Over the new few days/weeks/months, I am going to be changing my blog. First thing I am going to do is migrate it from Google’s free blogger, to an actual blogging application, most probably WordPress. After that is done (and thats probably not going to be easy but oh well, I will start to work on the functionality and look and feel. I am thinking I may take snapshots to give a sort of timeline as to the progression of this. I’ll see how it goes.
On another note, I had an AMAZING day with Amanda today. Wow she is great.
My name is Eddie and I am a phone whore. There I said it. Now I can let the healing process begin.
What is a phone whore you ask? The dictionary defines it as:
phone whore
one who goes through new phones like a teenage girl goes through boyfriends.
Yup that pretty much defines me. Since 2003, this is the list of cell phones I have owned (not sure about the order though) (they are all the Sprint version):
(more…)
Another post from Clear Night Sky:
Steve Nelson recently sent me, and a few other people here at Clear Ink, an article from the New York Times. It tells about a new approach being tested to measure a marketing campaign’s effectiveness. The company, IMMI, is providing cell phone service for it’s test audience, and in return, the audience doesn’t have to do anything. Well almost nothing – they are asked to carry the cell phone around like normal, as it replaces their existing phone. IMMI monitors what these cell phones can hear throughout the day and then match it with whatever marketing they are measuring. They say it isn’t listening to your conversation, only the media around you. Very Big Brother-ish if you ask me, but how do you know that your *current* cell phone isn’t already doing this already?
And with GPS apps like Google Maps, it even knows where you are and where you have been. Of course, most cell phones have built in GPS anyway so you don’t even need to have the app installed to be tracked. Granted some of this is pretty cool when used right, but where do we draw the line between usefulness and having the CIA know our every action, word and location?
Another one of my posts over at Clear Night Sky:
TV is dead. Or it will be dead unless it evolves drastically. I came to this conclusion sometime in 2002-2003. That was the point when I was abruptly weened off religiously watching television. Since then, only a few shows have caught my attention enough to actually turn my TV into a TV, and not just the screen for my XBOX(/DVD player). However, I have seen a new direction for TV, and it came from NBC of all people. Their great show last season got me hooked into a new way to watch TV shows. Online viewing. And boy am I hooked. No cable service to buy, no expensive equipment to buy or lease, no endless commercials. Its just great. I can watch when I want, pretty much anywhere I want to and the commercials are minimal. I like it so much I even got my technologically-limited mom to start watching this way and its amazing how quickly she caught on.
Commercials are the real thing I wanted to blog about though. While watching Heroes online, I did get some commercials, but strangely, it seemed to be the same commercial every 10 minutes. But it was only one commercial every 10 minutes it seemed like so I could deal with it. Yet I found myself wanting more commercials, or at least more relevant commercials. This was a strange feeling for me, having always changed the channel or went and did something else while commercials were on.
Being online so much, I am always looking for more to do, more to see. I usually have at least 4 different programs running, some with 2 or more viewable things each. Call me ADHD if you will, but only call me that because the Internet made me that way. So when I said I wanted to see commercials, I was serious. I wanted something to focus my attention and keep me on that one screen. While watching Heroes, I would switch it to take over my whole monitor, one of them anyway, and I wanted something to fill the space the inevitable commercial would take up. I don’t think I am alone in this feeling either.
TV execs, if you are reading this, take note. Give me options. Give me choices. You already do it by giving me the choice of which TV show to watch, so why not extend that to commercials. Here’s a simple way to do it online that benefits you twofold and is very simple thing to do. Give me categories of commercials to choose from such as movies, cars, technology, food, etc. This benefits you because then I would be interested in the commercials and would probably watch them. It also benefits you because then you would know what I wanted to see and you can tell your advertisers: “See? He wants to see your content. Give us more money and we pretty much guarantee your ad will get the placement you are aiming for.” After all, isn’t that what advertisers want to hear, guaranteed product placement?
Now that I have a HDTV, I feel this is even more of an important issue. Draw me back to TV. Live TV. I pretty much get all my content from the ‘Net now. Especially since it was so easy to hook my new TV up to my computer using a standard DVI port. I think my apartment still has cable … I would never know since my TV rarely leaves PC mode (Except to play video games).
I posted this awhile back on Clear Night Sky and I liked it so I thought I would repost it here:
Yahoo! just released a beta 3.0 of its Yahoo! Go mobile service. Version 2.0 gave you mobile access to your Yahoo email, calendar, contacts, news, maps, traffic and more. While 2.0 was ok (would have been great if I could use my slide out keyboard on my phone), 3.0 looks simply amazing. I am truly excited about 3.0. It’s doing what Facebook Apps did for Facebook, but on something I use constantly, my cell phone.
My normal cellphone of choice is a Windows Mobile device so I am used to having real applications on my phone that are fully functional just like on my computer. But Yahoo! Go 3.0 will let me write apps for it in a simple-ish language and have the added benefit of being able to use it on my other cell phone line (don’t ask, it’s cheaper for me to have 2 cell phones and service then 1 so I go with it), or any cell phone that can support Go. There are so many uses that someone could come up with for this, but me, I am looking forward to finally being able to write a ledger for my accounts so I can track my spending. Call me new school but I never carry a checkbook around, or even a pen for that matter, so being able to enter this on my phone and have it update online would be really useful to me. It’ll be interesting to see what others develop for it.
