Nearly A Nerd.com

What Dipps™ spewed on Twitter this week — 2010-02-15

February 15, 2010 – 12:32 am

http://twitpic.com/1267y9 - Hot damn! Schnucks’ “Deli” sells potato pancakes for $0.99 each #
if the SOCIAL BARRIER [2 foreclosure] crumbles, there’s no telling what it could do 2 an already weakened financial sector http://tr.im/NtK2 #
Time for Web giants to snatch up great services like @tweepi @twiangulate et al & build them into their ultimate Twitter client/application? #
There is now http://buzz.google.com , yes. #
Attn MacBook-ers: Freeware app from http://bashflash.com lets you know when Flash is hogging so you can easily stop it & use way less power. #
Excluding bulk and looks, today’s $40, 3 in 1 Workstation Notebook Case from http://woot.com is perfect. #
Live to help. Help to live. #
Ever get a wild hair 2 do something crazy like walk up 2 the next foreigner you see, find out where they hail from & go there w/ or w/o them #
Wanted so bad to tout CenturyLink over MediaCom. Now I can not. Dare I say: Google Internet can’t get here soon enough http://ow.ly/166JU #
@natebro please grab another iPhone and twitpic the mini projecter set up… A little jealousy is starting to set in. #
Slumburbia http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/slumburbia/ #
Nominate your community for Google fiber and get better Internets! http://tr.im/NUTn h/t @bryanhelmig @severeon #
Told someone - who’s also ditched RSS feed readers - I’d share my embloggery on occasion http://nearlyanerd.com Move along nothing 2 C here. #
Email is quickly becoming the cock-blocking bane of all human existence. #
Dear Men’s Jeans and Pants makers, please make more 33/33 lower body clothings. #
@artitumis That is one of the finer compliments I’ve ever got. I wish I could say the same to you. in reply to artitumis #

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Is this Google’s long awaited Google Drive?

February 14, 2010 – 1:01 pm

Google file storage

These screenshots popped up today, looking something like the much discussed, much anticipated “Google Drive”. In mid January, Google announced plans to start rolling out cloud storage. Seems you get a free gigabyte of file storage — for any type of file and may share any or all of it — and can buy additional space:

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card

Prices for more Google storage

Who’s ready to fork over more information and personal/business stuff to Google?

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Get Google Fiber

February 12, 2010 – 10:48 am

I just nominated Columbia, Missouri, for Google’s fiber optic trial. Anyone with home internet access can ask Google to set it up where you live too. Google’s hope is to “make Internet access better and faster for everyone.”

Here’s a few points I made for Columbia, MO:

Why should Google build a fiber to the home network where you live?

Columbia, Missouri’s telecom oligopoly has trampled over everything good and decent for far too long. Forcing residents to “choose” between two price gouging ISPs with lackluster service and performance is an Internet travesty.

Any Internet improvement, no matter how small, will vastly improve life for what is surely the most highly concentrated center of culture in Missouri.

Describe the quality of your home Internet service customer support:

After an hour trying to straighten out my erratically fluctuating bill — due to CenturyLink’s incessant system errors — their “Save Desk” is downgrading me from 10Mbps to 3Mbps, again, with no change in price. My Internet speed keeps switching without approval. Something similar to: http://tr.im/NVir Ready to ditch IPTV “service” & their Internet & get Google Fiber. S.O.S.

Web link to supporting material (YouTube videos and other creative submissions are encouraged!)

http://www.ripoffreport.com/cable-companies/mediacom/mediacom-horrible-service-and-2c282.htm

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Failure, Planning, Interruption, Inspiration, Immutability and Selling your By-Products

February 12, 2010 – 12:33 am

Business lessons from Jason Fried

Jason Fried of 37signals.com spoke at BIG Omaha in 2009. His talk hit home hard. Here’s a sort of summary of what Jason said there. Listen to it if you’d like. (Approximate time: 20 minutes.)

