Rachel and I went to see Simpsons The Movie a few weeks ago. I left the theater thinking I paid $18 to watch something I can get for free on my TV. However; due to their genius marketing gimmicks we did get these fancy simpsonized versions of ourselves.
We went to see the Simpsons Movie and all we got are these these silly Caricatures.
A while back I posted about feed 43 and Feed Rinse. Since that time I’ve become even more of a feed junkie. I find not having to go searching for information a monumental time saver, and as such I’ve let my subscriptions grow to well over 200. Also I’d say I’ve become much more informed which may or may not turn out to be a good thing. My weapon of choice is still Google Reader and while talking with my friend Matt I discovered he has been using bloglines. We talked for a bit about the different features and I came to realize Google Reader is missing a few really nice things. Since our brief chat I’ve found several new feed tools to enhance my tool set. There are three features which Matt takes advantage of which I was unaware existed.
Let me first tackle #1. A few days ago I discovered Mail Bucket. This handy website will create a feed out of any email address you send it. They allow dots, dashes etc. All you need to do is have E-mails sent to blurb@mailbucket.org and the feed for that E-mail address instantly available at mailbucket.org/blurb.xml. Remember though, this is publicly available so make sure no sensitive E-mails are being sent there.
#2. Matt happened across Power Sellers Unite. This site allows you to create a feed from a UPS or USPS tracking number. This is something I had previously attempted to find but other sites had been blocked by UPS. Let’s hope this one doesn’t anytime soon.
#3. This one turned out to be much easier than I had thought. As it turns out you can make any folder in Google Reader public. Thanks to Google Reader’s tagging/folder system this turns out wonderfully as any feed can exist in more than one folder. Therefor you can keep them categorized as you wish, and simply add a feed to the ‘public’ folder (or in my case use the blogroll tag).
Another helpful site I happened across recently that can help you Up Your (feed) Arsenal is Yahoo Pipes. This fancy little site might one day replace both Feed 43 and Feed Rinse and numerous others but for now it’s just a site to keep an eye on.
Thursday we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum with our friends Dawn and Brion. I’d have to say this is a must see especially if you liked the other two movies in the series. I’d say it’s not quite as good as the first but well beyond the second. The film is packed with non stop edge of your seat action and filled with ‘omg what did he just do?’ moments.
And now we present to you the slide shows from our honeymoon broken down by island. Maui was super long so it was split into two parts.
Oahu
The Big Island
Maui
I recommend turning the audio on by clicking the speaker icon (bottom right) however i have disabled it by default so as not to annoy you when visiting our site.
http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/user/js/Eq69zYSjjskFT5XH.js
I went to see my friend Charles for his birthday a few months back. While I was at a Mets game with him I took some video which I finally put together. Just to warn you, it’s not very good, but I did what I could with the video I took.
With all the web services out there today there are some truly amazing ones. Some I might even be willing to pay for. Recently I came across 37 signals which might have some great ideas and services. However; I’ll never know. When I click ‘sign up for free’ I am immediately shown a giant price sheet which lets me know just what features I won’t be getting. Why do this to your (potential) customers? Instead why not hook me with all the cool free features and then show me all the cool features I could get as well if I spend a little money? I see this all to often and every time I do I instantly leave the site without a further look.
Do you really expect people to sign up for the paid services without trying the free version? What’s the point of slowing me down don’t you want to get me trapped as soon as possible?
My friend mike told me about Blackle a week or so ago. It makes sense that black pixels on a computer screen use a very small amount of power compared to white pixels. Someone thought that just changing the background on Google from white to black we could change the world. Crazy tree huggers. Anyway, Since then I’ve changed all my Firefox search ‘keywords’ so doing a Google search routes me through Blackle instead. I wish they offered all the same features though, it would be nice to use a Black Google Reader, and a Black Gmail interface.
UPDATE: it really only affects older CRT monitors and can actually use more power on a typical LCD screen.
As most of you probably know, SunRocket, the Voip service Rachel and I have been going with (we paid $199 up front for 2 year contract, roughly $9/month not bad) has recently gone under and is closing up shop. We took this in stride and determined it gave us the opportunity to get away from a land line completely and go all-mobile which we’ve wanted to do for a while.
Today I received an Interesting E-mail from SunRocket. Apparently they haven’t shut off all their features yet because I received an E-mail that essentially says I was randomly selected to participate in a Customer Satisfaction Survey. They want to know how my experience thus far with SunRocket has been. Well, SunRocket, It was pretty darn good until you took away my ability to use the service!
With all the options out there it’s hard to determine what to do with your photos. Typically Rachel and I have created your standard photo albums where we print 4×6’s buy a book to put them in, organize and done. We wanted to do something a little different with our honeymoon photos and after looking at a few things available (scrap booking, scrap blogging, photo books, etc) we decided on a photobook.
The first few weeks after we got back we spent going over our (4,000+) photos with the hopes of creating a Best Of Album. This worked to eliminate a large majority of our pictures but after attempting to work with the best of album to create our photobook we realized even more needed to be eliminated and did so.
After trying several different photo book sites (snapfish, winkflash, shutterfly and a few others) we settled upon Picaboo. While it seems relatively new and unproven it had a client side application which you could download (rare in this day in age) and work with locally before uploading your finished book to purchase. There were many more layouts available than other sites had and the backgrounds are limitless since you can use your own photos (also something lacking in the other sites we looked at). Another unique feature is the ability to share your album online for free.
So without further delay we give you:
Please keep in mind that it’s intended to be a table top book NOT a web-album. With that in mind, if you see an odd picture and wonder why its in there chances are there’s a story or something we wanted to be able to share and you should ask us what’s up.
Randy Aldrich 