Matt Taibbi recently wrote a terrific article in Rolling Stone magazine that sheds some light on the economic bubbles we’ve been experiencing in the last decade or so. Goldman Sachs is a particular target of Matt’s article, and for good reason. These vid clips have some quick snippets behind the story, “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine”
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
California’s state government is the poster child for how NOT to run a state. They’re printing up their own currency nowadays in the form of IOU’s. The smart banks are refusing to accept them.
‘As Seen On TV’, Billy Mays summed up what he and his partners are looking for in an invention or product on the interesting tv series Pitchmen.
1. Does it have the wow factor?
2. Does it have mass appeal?
3. It is demonstrable?
4. Does it solve a problem?
5. Does it give instant gratification?
So now you know the minimum requirements for developing a product that might make you rich and be seen on tv via Telebrands, the “As Seen On TV” company.
UPDATE: Billy Mays died while sleeping on 6/28/2009.
Micro$oft might be spending $100,000,000 dollars to convince you that they have developed a better search engine than Google, but Google’s I/O conference stirred up some conversations about the ability of Googlebot to crawl JavaScript. That’s a tremendous step forward for search engines. If it’s true it’s also a serious game changing feature; one that should shush those (like myself) who’ve been saying that Google has been neglecting it’s search engine and focusing too much on all the other stuff they’ve been building, buying and giving away. So, it seems that yes Google can and does crawl JavaScript.
Here are some articles that SEO experts should check out.. and you’ll get a whiff of how important JavaScript crawling is:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/no-clarification-forthcoming-from-google-on-nofollow-pagerank-flow
the much anticipated slingbox iphone app has been published in the itunes store. but somewhat to my suprise it’s not a free app for slingbox owners. it’s currently listed for $29.99. the iphone slingplayer is now the most expensive iphone app i’ve paid for; i guess in a few weeks or months i’ll know if it’s worth it, right now i’m not happy that i had to pay for it.
the bad: it only operates on wi-fi, no doubt an at&t restriction. as a u-verse cable customer, the app doesn’t have a remote feature for the “ok” button. there is an “enter” button which acts much like the “ok” button when typing in channel numbers, but the big problem is that when i connect to my u-verse cable box and it’s not active on you must hit the “ok” button to bring up the guide and/or channels. when you hit the “enter” key on the sling iphone app without a number it alerts you to select a valid number… no bueno (PROBLEM SOLVED, SEE UPDATE). the biggest bad is the price 🙁 it should’ve been free, or least a lot cheaper. i wouldn’t even complain if it was $4.99.
the good: video and audio quality are good. slick and intuitive interface.
funny thing is i just happened to discover the slingplayer iphone app was out on my own, but randomly logging into the app store on my iphone.. instead of being alerted by slingmedia.. why did i sign up for the email alert?? maybe it went into my spam folder.. o well.
here’s the official slingmedia info page about the >> slingbox iphone app
UPDATE: the tech support folks at Sling were quick to resolve this issue for me.. it’s just taken me a while to post this update but better late than never. check it >> iphone slingplayer missing remote buttons
i tested mozy, an online backup service, and was impressed. mozy has been running a lot of commercials on tv lately and it was enough to make me get serious about protecting some important computer data on something other than backup drives that would do me no good if my house caught on fire (heaven forbid). mozy is good and the price is great but then i looked into idrive and i was more impressed.
keep in mind all the services mentioned let you setup a free account with limited storage capacity (2GB) so that you can try them out before paying for upgraded and expanded storage.
idrive does have a storage limit, 150GB, whereas mozy and carbonite boast unlimited storage space. however, idrive offers some features that those don’t have. the feature i like more than anything with idrive is ‘versioning’. you can actually restore an old version of a file that you have been backing up. also, if you delete the files locally you can leave them online; mozy and carbonite will remove deleted files from their server when the sync happens. idrive can be setup to do that if you want, but it’s like a nice safety net for accidental and unintentional deletes.
if you have important files you don’t want to lose you should consider one of these services.. all of them are worth the money, i just prefer some of the idrive features enough to deal with 150GB storage limitation over the unlimited storage offered by mozy and carbonite.
also, if you’re an iphone owner idrivelite is a nice free iphone app for backing up your contacts online.
there ain’t no rest for the wicked, money don’t grow on trees
we got bills to pay, we got mouths to feed there ain’t nothing in this world for free
we can’t slow down, we can’t hold back though you know we wish we could
there ain’t no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good
here is what i came home to a couple of days ago:
HAPPY TAX DAY!!!
RATM
i finally decided that having browser bookmarks on several different machines was not a good thing. it’s frustrating when you’re on one computer and you’ve bookmarked something on a different computer so you have to resort to googling all over again for something that may have taken you a while to find originally (hence the bookmark). i’m also a great fan of Google and their products; the google toolbar is great. however their bookmarking feature isn’t solid. i don’t like the fact that their bookmarking solution doesn’t allow sub-folders. i’m also getting rather tired of giving so much (too much perhaps) information to 1 entity.
so i ventured out to try and compare many of the bookmarking services on the web. a lot of “bookmarking” now-a-days is more about sharing and promoting pages and not so much just about indexing pages for private recall. delicious was decent, diigo was better, but ultimately i found a perfect fit with “xmarks”, previously known as “foxmarks”. it has a web based interface, but also includes browser plugins for FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari (for Mac only). the browser plugins make the bookmarking experience so much better. now on all the computers I own or control I can install the plugins and have my brower bookmarks act like they always have. if i need web based access from a computer where i can’t necessarily install the plugins on, no problemo.
anyhow i just thought i’d share my find with anyone interested in some really good, free bookmarking software coupled with a web based bookmarking interface. check out xmarks!