Failure
- “Fail early, fail often.” rarely makes sense.
- Failure only instructs on what NOT to do next time.
- Focus on what is going right and focus on your successes.
Planning
- “Plans are guesses.”
- “Through away plans.”
- Have a rough idea but don’t waste time on a 30-day plan, 90-day plan, etc.
- ‘Where are you going to be in 10 years’ does not matter.
- What matters is what you are doing right now.
- You’ll have more information tomorrow; use that information for what is important tomorrow.
- Plans use the wrong information. Plans use information from before you’ve started.
- Instead, be aware of what is going on as you go along.
Interruption vs. Collaboration
- An open workspace fosters people interrupting each other.
- Interruption is the enemy of collaboration and the enemy of productivity.
- With interruption, work days quickly turn into work moments.
- Try to stay the hell away from each other at the office at work for better productivity.
- Try not talking at all to each other on Thursdays. Use email, use IM, use whatever else you use to communicate, but no talking for that day. . . Or even try not talking for three hours.
Sell your by-products
- Sawdust — left over from making lumber for houses — started out as a nuisance. They couldn’t get rid of it. They figured out it could be used for other stuff like fuel, added to cement, added to animal bedding, pressed again into boards.
- Oil was once drilled only for fuel. Now oil is in everything.
- Same thing with edible grains: now used for fuel, oil, plastics.
- “Whenever you make something, you make something else.”
- “We had a product and we didn’t even know it.”
- Use the knowledge you gain as a product. . . Write a book. Do a conference, workshop, class.
- Share your knowledge and people will call you back for bigger things.
- Master chiefs share what they do via shows and cookbooks. Businesses should share too, not be afraid of others putting them out of business by spreading knowledge.
- Build audiences by sharing knowledge. People will come to you, you won’t have to go to them.
Focus on the things that do not change
- Focus on the basics and the core things that matter, not the sexy stuff everyone is talking about.
Inspiration is perishable
- Ideals are immortal, but inspiration wanes.
- If you find something you want to do, do it now.
- If you say you’ll do it later, you won’t be pumped up about it.
- The most energy comes when you first get started on something.

Another 2-for-1 error day

February 9, 2010 – 9:36 am

Happened when checking someone’s followers the other day, soon after Twitter updated their new mobile site at http://mobile.twitter.com (only looks different from twitter.com on mobile devices natch.) For you search engines out there, it reads:

Something is technically wrong.

Thanks for noticing — we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.

If you are going to visit http://www.ptsd.va.gov for some reason, don’t type a period after the “gov” or you’ll get something like the above. It reads:

The requested URL was rejected.

Please contact the VA Network and Security Operations Center at 1-800-877-4328 or email VANSOC@va.gov, if you feel this is in error.

Your support ID is: xxxxBlahBlahNumberNumberNumbersRemovedBlahBlahxxxxxx

Appliance name: also removed

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Readability’s Future Functionality

February 6, 2010 – 12:40 pm

Readability is a simple tool/service for internet readers that instantly removes clutter with the click of a bookmark(let) button — eliminating distractions and facilitating reading — as you (will) see below.

Before Readability

After Readability

Making Readability work is cake. After arriving on the Readability project page first select one of five presentation/font styles; then choose one of the five font sizes; finally, set your margin spacing — also from five choices. Step two: drag the Readability badge/button to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Now you’re set.

When visiting a webpage worth reading, click what you’ve just added to your bookmark bar and you are now reading better.

Readability Bookmarklet Button

. . . “Wait! I want the regular, ‘real’ webpage back!” Alright, done. Click the gray refresh/return button in the upper left.

Readability's Refresh/Return Button

Make the jump to learn some potentially exclusive news about the future of Readability.

Oh, and if you want the MC Frontalot track mentioned above, it’s at SPIN.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Brian Alfred

February 4, 2010 – 10:13 pm

Pleasant, thoughtful mix of stop-motion like type stuff, “live action” and animation from visual artist Brian Alfred with a soundtrack heavy on sound design including Columbia, Missouri’s own Jon Sheffield.

So why no HD version?

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Posted in Art, Design, Music, Video | No Comments »