If you know me, you know I’m a big fan of this guy. He’s genuine and has some really good advice on doing what you love.

This is cool stuff. Video (if you didn’t know), it’s where its at.

Related posts:

1. Sonoma Wine Weekend Trip

I have a list of things I really like and I’ve bought over time. I don’t want to bore you telling you about all of them, but here are the top four that come to mind right now.

Apple MacBook Pro.

I’ve never had a computer stay relevant with me for this long. And I can still upgrade ram and hard drive to get another year or so out of it. In fact, I’m due to upgrade it to 4GB and maybe I’ll get a 1/2 terabyte drive for it. Then, it will probably sell for around 500 – 900 bucks. Try doing that with any pc-based laptop. I dare you.

Electric razor.

Long gone are the days of expensive replacement blades. I charge this guy up and I can go a week without needing another charge, sometimes even a few more days (I haven’t gotten the guts to wait until it dies lest it leaves me half-way shaved on my way to work). I also can shave anywhere that may be socially acceptable, i.e. my car. Some people would say it isn’t actually acceptable to do this in the car, but whatever.This is one of the ONLY ways a man can actually multi-task^[1].

The Juicer

The juicer I bought last year has been one of the most used appliances in my house. I use it anywhere from three days a week up to multiple times a day. I love it. Not only are the health benefits amazing, but using it is fun and some of my friends even think it could be therapeutic. It feels great grinding some fruits and veggetables to a pulp after a stressful day!. I’ve had many juicers before, but this is the best I’ve found so far, the Jack LaLane’s Juicer Pro.

My Honda Element

This is the most practical car I’ve ever owned. I think its great. I liked it first because it was different, it has a look like you haven’t seen before and after sometime it really grows on you. Dubbed “the toaster” by many, the Element is an extremely practical car. I’ve moved twice with it; packed enough firewood to last me for two winters; been camping with it; been to Las Vegas, Northern California and all along the coast in it. I love the fact that I can pack tons of stuff on it to move around, the two seats in the back make it very comfortable for passengers. Its extremely reliable and can be cleaned very quickly and easy –although you’re not supposed to hose it– as some people would have you believe. I can even sleep in it if I want. By far, the best car I’ve owned.

1. There are only a few, really. That’s a post for another day though

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Reciprocity.

1 : the quality or state of being reciprocal : mutual dependence, action, or influence

I’m torn about this and I hope to explain why. Reciprocity is a problem right now in Social Media, its a rampant epidemic that needs to stop. The old cliche you scratch my back, I scratch your back wasn’t meant to be taken literally to everything you do. Here is where my rant comes in. Twitter for example, why do some people feel the need to follow everyone that follows them? I’m a techie, I have every tool available at my disposal and I know how to use them. I can switch from tweetdeck to hootsuite to co-tweet to seesmic to you-name-it in a heartbeat… yet I don’t follow more than 180 people. Why? Because it is impossible to actually follow all those people. I will not keep up with them if I followed 400 people, I couldn’t. So I know you also can’t. I’m also talking from experience, I’ve reached out to people with no response, or a 2 week later response that is starts with an apology because they have so many tweets to catch up on.

Unfortunately the trend of reciprocity is spilling into my new favorite site, Empire Avenue. People keep posting ads like “buy my stock and I’ll buy yours” or “follow me and I’ll follow you.” Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the network? You are supposed to bring value for what you do, who you are and what you want to do. The value shouldn’t lie in following back just for the sake of it. Please stop it.

But wait, this is happening everywhere. This happens on Twitter and most notoriously on Blogs. Please, if you follow my blog or my Twitter feed right now just because I followed yours. Stop reading this and go unfollow me. I don’t want you looking at my stuff just because I look at yours. The fact is that the more people you follow for the sake of the Golden Rule, the less you’re going to get out of it because there is no possible way you can keep up with that.

If you think you can keep up with thousands of twitter users, and hundreds of feeds in your reader, and hundreds of followers in other networks, you’re deluded. You’ll be able to catch some of the users’ comments some of the time. You most likely will remain within your personal group of friends and people you actually pay attention to and care about. So why keep around all those other followers?

Take for example Twitter. There’s a ratio number I consider heavily before I follow somebody… Actually there’s a lot of stuff I consider when I am about to follow somebody on Twitter. But one that is a dead giveaway for me that will make me not follow you is if you have a lot more people you follow than follow you. I love that Twitter gives us the number of following and followers directly on the email that you get when someone follows you. I read and check every single follower that I get so it is important that you’re not wasting my time. If you are following more than people are following you and have less than 100 followers, chances are I’m not even going to look at your profile.

It isn’t so much about how many people you have following you or how many people you follow, but in the cases of newsworthy or worthy information, the masses usually have something to say about what’s good. If you’re not able to get people to follow your feed, then chances are your feed isn’t interesting. Following hundreds of people back, or in hopes they follow you back to increase your numbers is lame. Its kind of like a kid going around the playground nagging everyone to be their friend. Nobody likes that kid, they’re annoying, probably have low self esteem, and generally thrive on worthless attention.

