Archive for October, 2006

According to a blog post a new airless tire with spokes may soon be released for use on consumer automobiles. No more flats? Easier home replacement? I say lemme at em! Thanks to Randy for pointing this story out to me.

The Internet and television has been gearing up for convergence for a long time. Some people thought it was going to happen a long time ago. Only recently have we seen IPTV start to take off. These IPTV shows, with the exception of DLTV, are usually pre-recorded and not intended to be watched live. ACCSelect.com is one company that seeks to change that. If you want to watch ACC Sports, there aren’t too many choices other than going to the school and watching it as it happens. But now you can get, for example, Georgia Tech Sports on ACCSelect.com. There is certainly a market for college sports other than Football. The market may not be big enough for cable companies to carry them, but that’s the beauty of the Internet. The delivery mechanism cuts out the middle-man and allows niche programming to be sold and delivered directly from the producers to the viewers. This is an exciting step in the right direction. Let’s hope that more live content like this becomes available. Finally there is an alternative to the Lowest Common Denominator!

“Awwww… nothing gets chocolate out, see?” I got a Chocolate Blast from Baskin Robbins and on the way home I realized I had dribbled little droplets of chocolate on my favorite shirt. They weren’t on the outside of the container, but rather on the underside of the lip of the plastic lid. I never even saw it coming. I checked online to see how to get chocolate stains out. I hope it works. The last time this happened was the first time I wore my Homestar Runner t-shirt. You may be wondering, “Do you even have a Homestar Runner shirt?” Well, I do, but I ought to throw it away. I dropped a glop of a Wendy’s Frosty on it and went into the bathroom to try and clean it off. It never came out all the way, so it went into the pile of work shirts.

Why must chocolate taste so good and yet behave so badly?

We’re not moving any time soon, I hope. But we sure do seem to have a lot more stuff than our apartment can hold. We have an extra storage closet on our balcony, and the thing is filled up to the ceiling with boxes of books, computer equipment, holiday decorations, and all sorts of things we just don’t want to get rid of, but really can’t use very often. When the time comes I’m glad that I found the Self Storage Directory – Moving.bz to help me find the best deals. I almost never pay full price for anything if I can avoid it. Moving.bz lets you compare prices and get quotes from different storage companies in your area. They also have links to deals on moving supplies and moving companies for when you decide to take your things out of storage and just get a bigger place instead.

This one is pretty close to the road if you know where to park. We came here from the Taylor’s Quarry cache and so we just followed the trail all the way out here. It was 0.33 miles according to our GPSr. When we were within about 800 feet of the cache there was another entrance from the road to the trail we were on. Oh well, we needed the exercise anyway.

The cache itself was a lot of fun. We were standing on top of it and I kept looking under the bushes for it. It was hidden under a rock so well that you would never even think of looking under it. The coordinates were dead on, but it still took us a while to investigate that one inconspicuous rock. We walked back to the car on the road and got to see a lot of fun Halloween decorations. What a fun day caching!

I have worked on some websites and tried to make those pages show up close to the top spot on Google before. This can be very difficult to achieve because the exact algorithms that Google uses are not public knowledge. It is sometimes baffling why a less relevant site comes up above yours. SEO in Austin, help Texas is the specialty of Apogee Search. They are the largest Search Engine Optimization firm in Austin and the fastest growing in all of Texas. It is amazing to me that search engine placement has become so important to companies that they are willing to pay others to help them rise to the top.

Krissy and I found this one without too much trouble, although it has some of the best camouflage I’ve ever seen in Geocaching. There was a Spiderman Travel Bug action figure inside, so I thought this one would come with us to either Las Vegas for Thanksgiving or to Georgia this Christmas.

Blog advertising website PayPerPost.com received $3 Million in venture capital according to a story by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. PayPerPost has polarized the blogging community. Many bloggers see nothing wrong with making a little extra cash on their blogs. After all, many bloggers have to pay for hosting and the proceeds from most forms of advertising is abysmal at best. PayPerPost users can make a few hundred dollars each month if they advertise as much as possible. Some people are just looking to cover their hosting and bandwidth costs.

I think PayPerPost is an excellent idea whose time has come. Small and new companies can get their name out there fast for just a few thousand dollars, and bloggers get the maximum benefit possible. It promoted blogging just as much as it promotes advertisers products. Some people think it’s deceptive, but that’s only if the bloggers make it so. I think most bloggers know which opportunities they will take based on whether they believe in the products being shown. I enjoy showcasing new exciting technologies on this blog, and I don’t mind making a little bit of money while doing it. If I had found out about these people on my own I would probably blog about them anyway, so I’m just getting paid to do what I would have done for free otherwise. Click the second link at the beginning of this post to read about the company and listen to an interview with PayPerPost founder Ted Murphy.

I was not aware of this before now, but apparently the Wii might run a version of the Linux kernel. It will also be updatable remotely. From an interview on Nintendo’s website:

Wii is the first system from Nintendo that we can continue to be involved in (via operating system updates) after the customer buys it. This means that Wii will greatly expand and diversify the ways in which people will enjoy games in the future.

This could be exciting. I just hope they don’t use this as a way to ruin everyone’s fun with regards to homebrew games, etc.

PayPerPost.com showed off a great example of Guerilla Marketing on The Today Show a couple of weeks ago. The Today Show is filmed in front of a big window facing the street where people congregate to watch the show and hold up signs on live TV. These guys gave out signs with their logo on it and markers so people could write on the signs and hold them up. They also gave out a bunch of t-shirts for everyone outside the window to wear. Check it out!