Category Archives: Web/Tech

Tivo Love

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So last night I sat down in front of the TV and flicked on Tivo to be greeted with a screen message saying that Tivo had added some new features in the last update.  So I check it out and here’s what I found:

  • Games from Yahoo! – There’s a marble game that’s kind of like Tetris (I’m already addicted) and another game loosely based on Scrabble.  How will I ever find time to watch TV?
  • Streamed radio broadcasts from an unbelievable number of radio stations (I think there are podcasts too, but I’m not sure).  The stations are organized by genre and I’ve only had time to check out the "Alternative" folder but I found quite a few college stations there that should be fun to listen to.  My favorite was the station that had the tag line: "Maine’s ONLY Alternative Rock Station."  Who knew?
  • Rocketboom!  Yup, you can subscribe to the groundbreaking V-Cast, or video podcast or whatever they’re calling it, and it is saved to your Tivo watch list to be viewed at your leisure.

Feels like Christmas in March.  Now if they will get that deal with Netflix going I’ll be a happy camper.  Speaking of Netflix the Greensboro News & Record has an inside look at Netflix’s Greensboro distribution facility.

**Update** Tivo does indeed have Podcasts, lots of them, and it even allows you to put in your own URLs if you don’t find one you like.  Over lunch, just for kicks, I listened to one from someone (no idea who) about cities coming back from disasters.  Fascinating.  At this point my Tivo-love knows no bounds.

Benevolent Inventor?

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There’s a neat little personality test out there called PersonalDNA.  It’s a little like the Myers/Briggs but it utilizes new web technologies that allow you to use ranking sliders and charts instead of answering multiple choice questions.  What’s really different about this one is that you can invite your friends and family to evaluate you using the same test.  In other words instead of answering the questions about themselves they answer the questions as they see you.  Could be creepy, but I think it could also be really informative.

I took the test and it says that I’m a "Benevolent Inventor."  Here’s a link to my full report. I have to say that the one thing that bothers me in looking at my 13 personality traits was when I saw the "femininity" and "masculinity" scores.   According to this 60% of the 3200 people who have taken the test have scored a lower "femininity" score than me and only 52% have scored a lower "masculinity" ranking.  Does this mean I’m some kind of girly-man?  Is this why I really don’t want to see Brokeback Mountain?

I’m going to invite some people I respect to evaluate me as well, and hopefully I’ll have my fears put at ease.

Go here if you want to take the test yourself.

XM Rolling Out a Way-Cool Feature

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The new wave of XM Radios coming on the market offer MP3 recording capability which is cool because it allows you to record your favorite XM stations and then listen to them on the road, while working out, etc. Now they’re going one step better: they are adding a button that when pressed "bookmarks" a song that you like and the next time the radio is connected to your computer it will automatically buy and download the song via Napster.

This is the kind of concept I can see working for a lot of online companies down the road and not just from XM, but since XM is doing this already let’s extend that thought process.  Say XM starts a "Great Authors" channel and they have interviews and book readings with authors and they enable you to buy the book through Amazon with one click of a button.  Pretty cool huh?  Same concept could work for advertisers (some XM stations do have advertising), but that probably makes too much sense for most advertising agencies.

Know What RSS Is? 2/3 of People Who Use It Don’t

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MarketingSherpa has a fascinating article about RSS usage in the UK and America.  According to the article there are 75 million people who use it, but 50 million of them don’t know they’re using it.  How can this be?  According to the article most of the 50 million are people who use MyYahoo or MyMSN and think of the RSS as news headlines or some such thing.

This has huge implications for bloggers, especially business bloggers.  The largest group of RSS consumers are not tech geeks and they don’t know what RSS means and they don’t care, BUT they do value the service.  In the immediate future I’d say it would be really smart to set up an "Add to MyYahoo" link to your site in addition to your generic "RSS Feed" link.

I recommend you read the article fast because MarketingSherpa puts their articles behind a "subscription" wall after a while.