So Do unto others as you wish to be done unto you doesn’t apply so much to following and using social media. After all, I DON’T want people following me because I followed them. That defeats the whole purpose. I want followers to follow me because they like what I say, because they find what I say interesting or and more importantly, I want them to follow me because my feed will add value to their lives.

Going back to the ratio of followers/following, I find it very insightful. I usually raise my eyebrow to anybody with a ratio, close to 1. I’ll still check out your site and feed if your ratio is between .999 and .700 but anything below that is highly questionable. Maybe I’ll expand this idea into its own post soon. Just like I have a ratio for this on Twitter, I have complex judging mechanism for all other public networks I join like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, etc., and trust me one of the factors I consider is not reciprocity.

This rant is really more about personal accounts in SM, business accounts, that’s a different story and should be handled in its own set of expectations and guidelines. More on that later.

Related posts:

1. Six new social media tools for you
2. Hash-Tagging it up on Twitter
3. Bluetooth Headset Giveaway Winner

I read this headline today, and the first thing I wondered was, who is Metaweb?.

And I found this cool video. It looks very promising, very top view and a lot of pixie dust but I’d be interested to know how this actually works.

Now how do these magically connected entities actually work?
source – http://www.kurzweilai.net/google-buys-metaweb-the-one-company-that-could-revolutionize-google-search

Related posts:

1. Pac-Man on Google’s Home page – Interactive Google Doodle
2. Google Sidewiki. Awesome.

I’ve always thought that there are several links that should always work on a website. When a link doesn’t exist, if you type it in you will likely get a 404 page. I put together a list of 5 links that should never give you a 404 page, they should always redirect you to the proper location, whether that is a redirect to your home page or to a relevant post.

I don’t really know the implications or if there are any adverse effects to SEO in doing this. But I don’t really care in this case. I much rather have a small group of people find what they need when they use this method. The method of course is just typing the name. We’re assuming for the sake of this post that you don’t have these pages in your site. They are either in the works, or don’t exist. We are also conceding to the fact that some people type in where they want to go on a website, instead of just clicking on available links.

For example, some people might change the url instead of looking for a link on your page. The easiest and most common of this example is going “up” one level.

If you have a page like this one:

example.com/stuff-we-sell/for-men/accessories.html

Its easy to see how someone would delete accessories.html, press return and expect to receive a page that shows all that you sell for men. In that page, one would expect to find the link to “accessories” along with any other products, for example: shoes, pants, and sunglasses.

Based on that interaction with a site, I can usually make one of two assumptions. If it works, I assume other pages might also work in this manner, and I’ll probably feel good about this site. I explore websites like this. In the other hand, if it doesn’t work I begin to wonder about the rest of the site. What else have the owners neglected to fix before its broken.

Please note that Google doesn’t do this and I’m sure there’s something to augment this discussion from that fact alone, but they’re also serving pages in the billions and they simply can’t foresee all the different names or words a user might try to use in their urls. Besides, you have to use Google, so they’re not concerned about someone leaving their site because these urls I’m talking about didn’t work. I still wish that addresses like these would work: http://www.google.com/orkut, google.com/vark. Why? because others work like that, if you go use the same method you’ll find that “analytics” works, “mail” works, “news” works, as do tons of others. So why not make the others work, like their services, or other google stuff? I don’t know and I don’t care, but I really just wanted to point out that this isn’t a discussion to see “what is google doing” or “what does google recommend”

Each website has at least a dozen words and keywords that should be part of the URL scheme. Its up to each webmaster/designer to anticipate these and take action. But each website, also has many pages that I think should always work.

Here’s a list of these, surely it can be added to and adjusted for your particular case.

about

. If you don’t have an official About page, then you should, but that’s besides the point. The worse part of not having an about page is that people looking for it will get a 404. At the very least you should point the about page to go to your home page.

contact

. What do people need to do to contact you? Why make it difficult for them by searching through your site and finding the right place or method to contact you? That’s silly, make a contact page and make sure that the /contact link works. If you don’t want to display contact information or prefer to remain anonymous, then simply make a contact page that states so, this will save your visitor time and effort.

mission

. Why are you online? why are you in business, what is your purpose. If you don’t have this, maybe you should reconsider being online at all.

your product

. If you have widgets, then your page /widgets should work and take you to something related to the widgets you sell.

help

. Sometimes people need help navigating through your website, maybe you have an application and your visitors might need to find out how to get around, find things or use your program successfully.

Others…

There are a few other addresses that should work I think, depending on what type of website, here’s a list to give you ideas.
Legal. Especially if you have a business or organization’s website
Main. Standard.
Shop. If you have a store, shop as well as, store, buy, market, and products should work.
FAQ. This could lead you to an about page or more information about your site if there isn’t a formal “F.A.Q.”

This is a work in progress, please feel free to suggest other words that you think should always work, or tell me why I’m wrong (even though I know I’m not).

