David Walkinshaw, who owns Savile & Grannan Funeral & Cremation Service in Arlington, Mass said in regards to the practice of setting up guestbooks where mourners can email their condolences: “Funerals are such a personal thing and really require person-to-person contact.” If funeral directors are thinking email is tacky and impersonal, that really says something. These are the same folks who charge for everything but sneezing in the presence of the dead. Ok, well, some of them probably charge for that. So is it tacky to email condolence to someone? Seriously, I think it is. I much prefer phone call, a handwritten note or face to face for things like death, divorce which the last time I checked were the two most stressful things in life. My son drew me a picture story the other day; you can’t get much more personal than that. The condolence would probably just be eaten by some bayonese filter anyway, thinking it is some scam to sell funeral plots or viagra.

While on the subject of death, let’s switch to life (beta life that is), I’m now heading off to Microsoft to do some beta testing. I’ll see if I can’t write a journal entry or two in my technology on the web blog. Maybe take a picture of the outside of the playtest facility or lunchroom or something; whatever I’m allowed to do without violating my NDA.

LMAO! The picture in this article is great along with the quote: “Researcher Dr. James McAuliffe found that baboons could use and test software, and perform simple programming tasks.” I wonder what software they are testing out? Now I’m off to perform a programming task and I can’t help thinking that maybe I could hire myself a baboon or two to help out.

It’s a jungle out there. Their words, not mine.

The Blog Herald is running a sort of song/karaoke blog-related contest which is based upon the satire lyrics by Christian Crumlish and since I love music and like the original song (American Pie) it was based on I fired up the recorder and gave it a whirl. While I’ll likely never win with my voice and rendition, if you want to hear me tackle the song, feel free to laugh after you:

• DOWNLOAD bloggingpie.mp3 (6.09 MB 192/44) It was a fun distraction!

Other artist versions (please trackback or comment here so I can find you to link up):
Listen to Pete Hopkins do the full version. Pete was the first to enter this contest. Nice acoustic guitar in the beginning and mild distorted guitar in the later parts.

Recently I purchased a new cell phone: Samsung SPH-A600. It’s only been 4 years since our last cell phone purchase, so we were not exactly current with the times. I liked the concept of moblogging and wanted to have a phone that could take pictures and send them along to my blog. After visiting several different cell phone dealers I decided upon the Samsung A600. It has a patented swivel display so that you can turn it around use as a viewfinder.

The Sprint Vision service cost an extra 15 bones a month (as of this writing), but it gives users of this phone the ability to do unlimited text messaging (sms) and web browsing. I found that not many websites loaded very well in the browser (including this weblog, grrr), but you could get wireless-friendly versions of some sites and of course those sites which have wap pages specifically designed for pda, pocket pc and wap-enabled phones come in good.The whole cell phone ring tone game where you basically rent ring tones is a big market and you can get ring tones for $1-3 for 30-90+ days of usage. I found the quality of the purchased ring tones, plus the ten or so ringtones that come with the phone upon purchase to be outstanding.

It comes with a demo of Ms. Pac Man which graphically was a nearly perfect replica of the arcade classic. The sounds were altered a bit, but navigating with the keypad is tedious. Good news though, a $40 USD gamepad is supposed to be coming out sometime this month. The pictures look encouraging. It made Time’s Gadget of the Week

Speaking of the keypad, typing URLs in through the phone makes palm/pocket pc users long for the ease of their stylus. It got me thinking about how to make a site with easy to use keypad URLs.

The feature that took me over the top for this phone purchase was the picture taking ability. You can take pictures in 3 different resolutions: high, medium, and low. The highest quality setting for the pictures is still a low quality setting on low to medium range straight digital cameras and check this out: there is even a built-in flash! Check out the sample picture for an example of the quality indoors.

How easy is it to take a picture? Simple, you click the camera button twice to go into Camera Mode, then you adjust the convenient swivel lens, aim, and press the button. How about sharing the picture? You push the review button then choose the picture you want, press the share button and then type in the mobile phone number or email address you want to send along to. You can even voice annotate the picture adding a short voice recorded message and it will be sent along with your picture (as a wav file). I am still learning, but I do not think that there is a way to send multiple pictures in the same email, so it’s one at a time. However, it does remember what email addresses you sent to so you don’t have to retype the emails over and over again.

