30 Friday Mar 2007
Posted in Homestead
I work with the guy who put up this site. About monkeys on acid.
I don’t know why. He scares me.
But it shows how “cool” the people at Homestead are!
20 Tuesday Mar 2007
Posted in Technology
I’m just testing Jaxtr, a click-to-call service.
I went through the signup process, which was very simple. After the normal stuff of validating the email address, etc., you have to add a phone number to it. You enter in the phone number then it prompts you to enter in a number when the automated system calls you.
The button below is the default for WordPress. After clicking on it, you’ll see a pop-up with a Flash widget that has some more buttons on it. You can also embed that widget itself onto your page, but WordPress doesn’t allow it. I just put in screen shots.
You can check it out, but I probably won’t answer (I like screening calls).
(This one works.)
(These are just screen shots of the other options.)
20 Tuesday Mar 2007
Posted in TV/Movies
Tags
So I was watching my Tivo’d SNL this morning, the one with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. One of the skits pokes fun at Oprah and her promotion of the book The Secret which, according to the skit, says that you can control the universe with your mind. Curious, I searched for it, and found a fascinating article about it on Salon.
Go read it now. I’ll wait.
Now, Oprah is an amazing woman. Very smart, very powerful, really a self-made woman. And I’ll admit, I am predisposed to thinking that she’s a little too self-righteous and her followers are a little too willing to lap up blindly all she has to offer. But I couldn’t really place my issue with her until I read the Salon article, which nailed it for me.
Her followers are often just that: followers. They do things because Oprah says they should, because she says it will make them feel better. And of course, Oprah feeds off of that blind faith; in fact, her entire empire is dependent on that idolatry. Her show is basically a 1 hour infomercial and I bet few if any of her congregation recognize that.
Almost all the time, I agree with the message: eat well, exercise, help the needy, take care of your finances, love your children, read a book, have a positive attitude. And I think that there are probably many people who are living better, happier lives for listening to Oprah. I just wish more people would question the message before accepting it and question the messanger before following her.
01 Thursday Mar 2007
Tags
Just in case you didn’t believe it, despite all the evidence to the contrary, gaming Digg works.
Check out this article on Wired News. Fantastic. The author’s site was eventually buried, but then again, the author made the site specifically to be stupid.
You can easily imagine a site that someone actually cares about, but is not necessarily outstanding, could be fraudulently promoted by U/S. I don’t have a solution for Digg, but it is interesting.
It’s really just another case where we should not be blindly enamored by the “power of the people”.
Update: Anti-Wired post from Michael Arrington. My response? You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t speak to previous articles in Wired about the demise of Digg, but investigative journalism is totally reasonable, and the author of the Wired article didn’t do anything so crazy in her investigation to deserve that much wrath. Frankly, I don’t think this would be news at all if Digg’s management wasn’t so adamant in saying that they can not be gamed. That’s pretty much “Bring it on!”, if I’ve ever heard it.