Other valuable links provided at the end of the article:

RSS study charts and data from Neilsen//NetRatings & Yahoo!/Ipsos Reid
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/rsscharts/study.html

How to get your RSS feed included at MyYahoo:
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss guide/

E-site Marketing – the company Travelocity uses to power their RSS offering:
http://www.esitemarketing.com

Info about the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed RSS Feed
http://www.scripting.com/2006/02/14.html#When:9:35:50PM

MarketingSherpa’s more info about RSS page
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3179

Playing with Wisdom of Crowds

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There’s a website that is trying to take off on the "Wisdom of Crowds" idea.  It’s called TwoCrowds and the basic idea is that you register (it’s free) and then start making predictions.  You can make your own predictions and you can look at others’ predictions and indicate whether or not you agree.

It’s very new (when I registered no predictions had more than seven peoples’ opinion) but it looks like it could be a lot of fun.

My first prediction was that Hillary Clinton will not run for Prez in 2008, and then I agreed with someone else’s prediction that there will be commercial flights to space by 2015.  Go to www.twocrowds.com and have a little fun prognosticating.

Find Any ATM by Zip Code

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Here’s a cool little Google Maps mashup: simply visit www.locateatms.com, type in a zip code and then click "Search ATMs".  It will bring up a Google Map with all the ATMs in that zip code indicated, then if you want to find a specific bank’s ATM you can select that bank from a drop-down window.

One problem I had is that the bank selector field shows up on the home page even though it doesn’t function until you search by zip code which can be confusing.  Still, pretty cool little application.

Should You Spy On Your Kids Without a Warrant?

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The Winston-Salem Journal’s Ken Otterbourg wrote a blog post about how reporters are using personal blogs and journals on sites like myspace.com and facebook.com to build profiles of people in addition to or in lieu of personal interviews.  One of the stories he highlights is that of the suicide of James Dungy, the son of Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy.  Reporters used his comments on myspace.com to get a sense of the young man that even his parents and friends didn’t have before his death.

Reading this got me to thinking about my own kids. Kids have always had, and always will have an altnernative persona to that which they show at home.  To me that’s healthy, but it’s also scary.  Does their alternate persona put them in danger (hanging out with gang-bangers, unprotected sex, buying drugs, etc.) or is it simply a matter of different language, dress, etc?  I’ll do anything I can to make sure I know the answer to that question.

As far as I know my kids’ only online activity right now is playing Runescape, but honestly I’m not sure. When and if they do start to blog or set up a page on myspace or whatever I’m going to be their most avid reader. They’ll probably know this and they’ll probably try to set up a secret, anonymous presence somewhere, but if and when they do I’ll do my damndest to make sure I find it. Let’s put it this way: I’m thinking of putting something on their computer to track their activity.

Is this "warrantless spying"?  Yep.  Is it wrong?  Nope, because I’m not a public servant. I’m a father and I want to make sure I know what’s going on with my kids.  Now if I’m stupid I’ll find out their doing something I don’t like, say listening to rap and IMing nasty comments to friends, and then ride their case about it.  That would totally defeat the whole purpose.  I’m keeping an eye on them to make sure they aren’t hurting themselves.  If I call them on every little thing I’ll just alienate them and alert them that I’m watching them like a hawk.  On the other hand if I take the attitude that kids will be kids (silly, crude, arrogant, petty, etc.) and reserve intervention for serious matters (secret liaisons with 19 year-old college students, drug buys, etc.) then I’ll be doing what a father should be doing: acting in the best interest of his kids.

Now you might argue that this is the equivalent of reading my kids’ diaries.  First, diaries are truly private.  Posting something on myspace is the equivalent of taping a diary page to the outside of your bedroom door and if you do that I’m going to read it.  Second, if I think something serious is going on with one of my kids I have no problem with cracking their diary to see if I can find out what’s going on.  Not to catch them at something, but to prevent them from getting hurt.  If I don’t find anything like "Yesterday I met Mr. XXX my gym teacher in his office and he kissed me" I’ll put it away and try not to ever let them know I was there.

To put this succinctly I’ll say this: My kids have the right to a perception of privacy, but until they turn 18 they have no rights to real privacy whatsoever. I’ll be polite and knock on their door before I enter their room, but if they say "Go away, I’m busy", I’ll kick the damn thing in without a second thought if I want to.  When you come down to it kids are not-yet-fully-formed human beings.  They can be incredibly naive and it never seems to occur to them that bad things can actually happen to them.  As a parent it’s my job to help them survive long enough to become fully-formed human beings (I’m 39 and I’m still working on it) and I’ll use whatever tools I can to do the job.