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1. Follow-up, PicLens awesomeness.

I put together this video on how to install CentOS 5 over the internet. This saves you the time of downloading and burning discs and instead uses one of the many public mirrors with all the sources available.

Its best if you view it at a larger resolution and full screen to see details. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment here in the blog or at the video’s page.

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Based on my post about Not having TV, I thought I’d put together a list of movies I have seen on Netflix or Hulu that you can watch too. Remember, Hulu is free, Netflix is a paid service, Netflix has thousands of movies, while Hulu’s selection is more limited. Also, Netflix has more commercially successful movies while Hulu tends to have independent lower quality films. Here are some of the gems I’ve found in both networks.

Beyond The Gates of Splendor. Available in
Hulu and Netflix

The Sea Inside (El Mar Adentro). Slow at times, but its worth watching. The theme is euthanasia so watch the preview and read it before watching it. Available on Netflix. I’ve been told that this is a depressing movie and some people can’t stomach it. I can understand that, but I also think that this is a must if you’re at all interested in who we are, what we do and the overall status and development of the Human condition. I’d give it a two thumbs up both in execution and delivery.

The Botany of Desire. It’s about 4 plants that have shaped how we do many things today. Sometimes we think we’re in control, but perhaps it is the other way around. Available on Netflix.

The girl with the Dragon Tatoo. Part of a trilogy, this is a mystery thriller with no gimmicks or special effects. It is truly about the story and the plot will drag you in with it to discover the truth about the missing girl. A classic whodunit with some elements of hackerdom, sex and murder. I’d love to find the other two movies online somewhere but they don’t seem to be available on Netflix yet.

No related posts.

Last year, I went camping three times. I hadn’t been camping in years prior to that. The three spots I went to were all in California and all were slightly different. I posted some pictures from my Bishop Creek trip. The trip to Kern River got a little more verbosity along with some pictures, and now here’s Kennedy Meadows.

We went to Kennedy Meadows later in the year. Most people in the group prefer warm weather, especially when they’re away from home. I like it either way. Hot or cold, if you have a good group, a strong spirit and even a small sense of adventure, I think everyone would enjoy camping even when its icy cold. According to weather reports and a few checks after our trip, we just missed the really cold weather.

Kennedy Meadows is pretty cool, have camp sites just like Bishop Creek and Kern River, but it seemed that it wasn’t as well serviced. I don’t think we saw a single ranger and we didn’t see anyone else camping. Maybe it was the time of year. Either way we had lots of fun.

Most people arrived on Friday, I got lucky enough to drive up there Thursday night and spend a little more time with a few people that had arrived earlier that day. I have to warn you, the winding road up to the camping site is pretty damn treacherous for california highway standards. The thing is that I didn’t realize this until I drove back home on Sunday. When I drove up there and got to the last road, it was already dark. 11:00 pm on a mountain road, no cell phone and only the company of Picasso. I cruised the road at a speedy 40 – 70, and didn’t think anything of it, even my boxy Element with less than ideal handling for these kind of roads moved along just fine. When I drove back I realized how crazy I had been when I drove up. There aren’t very many guardrails, the roads are narrow and here I was cruising in pitch black just teetering on the edge of disaster. My word of advice… get there with plenty of light, or drive carefully if its dark.

Besides the drive, which I didn’t really think about until people brought it up and I drove it back, the place is awesome.

There’s fishing somewhere even though we didn’t really find it. Fishing at Bishop and Kern was much better, but again, this could have been the season. Also, its a little bit hard to coordinate a fishing outing when you have over 19 people so we didn’t’ really drive away from the camp or anything to look for a good spot. For Bishop and Kern we had places to go and had scoped out good fishing spots in advance. This makes a big difference. The river stretch that was close enough to walk and hike too just wasn’t suitable for fishing, very shallow and rocky.

The river was way too cold for me to try a dip like I did at the other two places, but it seemed perfect for the dogs. All the dogs had a blast and lucky for us, there was a nice pool of calm water where they could play around and stuff. You can almost see the smiles in their faces.

I wouldn’t recommend Kennedy Meadows for a new camper, especially during the winter. I hear its a great spot during the summer, and obviously the more friends you bring along and the more everyone cooperates, the better the experience will be. I would go again, but I’d like to do more research. Some people in our group found some good spots to ride dirt bikes, apparently there are some good trails up there. But it’s in the rougher side of car camping.

We’re going to be camping again at Bishop in a few months. I can’t wait, it should be a blast.

Related posts:

1. Bishop Creek Camping
2. Kern River Camping

Reality check

Part of your job as a System Administrator or Website administrator is to ensure the work you do is safe from attacks and vulnerabilities. Remember that movie where Michael Moore goes around in Canada trying to open doors because he heard that people there don’t lock their doors? Do you remember what happened? It was true, many people simply didn’t lock their doors and he waltzed right in to their living rooms. Michael Moore seems like a nice enough guy so it wasn’t a big deal, but in the Internet people aren’t that nice. In fact they’re malicious, as many nice people as you know there are hundreds more literally out to get you, or rather, your webserver.

