As pointed out by the Tampa Tribune’s OpEd page, Howard Dean was the leader of a dinky state. Smaller than the county I live in. According to the piece, the number of votes he got in Vermont wouldn’t have won against a few of our county commissioners. Heh. No wonder he has to use weblogs.
A few months ago I mentioned my trouble in finding a new cell phone… This is a bad thing as I tend to publish daily news on cell phones. I can’t let the rumors get out that I’m using an outdated phone AND can’t set my sights on a new one. Think of the scandal!
So to try and save my career as a mobile phone newshound, I got busy and looked at my options. Result? The Motorola V300. Never heard of it? You will. Even your mom will have one in about 6 months. Here’s the breakdown:
Ups –
Cheap. VGA camera. MP3 ringtones. Big screen. 5MB memory. Java (they all have Java these days, buy my T68i doesn’t and I want it). Available via T-Mobile.
Downs –
No Bluetooth (USB Sync). Flip (I’ve never thought of myself as a flip-phone user… So consumer). Hard to get.
The Motorola V600 has everything that the V300 does plus Bluetooth, which would be a huge plus, but it’s not going to be out for a while. The FCC hasn’t given it a thumbs up yet, and Motorola is using all its camera modules for the V300 et al. No extras for yet-another device. I bet we don’t see the V600 shipping in volume until Apirl/May ’04 if not later.
If I do end up getting the Motorola V300, I’ll keep the T68i around for presentations (its small size and built-in Bluetooth make it killer for giving presentations from the PowerBook).
I’m sick of having just one Friend on Friendster… If you’re registered, add me: jon AT macmerc.com.
Update: Wow thanks. I’m no longer such-a-loser. If you haven’t added me yet, go ahead. There’s room for all.
For those of you that are continually late finding out what’s hip, subscribe to some of these feeds. Yahoo! is one of the only big companies that “gets” RSS. Sure wish Google did (I had to write my own code to make Google News into RSS).
Some of the higher ups on the search engine buzz index right now are socialite whore Paris Hilton, my favorite talk show host Glenn Beck and hip-hop deity Tupac Shakur. No news from Glenn or Tupac (hey he’s dead!), but it’s good to see real talent get credit.
Combined with DayPop Top News and the Technorati Breaking News page, you have no excuse for not knowing that we’re going to go back to the moon or that Paris Hilton doesn’t know what Wal-Mart is.
If you’ve got some money to drop on buying into a franchise, open a Firehouse Subs. I’ve had a smile on my face for over an hour. It’s beautiful. The only sad part is that Subway and Quiznos are now sub-par.
So what’s your favorite sub?
Jeff over at the new dick-site-of-the-week (AKA www.ipodweek.com) didn’t reply to my emails. He didn’t post a comment to my exposé on his site. But something he did do was block my IP from hitting his content pages. When I try to visit a blocked page, I get sent to www.mrbrainsfaggots.com. Cute.
Since Jeff is about as tech savvy as his new redirect is intelligent, I’ve been keeping up on his site via a proxy server. If there is any doubt about the blocking of my IP, I can read the RSS feed without the proxy just fine. It’s no DNS issue. Tip: Jeff, just wanted to let you know that mod_rewrite can block my access from your whole server, Google for it! It can also make your URLs sexy like MacMinute’s, question marks are so passé.
So where do things stand? Marginal success–tons of people know he jacked MacMinute’s design (hence my blocking). Also, his site hasn’t been updated for over a week. Any readership that he had is surely tired of such poor publishing.
Since no email has been replied to, I suggest calling him: 315-372-6391. Let him know I said hi.
The latest issue of Fast Company (my favorite magazine of late) sports a cover story on the evil side of Wal-Mart. It’s a great article, and it re-affirmed my personal embargo on Wal-Mart. Enjoy.
“A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickles.” – The Wal-Mart You Didn’t Know
Warning: this is addictive. Do not click the link if you have work to do, or a family that loves you.
MetaCrawler’s unfiltered spy is genius. See in real time what people are searching for on the popular meta search engine. Since it’s unfiltered, you get a lot of, “how to have sex with your dog” type searches, but it’s just so interesting. People are morons. Lots of searches for Google.
Thanks to Larry (no blog, he’s a loser) for spotting it.
Less than 2 months ago, I was getting around 115-125 spam messages per day. Those were the days. I’m now over 200 per day, a 75% increase. Somehow I feel I’m on the meaty part of an exponential curve. Here are some quick stats if the trend continues:
1) By Christmas, I’ll be over 300 spams per day
2) In about three months, I’ll be over 500 spams per day
3) And the kicker, 365 days from now, I’ll have downloaded 280,219 spams (that’s one spam every two minutes!).
If it’s not too cliché, I’d like to point out that if I got a penny for every spam for the next year, I would make nearly $3000. A dime? That’s nearly a living wage.
And well, what’s the harm in one more? In 2 years, 13 days, during the early morning hours, I’ll download my 1,000,000th spam from today. Eek.
I recently (a few minutes ago) had to output human readable values for money with PHP. While PHP may love to work with values like “10.5”, humans like to read “$10.50”. We also round money to 2 decimal places unless gas is for sale and the extra 9/10 cent is added in to trick the customers. There is probably a built-in function that does this, but I couldn’t find it. And as you can see, the solution is really short:
function makeMoney ($value) {
$value = round($value, "2");
if (ereg("^([0-9]*\.[0-9])$", $value)) {
$value = $value . "0";
} else if (ereg("^([0-9]*)$", $value)) {
$value = $value . ".00";
}
$value = "$" . $value;
return $value;
}
Read on for examples.
Read more