napster free. Yes, I pay for music. Napster was fun back in the day, but hey – with the recording business changing, people should pay for the tunes. The only way to help this change is to support it by buying your music from artist sites, iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby, etc. The recording business won’t change until the people force it’s hand to make that change. Remember that!

Lookery Self Plug

What will change the way ads make money online? Well things such as targeting and re-targeting your users are ways to ensure that you get paid for your advertisements on your blog. Those are some of the more traditional ways to help the advertising on your blog. But unless you have big numbers, you just won’t make millions from advertising on your site.

Now there are other ways, if you happen to have a user registration system set up – you can definitely share anonymous data to make money. That is the big difference between Lookery’s services and other analytic companies. Plus most of the services we have are free – such as knowing your audience as well as ad controller which puts you in control of your ad networks. Which is another way to help you control your blog money making abilities.

Sex And Your Cat?

I shared this last evening on my tumbl site. I still agree with myself, as I would hope that I would, and that thought is – people like this really need to be tagged just like we tag sex offenders. Seriously.

Now some of you that hate animals may not really care. This couple was already cited in 2002 as doing something very similar in another city/county. They just moved, and did it again! What really gets me about this is that there is no signs of mental health? Come on now, you have cat sh*t on your shoes and pants. That is normal?

Before I Go

I made the switch to TweetDeck after seeing Marshall’s RWW write up yesterday. I originally tried TD for a sec when it first came out. Think it was before they had the AIR app, and I was a bit like – “hmmm… not bad, maybe check it out later.”

Later has arrived, and I can say it is pretty sweet. I did however see that they have 12seconds.tv integrated in and not Seesmic as is on Twhirl. Means I’ll eventually have to get over and get one of those accounts.

Technically Speaking, I need a cigarette! NOT! But I do seriously need one of those nasty commit lozenges. Hopefully the same readers that came by yesterday to disagree here, will be by today to leave more comments of disagreement on this ramble!

Stop Modern Day Slavery in the FLA

The nice thing about twitter is some times there is a call to action or a public awareness tweet. This deals with modern day slavery still happening down in Florida. You can get involved no matter where you are by letting Governor Charlie Crist know that this isn’t right. Very simple to do, takes a few seconds of your time to let him know that you have seen the above Palm Beach Post article and don’t appreciate the state of Florida turning a blind eye to this.

This is NOT Metal!

It’s decent music, but unfortunately it is NOT Metal. There is nothing wrong with not being metal. Nothing at all. The music here is pop/blues/country/rock. No way would anyone in their right mind classify it as Metal. The sad thing is, apparently Jim forgot what metal really was. Or his marketing team told him to drop the “M” word to sell more CD’s.

This debut CD is an intoxicating mix of pop/rock styles, from radio rock and pop ballads to metal

While Jim Allchin is probably a true RockStar being he was a top dog at Microsoft and now releasing a CD on a label even, he needs to realize – you can’t be all styles of music to appeal to everyone. It doesn’t work. What I heard in the preview is good stuff. Just NOT Metal.

Technically Speaking, just thought I’d let you know on this rainy day here in the STL, more like Portland, OR today.

Well there was a time probably back in 2007 when if you weren’t on twitter, it was due to you being one of my 6 readers from the STL. No problem, I understand and relate.

The STL is known world wide for being in the show me state, and that being said, is usually dead last at anything new or adopting anything new. People around these parts are well known for being the last in line, last to adopt, and even rejecting mass transportation which is something other big cities have made work in order to grow. No problem at all.

For some reason, obvious if you just read the above, I’ve totally given up on the STL as having any worthwhile reason to be outwardly social. In fact, anytime I go anywhere such as a gathering of people, I’m always asked the question, “So what do you do for a living?”

So of course I tell them about Lookery and how knowing your audience is something really cool to know. Blank stare. Than I say, “Oh, you have heard of Quantcast, Compete dot com, or Google Analytics, right?”

Usually get that same blank stare back at me accompanied with a nervous laugh. That usually tells me, “Give up, the person is from the STL, and if I say something about twitter, they’ll say back to me something to the effect of, “Twitcher? Is that a disease or something?” Sigh, mentally I’m never in the STL. Oh, that “where do you work” conversation is usually short and to the point. I usually end it by saying, “We offer free services, so sign up next time you are online.”

Now some of you will say that twitter, and all this social media stuff like blogs is for the young people. Well that’s funny, as one of the more interesting blogger’s I have added to my feed lately is reportedly 72 years old! And of course we all know Mr. Business Golf who sometimes even finds things before I hear about them or have the inkling to try them. I think he found Plurk first as an example. He isn’t young either, but yet has adopted being online as his home quite well. He even has a Ning site set up for his Business Golf Country Club.

Back to twitter in the STL.

For some reason, one of the few STL people that I follow on twitter re-tweeted a tweetup in the STL. I was like, “What??!??! No way!” I had to go investigate.