You’re not in Canada

Leaving your server unprotected is like leaving your brand new car with your wallet on the dashboard in a crowded metropolitan city, like NY, Tokyo, Paris –someone is going to take it. People are looking for weaknesses and will take all you’ve got if you give them a chance.

Protect your server

Here are tips and advice to lock down your webserver and other stuff you might have running on it.

First things first. You have to address the underlying base first, the operating system. If your foundation is weak, it doesn’t matter how strong your application is.

1. Remove un-needed users. As you provision your server, you may find that you’ve created a user to test this, or that, if you don’t need a user, check the user’s home directory and make a backup of any files you need, then nuke that account. There isn’t a maybe option here. You either need it or you don’t.
2. Establish a strong password for the remaining users. I know its convenient for you to create a user and give it the usual password you like; this isn’t good. Instead of using a known password, use a strong password generator and change the passwords in any account that has login capabilities. Do NOT, I repeat do not write it down, email it or give it to someone else. Instead, use a password manager to save it safely and protect your password manager with a strong master password. LastPass for example allows you not only to lock your password database with a master password, but it also lets you lock down an individual record with one more prompt of your master password, just in case you forgot to log out or something when you go to get a cup of coffee and things like that.



3. Remove the ability to login for system and application users. Apache, MySQL, Postfix, and other applications have or require their own username to run properly. Chances are these users don’t actually need
4. Update & configure SSH

. Linux distributions are getting smarter about shipping ssh configs with better settings than they did years ago, but it is still your responsibility to ensure the settings are properly configured for your environment. Furthermore, check for updates on a regular basis and stay on top of those.

5. Do not share passwords

. It is easy to give someone your username and password to do something really quick, then forget about it. Presumably, you trust this person, but what if they happen to write down the password somewhere, or save somewhere where it is insecure to do so. You see, they could become the targets for someone to get your password.

6. Configure your firewall to only allow exactly what is needed. Do I need to explain this one?

To expand on this, soon I’ll post info about hardening Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, Linux, as well as WordPress, vBulletin, Wikis, maybe even Joomla and Drupal.

This is the first draft of a series of guides I’ll be writing on how to lock down your stuff and hopefully make it more secure. Got a better way of doing things, why don’t you send me an email or tell everyone in the comments below.

Photo by Rinaz, site seems to go up and down.

Related posts:

1. Two new reasons I don’t fully trust Microsoft.
2. Careful when using WiFi. Your files could be exposed.
3. How to erase your hard drive for good

Microsoft Word and WordPress

As much as I discourage the use of Microsoft Word, I know its widely used as the preferred method of writing for some people. Be it for a letter, a resume, or even in some cases, a blog post. Some people use Word to write their blogposts, then copy and paste them into WordPress.

This isn’t unusual at all, and in some cases I would even encourage it. Using an editor like Word has tremendous advantages for some people, for example:

• Comfortable environment. You’ve been using Word for ever and you’re comfortable with it.
• Custom dictionaries and strong spell check. If you’ve been using Word for sometime, you might have customized your dictionaries to suit your language and even the niche in which you write. For example, a technical writer may have certain terms added to the dictionary over time and adding all of these into the browser’s dictionary would be a lot of work.
• Automatic saving and backup. You can take full advantage of your existing backup system without having to worry about your blog too much. I’ve had friends loose hours of writing because something; went wrong in their editing window in the browser.
• Offline writing. If you’re on the go a lot, you may or may not have access to the internet. Sometimes it may be safer to keep your work offline until you’re ready to publish it. This way you always have the latest version in your computer. — I use Evernote for this by the way, it lets me work online when I’m online and offline when I’m not.

With all that said, if you’re using WordPress, you should be aware of a cool little function that is provided to Microsoft Word users. After finishing an article or a composition, most people would simply copy and paste the writing into the WordPress post screen, publish and be done with it. But that’s just for the inexperienced.

WordPress has a paste from Word function that cleans up the text and code from Word and makes it more web friendly. If you’re using Word and want to publish in WordPress, you should take a look and use it, it could save you time and effort, not to mention a lot of headaches.

How to Use it

The paste from Word function is only available through the Visual Editor in WordPress.

To access it:

Create a new post for WordPress

Make sure you’re in the Visual mode. There’s a tab on the upper right hand corner of the editing box, if you’re on the HTML tab, click on Visual.

To paste from Word, use the clipboard icon with the MS Word logo on it. Its the 2nd icon to the right of the “Paragraph” type of selection:

A new window will pop up where you can paste the stuff you copied from Word. This should help you maintain your styles in Word, like bold, italic, and headings as well.

Conclusion

This little handy trick should help you publish faster and more consistently when you use Microsoft Word as your editor of choice. Whatever you do, do not, go back and forth between the Visual and HTML tabs (unless you know exactly why and what you’re doing).