Where the Jobs Are

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There’s a job-related search engine called Indeed that is basically Google for jobs.  To use it just go to the site, type in your parameters (two fields are provided, one for describing the position you’re looking for and one for a geographic area you’re looking for) and faster than you can say "You’re hired" a listing of jobs will appear.  Just like other search engines Indeed ranks the jobs by relevance and it pulls the job listings from thousands of sources.

Indeed has also just launched an interactive map that shows which cities in the US have the most job listings per capita.  My old hometown, Washington, DC comes in second behind San Jose.  Sadly, none of the cities in the NC Triad area (Winston-Salem, Greensboro or High Point) shows up, but that’s not a surprise when you consider that the region’s traditional industries are textiles, furniture and tobacco.  On the other hand Charlotte, just an hour south of us, is ranked 19th.

Winston-Salem Ledger, New Conservative Blog

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Thanks to Ben Holder who pointed me to a new Winston-Salem blog called the Winston-Salem Ledger.  It’s a conservative-leaning blog that I think launched on December 10, 2005.

If these guys make a go of it they should make an interesting voice for Winston-Salem conservatives.  I couldn’t make out who’s running the blog, although the hosting (software) is provided by an outfit called ACT Media, which is definitely a conservative group. Their website states "Act Media, Inc and TheConservativeVoice.com are committed to advancing the conservative movement by providing free websites."  Anyone know who the "feet on the street" for the blog are here in Winston-Salem?

“Dad, what’s a master debater?”

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Yesterday was the last day of school for my kids before the Christmas holidays so my daughter, Erin,  invited two friends to sleep over.  Last night I was working on my computer and the girls were on the kids’ computer which is also in my office.  They found some website that was dedicated to kittens so I had to endure a seemingly endless string of "Oooooh, he’s so cute" coming from three sixth grade girls.  Then, after about 10 minutes of this Erin suddenly asks me, "Dad, what’s a master debater?"  What follows was our discussion:

Me: "Huh?"
Erin: "What’s a master debater?"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Erin: "Well it says here that any time someone master-debates a kitten dies so I was wondering what a master-debater is."
Me: Chin on floor.
Erin: "Well, what is it?  Is it a bad thing?"
Me: "I don’t want to talk about it right now."
Erin: "So it’s a bad thing?"
Me: "It’s a play on words, but it’s not something I’m gonna talk about right now."
Erin: "Okay."
Erin, to her friends: "When Dad won’t talk about it that means it’s bad and probably something about sex."
Me: Trying to type, but have no idea what I was typing.

The girls quickly moved on to something else and forgot all about it. I however couldn’t forget it.  I had visions of the girls’ dads showing up at my door and belting me in the nose for their daughters being exposed to ‘master-debater’ on my turf.  Yikes!

I don’t know how this happened but over the last few years I’ve become the de facto birds-and-the-bees speech-giver in this family.  A couple of years ago I was sitting in the car with the kids while Celeste ran into the grocery store to get milk and bread.  In the five minutes she was in there I managed to get cornered into giving the whole "how babies happen" speech after Erin informed her brothers that she would never kiss a boy because she didn’t want to get pregnant.  She was operating on the assumption that she had a multitude of eggs stored in her belly and that a kiss was like watering those eggs and causing one to grow.  So much for the much-vaunted "You and Your Body" class the kids had at school.  Anyway, when Celeste got back in the car she took one look at me and asked, "What happened."  I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

And just last week my oldest son, who’s in 7th grade, laughingly told me and his siblings about a boy who had to get up in front of his class to do a presentation with a full tent-effect going on in his drawers.  That led to a private half-hour conversation between Michael and me that began with why it’s inappropriate to talk about that kind of stuff at dinner (and in front of his 9 year old brother) and progressed into practical advice on handling such situations for himself in the future.

I told Celeste (my wife) about the master-debater incident and she agreed that I seem to be the one who gets stuck with all these questions/issues.  We also decided that she needed to have a little talk with Erin since there’s no way I’m talking about master-debation with my daughter. 

It’s times like these that I wonder if I can resign my commission as a dad.  We definitely don’t get paid enough for this.