What I found was an actual Ning site for STL twitter users. Wow. I signed up and did find that I was #72 there. Very interesting. I guess pretty soon, in another decade or so, I suspect that people from the STL will be on FriendFeed, Plurk, Strands and whatever the newest service is at the time. Remember, that might happen in 5 years to a decade.

Technically Speaking, while I’m happy to see twitter adoption happening in the STL, I’ll wait and see what the actual time line to adoption rate is for the above mentioned services. In a few weeks there will be an actual blogger from the STL featured on the Lookery blog as Featured Site of the Week. How do I know that? Obvious, if you have been one of my loyal 6!

Once again, a totally misused term (or word) that I am guilty as charged in using. That term would be GAY.

As many of you know, in the 20th century that term was associated with people that are homosexual. It’s not a bad term, but before the term was used as such, it also meant to be “merry, happy, bright or showy“. In fact if you look it up, the term that is more commonly associated with a homosexual person, comes in dead last in the order of what the word actually is defined as!

How did I misuse this term? Well we are heading to this engagement party this evening for a couple we know, and I was laying down taking a nap, when my fiance came in and announced that the time and told me that people were dressing up. My immediate thought, as well as vocal reply was, “How fu**ing GAY!” Of course she sided with me on this fact, and said, “Oh just wear what you wore to my companies Christmas party.”

Yes, it’s true, I really don’t like to dress up for anything. It’s like the thought creeps into my head, “Why?!?” I think my aversion to it comes from the fact that when I use to work in the cubicle fields of America, one of the better gigs I had as Unix programmer was at this financial company. One of the big ones as a matter of fact. Yes, we had to wear shirt and tie and dress pants every day to sit in a cubicle to write code. Not only that, some of the older people that worked there said they had just changed the dress code policy recently as they use to make you wear a suit to work every day. Of course, what was the benefit of that? Nothing. Oh, yeah, they would have casual Friday’s. You know, the day of the week where you could wear a polo shirt and jeans. Another totally useless dress code policy that corporate America thinks it is doing a favor if you will for it’s ant farm of cubicle employees.

My immediate thought then as it is now is, “How fu**ing GAY can corporate America be?!” Now of course, there I go again – that isn’t the proper term to use. Just like the term which started me on this term-in-nation cause I’m on these days on such terms as “rockstar” and “widget“, it’s just not the correct term to be using. The funny thing is – it’s so accepted. Even friends I have that are homosexual seem to use the term gay to describe something as gay as having to sit in a cubicle all day wearing a shirt and tie. Dressed up with no place to go just because of some stupid corporate policy.

I guess what I hope for is someone out there to come up with a new term that means the same as stating the obvious. I would suggest a term such as “Samurai Warrior” like I did to try to replace “rockstar”, but I can’t think of one! There has to be such a word or term or even phrase that will overtake the misuse of the word “GAY” to mean the same thing. Such a word needs to express the facts of how “gay” something is, but still not be a term or word or phrase associated with something else that is the actual meaning.

Technically Speaking, this will be the first event I actually attend amongst a group of people that are smokers and non-smokers. For the first time, I’m in the non-smoker group! Now that isn’t gay at all, in fact I find it actually cool.

Well I did pretty good so far today. The mind was wandering all over the place, as I’m trying to avoid using too many commit lozenges as you already have read. I actually made it until 2:30pm in the afternoon before it was beyond time. Talk about restless thoughts as well as physically restlessness had about taken over totally. But that was the first one of the day. Yesterday I did have two of them, but the day before I made it with only one.

This morning started off kind of stressful, and of course the immediate thought was “Time for a smoke!” That was something that had to be a main trigger in my smoking habit. The nice thing is that it’s like 10 degrees out lately in the morning, and since I made sure that quit meant – no smokes in the house – it was easy to just do something to get the mind off of the subject.

Now this just is crazy.

Awesome as called by Marshall, but pretty nutty way to make a point.

I hope that the insects were just the normal kind and not the disease carrying kind. I guess you never know what kind of backlash a stunt like this could cause, but it’s definitely an attention grabber to a good cause. When you are Bill Gates, I guess you think pretty outside the box in order to get over to a crowd.

Technically Speaking, one last thing in case you missed the post this morning – and – that’s it for now!

First a quick note about the quitting smoking adventure.

Food. Bring on the food. Which kind of sucks, as I was hoping to avoid that entirely, but now that things are starting to reset, food has started to come into focus more clearly now. As in the fact that food tastes much better than commit tablets. I have had one today, and really would like to avoid another one. Bad thing, I’ve really had the urge to light one up for the past two days.

I’ll eat a bunch of small snacks throughout the day. I may have to push up to another commit to curb that urge, but it’s like anniversary day I guess. It was last Tuesday around this time in the afternoon that I had my last cigarette. So I have made it this far, and will push forward. Hopefully I can somehow manage not to gain 50 lbs from eating all the time. Though it is said that eating 6 or more times daily should help speed up the metabolism.