If you’re going to use Word to publish in your WordPress website, you should stick to one or the other while writing any one single post. WordPress tends to change a few characters when you go from Visual to HTML and you don’t really want that because your posts could come out with the wrong formatting or not be visible at all.

Related posts:

1. Troubleshooting and Modifying your (WordPress) website
2. Tiny WordPress improvement.
3. List of words to blacklist in your WordPress site.

Gmail has a really cool system to help you filter and sort messages as they come in. I have many rules in place to help me manage my inbox and a lot of those rules forward a message out based on a given criteria set.

I wish they would make some tiny improvements to this.

The one that seems most needed is an indicator on a thread, to tell you when an email has been forwarded by a rule. When you have a lot of different rules to forward email out, sometimes you’re not sure if certain message did indeed get passed on to the right person. The only way to check right now is to: 1. check with the intended recipient or 2. there is no other way.

You can’t even look in your sent items because the email message doesn’t get sent, instead its just forwarded or redirected.

If an indicator is too much trouble, maybe just drop them into the sent folder like any other message, then I could see if something was forwarded and to whom.

No related posts.

Installing Vyatta was extremely easy, I got their LiveCD, booted into it and ran their install script. The options and settings were very easy to understand and for the most part I chose all the defaults.

The hardware I chose for this seems ideal for the purpose although I am afraid it could overheat eventually, only time will tell. Its a small compact PC without any fans, the case itself acts as a heat sink, but it still gets warm easily. The benefits of this hardware is its size, it has a fast processor (1.2Ghz), 512mb of ram and 2x Gig nics. It’s similar to the one pictured here.

Configuring it was a little bit trickier than installing it but with tons of help online, I figured out how to get started quickly. Although the Vyatta system has a WebGUI (you must enable it first), I chose to do all the configuration via the command line. When you’re looking for help, there is a lot more information on how to do things with the command line. The system sits on top of Debian so I felt right at home on the command line, tab completion works and, much like other Open Source appliance-style sytems, tabbing completes your commands and shows the next available options.

In order to configure the Vyatta system, you need to feel comfortable with the command line; the system must be configured from scratch. There are no templates, or configured options, nothing works out of the box, you have to configure each ethernet card, then you have to configure the networking configuration between the two (or more) ehternet cards. I’m pretty comfortable in these type of environments but I’m not a networking expert and some of the firewall concepts were confusing, to say the least. At one point I gave up on trying to revert some changes and instead I reinstalled the whole thing. It only takes about 6 minutes to install, and after this I made a copy of the initial configuration so I could restore it quickly instead of having to reinstall again if I messed it up again. Luckily I didn’t have to.

I should also mention that the documentation available from Vyatta is great and its available officially in PDF directly from them, there are also forums which seem pretty active with a sizeable community growing.

In addition to the official docs, I found this great guide to help me with the firewall configurations, and towards the end I found a simple configuration to simulate what a standard home router would do (look at section 6). I had found parts of the configuration described there previously at The Complete Geek’s site. For starters setting up the NAT translation was enough to get my system working.

Just to confirm that my system was somewhat secure, I tried running an nmap scan against my IP. The scan revealed no open ports. I also used this site to run another scan, and the results were good as well.

Next I need to figure out:
How to configure the router to accept SSH connections from the outside world. I already changed the SSH port but I can only access it from within my internal network.
How to map ports to specific hosts behind the firewall.
Configure a VPN.
Fine tune firewall.
Set it to use NTP to update its time, and make it an NTP for my internal network.
Set webcaching on.
Configure dynamic DNS so I can host services behind it.

So much to do, so little time. Oh yeah, and check out some of the too hot for print ads in the community section of the Vyatta page.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft products since I started playing around with technology over a decade ago. I love some of the ideas they bring to the table, and their contribution to progress of technology is unquestionable. But their implementation is usually poorly done, clumsy and generally just sub par.

Here are two recent examples, one in Security and one in Consumer electronics.

Security first

This is really important if you’re using Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail. Before I go any further, please go and get a real email account with Google. You can get a good and secure personal email address account here. If you need a business account, take a look at Google’s business offerings, they’re better and less expensive than Microsoft’s and if you insist in using Outlook or Outlook Express, you can still get your mail with those clients. Now onto the meat of the story, I’ll just quote a couple of snippets form the news article (thanks @David) that talks about an inexpensive tool to basically get all your passwords, yes, thanks to Outlook and Microsoft.

Here’s what the tool does:

Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker automatically identifies all supported products and user identities, locates all available accounts and PST files, and reveals stored password information.

And why it is important:

The password cracking tool reveals passwords protecting access to email accounts, identities and Microsoft Outlook PST files. Supporting all versions of Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail, Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker can retrieve the original plain-text passwords protecting access to mail accounts, POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP news passwords. In addition, Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker reveals Microsoft Passport passwords stored by Windows Live Mail, user identity passwords, and passwords protecting PST files created by Microsoft Outlook up to version 2010.