In the title I called Yahoo! mobile crazy cool and the last paragraph gave just a hint of how cool it could be, well now just a taste of how scary it can be. While not supported yet, Phase two of Yahoo!’s launch will try to make use of some of the phone’s built-in features like location based services. This means the application will be able to locate where you are physically and update the service with that information so you can get usual facts like nearby restaurants. This sounds cool to, but combine it with the tracking and stats they plan to implement soon and then anyone, not just the CIA, will be able to track where you go. They can also track how long you stayed somewhere, what people you were close to (if they also have the program installed) and where they went. Of course, the thing that makes me feel better about this is that it *should* only work if you have the app running.
Overall, I am excited about this news but slightly worried. I may be a lot more worried when they roll out phase 2 but for now, I am going to go write a checkbook widget.
Read more about this at Yahoo! Mobile
As I learn more of Joomla’s ins and outs, it’s getting easier to develop for it. The component I am working on right now is for a client and was specifically tailored to that client. But I can see it being the basis for a much larger project. I think I might want to turn it into a product management extension. I’m thinking it will be open source with paid support. Might bring in a little change, hopefully enough to pay for the server hosting the downloads but not expecting anything.
Please comment with features you would like in a product like this so I can plan them in for the initial release.
By the way, a big thank you to ircmaxell on the IRC Joomla channel for all the help. Show some support for a great resource: www.joomlaperformance.com
I use Firefox. I stopped using IE awhile ago after I realized how much better Firefox is. IE7 does a pretty good job most of the time, but Firefox is so much better when you can throw extensions, useful extensions at it.
I am a web developer. I make web sites (<- I never know if that’s one word or two). Part of making web sites is viewing them on as many browsers as possible to make sure everyone gets a consistent experience when viewing the site. Some of the extensions I use help with that.
Now on to the list (it’s not too long) sorted by what I think is most important/useful first:
- Firebug
This is probably the best extension out, even if it is buggy at times. If you don’t develop web sites, then you probably don’t use this or would have heard about it. But if you do develop web sites, and you don’t know how to use this, then you need to get in the know. Firebug is the most useful tool in your library. It will greatly improve your quality of life. Thank you to the developer’s of this.
Now only if it worked in Firefox 3 perfectly…..
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
Ever since I found this little gem, my surfing is so much easier. Now all of my bookmarks are synced across the 3 and up computers I use (Home, Work, Laptop, Virtual machines). I could use something like del.ic.ous or some other social networking site. Or I could even write my own script that would sync them, but why bother when this handy extension does it for me? I don’t care about sharing my bookmarks with people, and some of them I don’t want to. So this extension is great for me.
- Google Notebook
Google Notebook is a pretty useful because it lets me write notes and access them anywhere I have a computer with an Internet connection. With this extension, I can access my notebook even faster. I can just click “Open Notebook” in the lower left hand of my browser and instantly my notebook pops up in the corner. There’s even a right click context item that sends the current page to my notebook for later viewing (it saves a link to the page). I can store code, tips, reminders, any text I want to use later. Saves having to carry around an actual notebook.
- Web Developer
I only use a few features of this one, but that’s only because I haven’t played with all the features yet. Every time I try a new one, this extension gets better. It lets me block JavaScript, view the CSS for a page in it’s entirety, provides quick links to validate the page I am on through W3C, and many other tools I am still learning. Combined with Firebug and my web development life is almost a breeze (well not really since I still have to write all the code, but it does make debugging the visuals of a page so much easier).
- PDF Download
Not the most used extension, but good nonetheless. No more opening PDFs in the browser and bogging everything down unless I say it can. I normally use it to save the PDF to my computer, which should be the default action but isn’t always. I can also view the PDF as HTML.
- StumbleUpon
If Firebug and Web Developer are the tools of my trade, StumbleUpon can be described as the rust on my tools. This extension slows my work down. But maybe in retrospect, it speeds it up too. StumbleUpon will randomly take you to a page others have said are good. You define the categories of sites you would like to browse then hit Stumble and you are on your way. Great way to kill time, but really only if you have the time to kill, which I rarely do. I sometimes spend too much time on sites StumbleUpon sends me too lol.
- Adblock Plus
This would have ranked higher except that, once again, I am a web developer. Sometimes its me putting those awful, awful ads on pages. But to give myself a bit of credit, most of the sites I work on don’t have unnecessarily obnoxious ads since they are mostly corporate sites. Some of my personal sites (like this one) will from time to time have Google Ads, but those are plain text ads, not like the ones on Myspace or Facebook. I can’t really use this extension too much because I need to see the ads at time, but when I don’t need to this is great for getting rid of all that junk. If you aren’t a web developer then this should be at the top of your list.
- Download Statusbar
This one is only a minor one but a welcome one. It adds a counter to the bottom right of Firefox and lets me know when my downloads are done and how many are still going. Not much more to it than that.
- Google Send to Phone
Sometimes its easier to type a text message on my computer. What can I say, I text a lot.
- Nasa Night Launch
I’m throwing this one my list of extensions even though it’s a theme (although themes are considered extension in Firefox). This is purely a cosmetic thing. My home computer is Vista and has a nice dark theme going for it so having my browser match is nice. Even when I was running XP, I had the Royale Noir theme (which is pretty close to my current Vista them) so I had this theme too. It even works on my Linux boxes.
Well there’s my top 10 (and consequently the only 10 extension I use). If any of these sounded interesting to you, try them out and let me know your experience with them. If you don’t like them you can always uninstall them. Firefox makes that extremely easy. To get these, go to Firefox’s add on page at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
