January 6, 2008 at 12:55 AM · Filed under Gadgets, KJH News
You gotta love it - start a blog out of your bedroom, and qualify to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as a member of the press. Yup, I can actually say I did that with my buddy Doug. We’re attending CES again this year. Yes, it’s not just wandering around aimlessly trying to snag what you can for free, but even this kind of ‘work’ is a lot of fun for tech geeks like us.
We’ll be posting articles as we have time, and you can see them all on Gizmos for Geeks. Better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed so that you’ll get the articles the minute they are published. Don’t know how to do that? Hit this “How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed” mini tutorial I wrote.
December 10, 2007 at 11:53 PM · Filed under Misc
No one is going to care much about this post once the strike is over or when robots are writing our TV shows, but here goes anyway. Blogger Brent Evans put together a very nice rundown of current shows and how they’ve been/are affected by the writers’ strike. Things are rather messed up. For example, Heroes got re-written so that the 11th episode of the season became the last one instead of the 22nd. Ugh.
You may be wondering how the guy that claims not to watch much TV any more is posting this. Hey, it’s news-y and current, isn’t it? Plus I do watch *some* TV, usually while eating dinner or spacing out. On the plus side, not watching that much TV means I don’t care about most of this list at all. In fact, it means I soon won’t have any reason to watch TV at all!
November 24, 2007 at 1:27 PM · Filed under Cool, Games
This weekend, I had a chance to play the latest music play-a-long video game, Rock Band, which is the natural successor to the Guitar Hero line of games. Now, don’t get me wrong, Guitar Hero is an amazing game, but Rock Band blows it away because it’s so much more fun to get a bunch of your friends together collaborating on a game. It’s also more diverse, because now you get to try to master 4 different instruments/vocals. You’ll want to keep switching up so everyone gets a chance on everything (guitar, drums, bass and vocals). You’ll soon figure out who’s good at what.
Available for Xbox 360 and Playstation (2 and 3). Make sure you get the bundle with the drums, guitar, bass and mic if you don’t already have any instruments.
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November 19, 2007 at 12:39 AM · Filed under KJH News, Misc
Ok, the title of this essay should really be more along the lines of “Why Having a Job isn’t Exactly the Best Idea”, but that doesn’t have a nice ring to it like the current title, does it?
For those of you that know me, I recently started a new full-time job after being primarily a contractor/consultant for over 7 years. About 1 week into it, it hit me that I made a terrible decision. Why? Mainly - Time. I hear you asking “what is he talking about?” It’s quite simple really. I was never consistently a full-time employed contractor. Sometimes I was part-time, sometimes, 3/4-time, sometimes even more than 40 hrs/week. While I’m always struggling for time enough to cut deeply into my To Do list, I haven’t been this strapped for that precious commodity in years. Trying to run a side business while working a full-time j-o-b is not easy. I have new-found admiration for all of those so-called ‘overnight successes’ who bootstrapped businesses while working a full-time gig. I simply never realized how important and valuable my time was. To know something academically isn’t the same as experiencing it.
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November 3, 2007 at 2:26 PM · Filed under Internet, KJH News, Misc
Not too long ago, Netbank was shut down by the Feds, and their main banking assets were acquired by ING Direct for a song. I was a loyal Netbank customer for about 10 years, and enjoyed it tremendously. While I became complacent with the (initially good) rates, and stopped looking for better deals, for the most part I got what I needed.
Netbank was probably the first online only banking entity to not only offer above average rates, but also free bill payment. One feature that I didn’t even knew existed when I signed up, but immediately loved, was the ability to write someone a check from within the website and have Netbank print out and mail the check. Free. When I told friends and family about this, they either didn’t believe me and/or were amazed that that existed, more so when I sent them a check!
Lots of banks now offer this feature, but my vague memory tells me that Netbank pioneered this. I’ve started the process of migrating my accounts to ING Direct, as they appear to have what I need for bill payment and have great interest rates, and I don’t really want to spend lots of time researching new banks.
BTW, for those of you wondering how this has affected, the short answer is not at all. My money was FDIC insured, and I think the Netbank site may have been down for less than a day while ING Direct did some tweaking in the background to get it all under their control, but other than that, everything still looks, feels and is the same for me and the rest of the Netbank customers. The only impending thing is that I get the distinct impression that ING is trying to phase out the Netbank services and bring us under their main umbrealla of services. Makes sense for them.
Thanks Netbank. It’s too bad you didn’t manage to stick around and benefit from the fruits of your pioneering work, but I was glad to be along for the ride.
October 21, 2007 at 10:33 PM · Filed under Internet, KJH News
About a month ago, we signed up for a new service called BlogRush for Gizmos for Geeks. BlogRush is essentially a networking tool where you earn credits based on how many times the widget is displayed on your site (i.e. pageviews) and in turn, links to current articles on your site are displayed in the widget on other similar blogs.
Since its launch, BlogRush has had tons of issues with spammer types signing up for the service to up their traffic, and so they decided to move from an automated sign up to a manual review process. We just got an e-mail saying that GfG was reviewed and that it did not meet any of their “Quality Review” criteria. I had to laugh; I may have even snorted. Reading through their list of 7 criteria, I found it rather ironic that we (our site) didn’t meet all of those requirements easily. I’ll post the “Quality Guidelines” below.
About the only thing that we could be faulted for is too much advertising on the site, but honestly, what blog out there isn’t trying to make some money, and how do you do it without advertising? We’re not blogging to drum up buzz for something else that we sell. Our blog is our product. But come on - we have 3 ads on the main page. Three, for Pete’s sake.
We found out about BlogRush from Shoemoney’s blog and guess how many distinct ads he has on his blog - 9 at least count. I’m not faulting Shoe at all. Actually, quite the opposite. God bless him for being able to stick that many ads on his site. If you told pretty much anyone that they could plaster their car with ads and never have to work again, do you think they’d stop to think about it for a minute? Hell no.
In case you’re wondering if we’re going to pursue BlogRush to get reinstated, the answer is nope. For our couple hundred thousand impressions, or whatever it was (since we can’t see our statistics any more), we did not get a single referral. Not one.
Guess what we’re going to do with our newly freed up page real estate? Yup, you got it - stick an ad there!
Read on for BlogRush’s admirable, but strangely enforced, list of Quality Guidelines.
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October 1, 2007 at 10:36 AM · Filed under Cool, KJH News, Misc
There I was losing pretty badly at a Scrabble game, and with a last ditch gamble, I pulled it out on the last play of the game!
Click the image above to see the larger size of the game board at the end.
Here’s the post-mortem: 3 tiles left in the bag, I have [RUSHIS, blank] in my rack. Lots of words if I can turn that I into an E, and at least 1 place to play them. So I take a count of the Es on the board and decide to gamble.
I play the I in a 2-letter word, and pull. Got it! Got the E. My worthy opponent plays 3 tiles and empties the bag. I lay down ‘CRUSHES’ on the next turn. Game over right then and there. Yes, I intentionally chose ‘C’ for the blank tile. Hehe.
CRUSHES was worth 86 points, so you can see how far behind I was.
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