You can see that it affects all versions of their mail products (servers being the exception), but you don’t use server products, you get your mail with Outlook. I’ll say it simply and calmly. Stop using these products, especially when the alternatives are clearly superior in almost every regard.

On consumer products

The other reason I am not very trusting of the Redmond guys, is in the area of consumer products. It was announced that Microsoft is pulling their phones out of support; you see they decided to jump in the bandwagon of social media recently and thought to add yet another useless product to their consumer line.

The Kin, it was supposed to tie in your Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks into an easy to use device. You know, kind of like the iPhone, or Android, or Blackberry or any of the other devices that already do this. All that is great!, the guys like Apple, Google, HTC & RIM need competition. Except that, in typical MS fashion, during the design phase and engineering meetings, they decided to make a piece of shit instead. Trust me they have blueprints and specs for it. I tested the phone out at the store a couple of times and it just sucked.

Why is this important? Because MS keeps trying to do everything, they’ve long forgotten their roots and now want a part of everything. That’s fine, many companies do that, except when they enter a space, they try to do it gracefully and intelligently, and they certainly won’t leave you hanging in the dark with an overpriced just-bought phone by discontinuing it less than 2 months after its launch.

In closing

I’m a fan of the best of breed products, in today’s day an age email services by Google kick everyone else’s butt, plain and simple. And I can say this with confidence after running Exchange and other mail systems for years; both as an admin for hundreds of users and as a user. I also love new gadgets, I’ve had a Blackberry, an iPhone, an Android phone and have tried dozens of other phones, but I always do my research. This is why you won’t see me using a windows mobile phone (they suck), and you won’t see me buying any 1st generation new-space gadget by Microsoft. They simply don’t do research and testing prior to launch, they hope their brand will make people flock to the stores to buy their products. It is unfortunate that they don’t realize how much good competition is out there. Do your Research before you buy or use anything, especially Microsoft offerings.

Related posts:

1. The hackers know this, but do you?
2. Careful when using WiFi. Your files could be exposed.

These are very unique tools that use the power of social interactions to bring the most value to their services. From watching TV to watching what is being said and by whom, I hope you or someone you know enjoys these.

Threadsy

As you exchange messages, this tool brings in more information about the person you’re interacting with. It helps you track conversations and interactions on twitter, facebook and email. It works with Gmail using oauth so its safe, you can also use other email address systems. Next after email, you’ll add your social networks and other information before you start using it. Great for business interactions and simply learning more about the people you communicate with all the time. This is awesome for social media users.

Anyclip

Allows you to search for a quote in a movie through the collection of movies to find the clip you’ve been looking for. They’re brand new so don’t scoff when you can’t find your favorite quote from a movie. Given some time and enough interest, this is bound to be a gold mine for bloggers, movie critics and other content producers.

RefMob

The idea is for you to find businesses that offer referal bonuses, by using RefMob, you can cash in some of those referal bonuses. I checked out the site and created a profile, it looks very well thought out but maybe a little complex. I have to give it a second pass before I say if I like it. The idea that you can make a few hundred dollars just by telling your friends about a service they’d use anyway seems like a great idea. Other sites like Groupon are cashing in on this.

Clicker

Not really sure if this is considered social… but anyway. This service has two sides. One you can browse in your browser like any regular website, but the nice feature I’m looking forward with this application is their clicker.tv app. I recently ditched cable tv, so being able to quickly find good stuff to watch is a little difficult in standard resolution webpages. Every icon is way too small in my big screen TV. Clicker.tv is presented in such way that it can make browsing with your computer on the big screen a lot easier and pleasant experience by presenting large icons and convenient navigation.

SeatGeek

This is such a great idea and hopefully it works well. I’m looking to save some money in a bunch of events coming up this year and next year, maybe seatgeek is the way to save some serious money. The site uses fancy braniac algorithms to find you the best deals on tickets to concerts and stuff. It works by using historical trends to forecast when you should buy the ticket. It sounds like a snake oil gamble, but it could seriously work. I’ve signed up for an account and might give it a try soon.

TheSwoop

Jumpstart your startup with favors from other start-ups and pay the favor back by contributing your own assistance to others. A sort of pay it forward system is what drives this service. Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for some work done at a low cost or for barter.

A few more worth mentioning:
http://www.crowdflower.com Similar to the mechanical Turk by Amazon, this helps you outsource tasks and jobs out to people willing to complete the work.
http://www.trollim.com Test out your programming skills in battles against other programmers. Compare candidates for employment, review competencies.
http://toonstunes.com Social network for musically inclined kids. Worth checking out.
http://thoora.com Finding current hot topics and discussions around the web.

Related posts:

1. On Reciprocity in Social Media
2. StumbleUpon tips and thoughts
3. The best way to get shunned is to show up and shout your stuff.

