Archive for August, 2007

Virtual Assistant Shortage

Monday, August 13th, 2007

After listening to Scott Hanselman’s interview with Timothy Ferriss, I was intrigued by the Virtual Assistant concept. This is, basically, hiring a personal assistant, but one who works where labour is less expensive. There are companies that have sprung up to act as intermediaries between you and your virtual assistant, providing things like a pool […]

Rogers, 8300HD, FireWire

Friday, August 10th, 2007

In case you were wondering if you can use the FireWire port on your Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box from Rogers to get video out… you can’t. At least, not yet. I tried hooking the Mac up and using the FireWire SDK to capture video, and while it can talk to the device and query it, […]

Google Shared Storage

Friday, August 10th, 2007

Google has rolled out a paid storage service, called Google Shared Storage.  The part of it I don’t understand is why it’s so expensive. Here’s the storage I’m using: And here are the options for additional storage: A 500 gig hard disk is around $100 these days, and that will only get cheaper.  Google has […]

Spock is Evil

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

I’m not talking about that guy on the right.  I’m talking about the new social networking site, spock.com. The different thing about Spock.com is that instead of asking people to sign up, they’re crawling other sites and pulling profiles, and populating their database with what’s already out there.  So you go to Spock.com and enter […]

10 Things You Should Know About Silverlight

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Computerworld has an article entitled “10 Things you Should Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight”.  I just wanted to add a few notes comparing things to Flex, since the author doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of Flex. 1. Silverlight Avoids Cross-Browser/OS Issues As long as you don’t count Linux as an OS.  Flex spans Windows, Mac, AND Linux. […]

Auction as Spam Vector

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

I’m selling an old laptop on eBay, and since posting the auction, I’ve had 5 “questions posed by potential buyers” that were spam. eBay lets buyers ask questions about the products being sold, and because these questions could be from potential buyers (and always were, my experience, up until yesterday), sellers need to read and […]

Fish Pirate Backfire

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

Two days ago I said we should Googlebomb Rory with “fish pirate”.  The result?  Today I’m the #3 link on Google for Fish Pirate, and Rory is way down on the 2nd page.  Sigh. I wonder if this means Google doesn’t put as much weight into link text and targets (the democratic nature of  Google) as […]

Toy Cars

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

You know how sometimes when you’re watching an action movie and you see a scene where it just looks like they used models? To me, that photo looks like models. But it’s the real thing, the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Maybe the movies got it right.