I am seeing the day when I’ll be able to have my PDA and cell phone merged as one and therefore reduce my travelling tech gear. I realize there are already palm/cell phones out there, but I wasn’t ready to spend another 100-200 bones to replace my Palm VIIx, which I realize is grayscale and very outdated but something I still use a lot.

If only the Samsung SPH-A600 phone was perhaps $100 cheaper ($350 USD is a bit steep for a camera cell phone which takes OK quality pictures at its best setting), alas it is still worlds better than the previous phone we had. Grade: A-

Related Samsung SPH-A600 Articles / Reviews:
http://gear.ign.com/articles/432/432039p1.html
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/340/C1873/
http://reviews.cnet.com/Samsung_SPH_A600/4505-6454_7-21008620.html

Accessory list for Samsung SPH-A600
http://www.sprintpcsaccessories.com/direct/sp/accessory.jsp?prod=1595

Microsoft and others are hot on the path of bidding on 3D0 which is going through Chapter 11. Trip Hawkins, where are you now? In the 90’s didn’t you say this console wasn’t going to be the next Atari and what do you know … it was the next Atari.



I Googled ole’ Trip to see what came up and I shouldn’t begrudge Trip for me being one of several on the front lines supporting 3D0 when it first came out because Trip loaned the floundering 3D0 10 million Yup, the bandwagon. Jaguar. 32-X. Been there, done that. Any other videogame suckers out there? I’m more jaded now and don’t stand in line as much for the “latest, greatest” videogame system.

Here’s a video presentation (57 minutes) from 2001-03-22 on Consoles Vs. PCs: Is the PC dead? I think the two markets are becoming more similar in the sense that the consoles are starting to embrace online gaming (check out the XBox’s newest Live Now features coming August 25), but the PC can be used for so many other things (blogging anyone?), so it’s really not a question of one killing the other but how the two will co-exist. On cell phones you can play games now that are reaching the quality of Game Boy Advance, so how will they co-exist? Hmm…

Congrats to John who reports that he has inked a deal with AOL to be an on staff paid blogger for their new AOL Journals. I used to volunteer in the keyword: novel area back in the 90’s and AOL is good about pulling in people into their community to increase their content but I have to wonder if their TOS rules might ultimately prove too restrictive for bloggers who have a dicey style. John, keep an eye on my technology on the web AOL Journal, will ya? And yes, I’ll conform to the TOS

Jeff Jarvis writes a nice post about Instapundit Happy 2nd Birthday.

On June 5, 2003 eBay fired off a letter to Google to stop allowing searchers to use “ebay” and other trademarked names in their Google Adwords campaigns.

In other news, Google is facing heavyweight challenges from other search engines. It’s sort of poetic justice for them because they were ignored for so long by the “big” search engines. Perhaps this is a lesson in never underestimating competition. Always strive to improve and excel at business. Never stand still.

And I concur with Jeremy the Google Page Rank is still broken. Time for somebody to put a fresh quarter or two in the machine.

This Sunday, Aug 10 I’ll be attending a 7 hour beta testing session at Microsoft. Can’t say much more as we are sworn to secrecy about what we actually test (NDA). Actually, I look really forward to these session. If you live in or near Seattle, Washington you can send them send an email to beta their products, or you can fill out their playtest application. It’s a neat way to see what’s cooking behind the closed doors. All you have to do is promise to not to jabber about what specifically you are testing and give honest feedback about the game, software, etc that you test. Now shhh.

Interesting in beta testing other games?

2,000 computers at Standford come under hacker siege; exploited by a newly discovered vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Cedric Bennett, Standford’s director of information security said: “it could take several hours per computer to delete the ersatz code.” I offer malicious hackers this challenge: use your skill to benefit others like Mr. Vilsmeier did curing cancer with his computer skills.

phtml encoder allows for encrypting your php scripts. It also allows for blending of encrypted and unencrypted scripts running on the same website. As for the question of whether or not developers should encrypt their PHP scripts, that’s a whole other can of worms. I’ve found that customers like being able to customize the PHP scripts that I write and through courses at Script School I’ve often encouraged students to modify code where the author allows them to, of course. Analyzing other programmer’s code can be a very useful way to learn how to code. At the same time, I understand developers who spend much time and $$ resources building great PHP software, only to have chunks of it borrowed for competing programs.