I’ve been using Etacs for a couple months now, ever since I heard of it. I love it, its so simple in its functionality but seems like a total savior. I get 45 – 200 true legitimate emails every 1 – 2 days, I get a couple hundred total spam messages that I don’t even look at, but then there are those that might be a little bit in between, like newsletters, alerts & notifications and stuff like that. I’ve managed to wrangle all the email I get very nicely with labels and automatic filters by Gmail, but these are a little bit cumbersome to use. Don’t get me wrong, using filters and labels is one of the best things about gmail, but they could use some improvement.

Then I heard of Kwaga, Kwaga aims at being that personal assistant we so desperately need, it is supposed to manage your inbox and surface those emails which are most important. Don’t ask me how this is done, and don’t ask me how you prevent the other emails from being obscured and forgotten. In fact, don’t ask me much about this product… yet, I’ve just installed it. I’m looking forward to using it and testing it out to see what all the fuzz is about. I feel pretty confident in my email labeling system and filtering methods, but if this can do a better job, with less management and administration time on my side then I’m all for it.

Here’s a quick video to show how to get it installed.

The downside to using Kwaga right now is that it only works for Google Apps for domains, you can’t use it in your personal gmail. That sucks! I am using Etacts on my personal gmail and trying this out on one of my google apps domains. So far I’m unimpressed, It doesn’t seem to go back and account for emails and threads prior to Kwaga’s installation. Instead it starts tracking after you install it, which is okay but not ideal.

The concept is great, but so far its just meh. For example, Kwaga tries to pull in social profiles for the individuals you’re emailing and put them at the bottom of an email. I tried looking through some older messages and it found the social profiles for this particular individual, the linkedin profile, the facebook, myspace as well as twitter. The problem was that Twitter for example took me to the wrong profile. I have no idea how it determined to pull that information in, but in this case it pulled wrong and directed me to the wrong twitter profile. This isn’t a big deal if you know what you’re doing, but if this happens to other people, you might actually be looking at one person’s Twitter profile –making judgments etc– while you really should be looking at someone else.

Here’s a screenshot of how an email is displayed after Kwaga is installed. Notice the red boxes.

I’m putting together a better video that will show some of the features and a walk-through of the application features. Check back in a day or so.

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One of the faux paus of Twitter is abbreviating things just to fit your whole message. Abbreviating things just to get more words in is weak, if not outright dumb. Abbreviating words or using acronyms properly^[1] is actually good so I think there’s actually a middle ground.

Ten years ago, if you wrote at the end of your email “LOL” most people would give you this look o_O as if wondering, WTF? Right, and then you’d be like OMG! you don’t know what LOL is? now I’m ROFL, BRB. Now a days everyone knows the big ones, like: LOL, OMG, WTF.

I used to hate short-hand “Internet” writings, those pseudo-abbreviations like “cuz” and “smthng” and even some of the ones I mentioned above. Then I realized that sometimes, they’re okay. Its okay to use abbreviations or acronyms, so long as they’re used in the proper context. In fact abbreviations have only been born out of necessity; they’re needed. We need (in Twitter) to convey a complete thought in 140 characters and to do so, we must type in our tweet as succinctly as possible. Sounds easy, but it is not. There are times where we simply can’t take one letter or word out without loosing meaning and we’re on revision 3 or 4.

Just like my hash-tags, here are the acronyms I use to say something that’s unambiguous. These are easily understood and I find them acceptable.

1. AFAIK – As far as I know.
2. IDC – I don’t care.
3. IDK – I don’t know.
4. IMHO – In my honest (or humble) opinion.
5. RL – In real life, as opposed to a virtual environment.
6. LMK – Let me know.
7. LOL – Laughing out loud. Sadly, overused and undervalued.
8. OMG – Oh my god.
9. ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing. Like LOL but on steroids.j
10. RT – Retweet, a form of quoting someone else when they say something in Twitter.
11. TTYL – Talk to you later.
12. TTYS – Talk to you soon.
13. TY – Thank you.
14. TYSM – Thank you so much.
15. WTF – What the f*ck.
16. WTH – What the hell.
17. YMMV – Your mileage may vary. Meaning, this works for me but you may have a different outcome.

Besides these, what other acronyms do you find acceptable in your social media circles? Surely, each demographic has their own more specialized examples that affect their industry or workspace. Shout out in the comments if you’d like.

1. The definition of proper also varies by medium, so what is proper in Twitter, may not be proper in a term paper for example. We’re talking about Twitter here.

Related posts:

1. Hash-Tagging it up on Twitter
2. Bluetooth Headset Giveaway Winner
3. Twitter Survey.

I love spoof commercials. This one is awesome Jane Lynch kicks ass. Enjoy

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I was going to wait another month or so before I brought this up in public, but I think if I put my thoughts down and articulate what I’m doing I might get better results. Have you heard of polyphasic sleep? Neither had I until a couple years ago. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you more about it in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, this is what Polyphasic sleep is defined as by the venerable Wikipedia:

Polyphasic sleep, a term coined by early 20th century psychologist J.S. Szymanski,[1] refers to the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period—usually more than two, in contrast to biphasic sleep—and does not imply any particular sleep schedule. The circadian rhythm disorder known as irregular sleep-wake pattern is an example. The term polyphasic sleep is also used by an online community which experiments with ultra-short napping to achieve more time awake each day.

photo credit: Michelle Jones UK

What does this have to do with anything?