Now on to my thoughts on television. It’s dead. Kill it. Stick a fork in it, it’s done. But there is a bigger issue that I see. That is the fact that people that end up with 60″ plus flat screens are pretty well stuck to that format.

I guess my thought is, for at least my family – the three of us all like to watch different things. Now with all the convenience of DVR’s, Slingboxes, etc… we still haven’t addressed the fact that you need a separate viewing device for each one. Or basically to have a family all sit in one room and watch one monster 60″ plus TV, you are still stuck with one show on it.

Nothing has really been solved or is revolutionary if you ask me. It’s just bigger, not better. Ok – HD is better, but really – you are still stuck in 20th Century technology concerning the device itself. One TV. One show at a time. 60″ of either pure pleasure, or pure crap – depending upon your point of view or likes and dislikes.

The choice is – you end up buying 3 smaller 42″ televisions, or how about this – a piece of hardware that integrates into the 60″ plus television that divides up the pixels on the screen for each person. This box would be like a simple splitter, but more advanced as you would be dividing up that screen real estate by the 3 people watching. Not only that, the dedicated screen real estate would have to also be in it’s own zone of audio, wifi, bluetooth content delivery and reception.

For example, I could than hook up my Macbook via bluetooth or wifi connection to one part, and segment out the left lower part of the screen. I could watch Hulu in one part, grab the top left corner and maybe watch something I recorded on the DVR, and in the middle left part answer a few e-mails and surf. My kid could watch his cartoon network in the middle section, and the better half could watch her DVR shows on the right.

We thereby share a 60″ plus television, and all 3 of us via the technology that is available such as wireless ear buds for the separated audio content we would be listening too – can all enjoy the shows or choices we wish to view. All on one television screen, which of course would encourage the television makers to go way beyond the 60″ plus limit and finally release what we have seen in those electronic events – the 100″ plus units that are as thin as a piece of paper.

Technically Speaking, maybe some hardware manufacturer is already working on this device, or maybe it already exists and I just happened to miss it in reading feeds. Either way, I think it brings people in closer connection, even though they are doing their own thing in their own pixel space, but still – it beats having to end up buying three 42″ flat screens so everyone can watch what they want.

Why not? I may as well call them something fancy such as the Quit Smoking Chronicles. This is day 6 or 7, technically day 7, but some might call it day 6. It all depends on how you count the first day. In any case, it’s that really tough day. I looked out my window earlier and saw a cloud and for some reason my mind said it looks like a cigarette! Funny, but I wonder if other addicts see clouds after being clean for a week and say “Wow, that looks like the last crack rock I smoked!” or “That sure looks like a bottle of Jack Daniels to me!” etc.

Now as I stated in the beginning, I do not want to be hooked on this commit lozenges since they are a nicotine delivery system. In other words trading in one addiction to nicotine for another delivery system and still be addicted to nicotine. I’ve actually consciously kept that in mind and since they are terrible tasting I have held out for long periods of thinking about that one thought that has dominated so far today, “It’s time for me to go outside and have a smoke!”

Many of, well at least my loyal 6 readers, are probably smiling or even laughing out loud at this by now. I mean, for those of you that are lucky enough to be addiction free are probably thinking, “What a loser, he talks like this is really hard or something!” While I feel more like a winner at this time, I can totally understand your viewpoint. I am in fact sympathetic to it. It’s quite easy to quit. You just stop.

Simple, right? Well when your body becomes accustomed to something over a long period of time, quitting and just stopping are not as quite simple as it may seem. It take an extreme commitment of ones mind to do this. I really don’t want to say how long I have actively participated in lighting up a smoke, but put it this way, it was as naturally as going to the bathroom to relieve yourself. While that act is something you have to do, smoking had become that natural of a reflex to me at least.

When one of the first acts of being awake was lighting up that first cigarette of the day, usually within the first 30 minutes of being awake for the day, and the last thing you did before going to bed was having that last smoke – it’s not something that is easily changed in one’s daily routine. That’s one of the harder things that I try to overcome. The change of habits.

For example, after every meal, within 10-15 minutes at least, it was time for a smoke. Like clockwork. It was almost something that was again natural, like going to the restroom to wash your hands before eating. It came with no thought process at all. Put it this way, I’ve been smoking longer than the Web 2.0 or the last dot boom. I’ve been smoking longer than some of you reading this have been alive. I was smoking when Guns N’ Roses first became, and I was smoking when 17 years later Axl finally released Chinese Democracy.

The nice thing I find is, that I’m not alone in this fight. Others out there have won the battle are now crusading against the whole smoking false-hood that the big tobacco companies lie about.

Technically Speaking, gaining in life itself isn’t easy, and since I’m doing this for all the right reasons and no one has put a gun to my head to do this, I think I’ll in the end win this battle this time.