Monthly Archives: February 2008

Nader for President?

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He can’t be serious?  I’m still one of the folks that think his running in 2000 handed the election to the Republicans, so I’m sure they are hopeful he’ll run again.  Heck, I’ll even start the conspiracy theory and say the Republicans are probably putting him up to this since they’ll have a tough time beating Obama (sorry Hillary, I just don’t see how you can stop him now).  He ruined it for Gore so maybe he can do a repeat performance.

OK, seriously, why would he run?  He can’t possibly think people would vote for him?  What does he have to offer?  This offers nothing but confusion and disruption.  He cannot possibly win.  He should fire any handlers that are telling him anything different.

Disclaimer: remember, I know nothing about anything (but even I think this is a stupid idea)

My Calendar makes it impossible to lose weight

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Most people tend to think of the calendar year as January through December.  Around here we don’t use the standard calendar and instead our year goes something like this…

  • New Year’s Day.  Say goodbye to our favorite foods.  Diet starts tomorrow
  • Valentine’s Day – Chocolate season
  • Girl Scout Cookie Season – speaks for itself
  • Easter – Chocolate and peeps season
  • Memorial Day – Cookout season starts
  • July 4th – More Cookouts
  • Labor Day – Cookout season ends
  • Halloween – Candy season
  • Thanksgiving – Stuff ourselves and then ease in to Christmas candy season
  • Christmas – Christmas candy season
  • New Year’s Eve – Parties and food

Then you start the year all over again.  Who needs a regular calendar?

Amazon MP3s – I feel a little dirty

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I was picking up some new music for an upcoming trip when I thought I’d look at the Amazon.com MP3 Download store.  I’ve done 100% of my music purchasing on iTunes for the last few years because it is just so easy the way things are integrated with my iPods.  I was surprised to see how easy Amazon has made it not only for those of us that use iPods, but OS X itself.

Amazon provides a decent downloader that brings down the music and adds it to your iTunes library automatically.  It’s completely browser based so it’s not as seamless as iTunes, but I think it’s about as good as we’re going to get with a vanilla web browser for a while.

But the fun didn’t stop there.  I picked up 3 “albums” (is that really still a valid term?) and not only were they $2(US) cheaper per album, but they even had one that iTunes did not carry – an old Radiohead album. $7.99 for the full album definitely has my attention.  The no DRM piece is a nice bonus as well, and I’m happy to take 256k MP3 files for less money.

I think iTunes finally has a little competition here and competition should be good for the consumer.  I felt a little like I was cheating on iTunes with the first purchase.  The second click was easier, and by the third click the guilt was gone and I was just begging to get caught.

Nice job Amazon, I’ll be sure to check your store as well as iTunes when i am looking for music in the future.

Microsoft Yahoo – Don’t Break My Yahoo

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While at home, I’ve done a fairly successful job of not using many Microsoft technologies for my Internet experience.  At work I’m locked in to all things Microsoft, at home I can use any technology I choose.

I use Gmail for my email, Google for my search engine, Adium for my IM client, Safari, Camino, or Firefox for my web browser, Google Reader for my news feeds, and Flikr for some of my photos.  But the most important page I hit every day is my personalized My Yahoo! page.

I’ve never been impressed with MSN.com’s pages and the new Windows Live sites don’t do much for you with an alternate browser or operating system.  I was not happy with Yahoo when they released the new version of their home page because I was so used to the old plain text look, but over time it has greatly improved, added Safari browser support, and is finally performing like the old version.

When Yahoo first released the new version I decided to try to make the move to iGoogle.  It wasn’t even close at the time.  We use the Yahoo Finance pieces a lot and Google’s instructions to import that data over to iGoogle sounded easy enough – just highlight all the data, including headers, and paste it in to the import field.  It almost never worked, and when information finally did import it never brought all the information I needed over.  Very disappointing.

So I went back to the new My Yahoo and that’s when things started getting better.  It’s become a great home page again – except for the massive ad that you can’t get rid of, but I worry that Microsoft’s influence would ruin the experience.

So I took another shot at iGoogle and was happy to see that things have improved a bit and they now have themes as well.  It is still not as nice as my My Yahoo page, but my iGoogle page is pretty darn close and I’m ready to make the switch if necessary.  After all, if Microsoft really got all the Web 2.x stuff they would never be bidding on Yahoo.

From the outside it sure looks to me like Microsoft needs Yahoo a lot more than Yahoo needs Microsoft.

Hang in there Yahoo, you can right this ship on your own.  If not, I’m sure there are better suitors out there that would make better partners.  Microsoft will take your best technologies, rebrand them, and you’ll be but a distant memory 5 years from now.

Hey, whatever happened to Excite anyway? ; p