I’ve never been one to have a regular sleep pattern, I often stay up late and wake up super early without affecting much of my day effectively sleeping about 4 to 5 hours. Two to four or even five times a year I’ll stay up all night, sometimes past 36 or even 40 hours. I did that just less than 2 months ago. I’m not sure of the reason why I’m able to do it, but I think its just motivation. I tend to get into things and kick up the intensity up to %120 and in this last case I just mentioned, I literally forgot to go to bed. When I was finished with the tasks at hand I said to myself, time to go to bed, that’s when I realized I had to be at work in less than 45 minutes.

If I sleep the normal 8 to 9 hours of sleep I don’t usually feel refreshed or alert; at least not anymore than I do when I sleep 4 to 5. With these circumstances I thought, why not take full advantage of my ability to stay awake longer than the average person and see if I can become more productive. The answer was of course polyphasic sleep which if done properly and rigorously may reduce sleeping time to 2 – 3 hours per 24 hour period.

Failure came first

When I first read about this in late 07 or early 08, I got excited (remember my note about 120% above?) and I read a couple of blogposts, got the details and jumped on it right away. Needless to say I failed miserably and had to quit less than 2 days later. I couldn’t hang and I hadn’t really read all the gotchas.

Preparation is Key

This time around I’m getting prepared. I started about 2 weeks ago with a couple napping exercises. I need to be able to fall asleep quickly since I only get 30 minutes at a time. Normally I take 5 – 6 minutes to fall asleep. I’ve been training my body to quickly fall asleep when I want to; so far it seems to be improving, I think I’m down to a couple of minutes. Another key preparation is diet. I don’t have a lot of problems there because I already watch what I eat and try to minimize salt and fat intake while keeping a balanced diet. I juice a lot, I eat pretty healthy, not over the top but I am watching my food intake a little bit closer now. Besides food, I’ve also minimized intake of different stimulants such as alcohol, beer, wine and coffee; their effects can be devastating to the focused and compartmentalized sleep pattern. In fact, I’m on my 9th day of no coffee; I feel great.

Learning and Logging

I’m learning a lot, I’ve read a couple of research papers as well as tons of blogs and personal experiences. I have also been keeping a small quick log of what’s going on and things I’ve done, tried or thought about this whole process. I will be presenting that log here somewhere in the upcoming weeks. The title of this post is related because the adjustment phase, which is supposed to last 7 to 10 days puts your body in a sort of sleep depravation mode. We’ll see how that goes.

Haven’t actually started…

I was going to start this on Monday this week, however I’ve been battling a cold for a week or so and I needed solid recovery rest so I had to postpone the start of the experiment. I hope to make the experiment last at least six months but I might have to break away from it for about a month or so after August. That might be a challenge, as I’ve read that adjusting into and out of the program takes some time and effort. I’ll be getting married (again) and so the chaos that comes with that will certainly interfere with the 6 hours on, 30 minutes off pattern.

Who else is out there?

In parallel with preparing and planning this out, I’ve begun looking for other people that have had this experience or are in the middle of it. I’ll be connecting with them and learning from them as well. Please feel free to reach out if you’re one of these people and we can share tips and experiences to make the entire process much better, not only for ourselves, but for other people willing to experiment with this. After all who wouldn’t want to gain four to six hours of waking time?

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Never, ever, dispose of your harddrives without first erasing all the data in them. Also, make sure you don’t erase it just by deleting the files; even after you delete files, they can be recovered. Your best bet is to properly overwrite the harddrive with bogus data, then erase it.
This process ensures that your data was erased, not by deletion, but by being overwritten which makes it extremely hard to recover and most of the times its impossible.

Sometimes the harddrive you’re going to get rid of is actually broken, it won’t spin, it won’t power on or it clicks but it doesn’t show up in your computer. Don’t just throw it out! Even if you can’t get it to start up, somebody else might be able to. Then they could have your data. The best way to make sure that your data is completely unrecoverable if the disk doesn’t even turn on, is to drill through the drive.

1. Get a drill
2. Get your HardDrive
3. Need a surface like a workbench
4. A Vise would be ideal
5. Drill a couple of holes through the platters of your disk.
6. Dispose of the drive properly; electronics need to be recycled, don’t just dump them in the trash.

Not sure what I mean by drilling out your harddrive? take a look at this video where we destroyed one of these drives that wouldn’t turn on at all.

Take a look at this guide to help you wipe a hard drive clean if you’re doing it from Linux. How to wipe a hard drive clean in Linux.

Safer than anything would be to first wipe the drive, like the instructions say then to destroy it physically like the video shows. Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Careful when using WiFi. Your files could be exposed.
2. The hackers know this, but do you?
3. Two new reasons I don’t fully trust Microsoft.