Social Media Contacts within Gmail

http://rapportive.com/

This one I could certain give a try for awhile.  It integrates info from Social Media sources to bring all their info together that you can see from Gmail.  Should make it even easier to follow up with people, if you can see it right from Gmail.

Run OSX under Windows

http://www.techremixed.co.cc/2010/07/how-to-install-osx86-snow-leopard-on.html
This article on running OSX on a PC seems very straight forward, and even easy to do.  I guess the reconfiguring your boot menu is a PITA, but simple other than that.  Certainly worth a test drive!

Yet another Twtter Tool I'd really like to try out

http://tweepml.org/

There's been a ton of Twitter-related stuff I've been posting on this blog lately, and with any luck I will get to a bunch of them this weekend. Anyways, this particular one lets you set up groups of Twitter users to follow.  Obviously, people will need to use the tool to follow everyone.  I guess the main advantage of this over Twitter 'lists' is that is is easier to constantly update, and all of someone's follows aren't *poof* is someone deletes said Twitter list.

A new Social, Mobile Game

http://www.scvngr.com/

Seeing my long list of neglected tasks/accomplishments for this week, I figure I might as well attempt something for 'fun' as well.  This seems like something that might be interesting, and might help make more social connections while I am at it too.

Tomorrow's Goal

Yup, I try and plan out what I would like to get accomplished tomorrow.  I only plan the minor stuff, things that I should be disappointed at not getting done, even though I often miss my own goals.  Anyways,  seeing as I finally have some CMS (Content Management Serv???)   installed on my web site, its time to slap together a really messy layout, and add it to the CMS.  That way, I can start moving over content this coming week.  And damn do I need that content!

Diets are good for your wallet too

http://www.helium.com/items/1903331-why-losing-weight-saves-money?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Interesting article, but I think the savings are pretty debatable, depending highly on how expensive and area of the country you live in.

Deciding on an OpenID service to use

I'm not sure, but I may have used OpenID in the past.  At the time, so few sites that I regularly visited used it, it fell by the wayside.  Now, with a lot more social media activity, I may get some use out of it.  However, I don't know which 'service' to use.  It seems like this first one is most common/popular:

https://www.myopenid.com/
http://claimid.com/
http://myid.net/
http://www.yiid.com/

A small collection of WordPress plugins

http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

A nice bunch of useful WordPress plugins.  A lot of them seem very useful for social media or business related blogs.  I actually use something similar to a couple of them myself, and like them.  The next one that I am most interested in is the 'Since Last Visit' plugin.  That could be a nice feature visitors would Love!

Link Dump for today

Yup, exactly what it sounds like.  A dump of links I haven't even had a chance to look at, but I will check them out tomorrow.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/8-Painless-Ways-to-Save-usnews-4181079233.html?x=0

http://shopping.yahoo.com/articles/yshoppingarticles/404/the-best-months-to-shop-for-deals/

http://yahoo.match.com/y/article.aspx?articleid=5785&TrackingID=526103&BannerID=686133

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/110152/wal-mart-radio-tags-to-track-clothing

Turbulence Training

Has anyone heard of P90X?  No, I'm not crazy enough to try that, not yet anyways.  I don't really have the 90 minutes every day during my work week to spend working out.  Turbulence Training is basically the baby steps before you try P90X.  Or something like that.

http://www.turbulencetraining.com/

Weird Fact of the Day

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel, "Gadsby", which contains over 50,000 words -- none of them with the letter E!  Actually, that's kind of cool!  And weird, too.

Links for improving your Wordpress blog

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-add-social-media-share-count-widgets-in-wordpress/
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/most-wanted-twitter-hacks-and-plugins-for-wordpress/
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-auto-publish-your-twitter-tweets-as-wordpress-posts/

I'm sure you realize by now why I post so many links that deal with Wordpress (http://blog.relentlessdigital.com).  All 3 links are interesting, but the website has a ton more resources that are helpful.  If you've seen my main blog, the first link adds a widget that has more than just a 'retweet' button.  The second link is very similar to the first, but the last one is interesting.  I know of several people that have their blog show all of their 'tweets', sometimes just in a 'summary' post.

Guy trades 1 red paper clip for.....

A house??  Yup.

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

Interesting story how this dude traded a red paper clip for a bunch of items through the 'barter' section of craigslist.  Eventually bartered his way to a house.

Social Media Resources

http://mashable.com/2010/07/18/essential-social-media-resources-12/

No, I don't know why I have been surfing Mashable so much today.  Must be link loadup day today =/  This is a nice collection of social media resources people might not be taking advantage of.  A lot of them are not applicable to those of us not trying to build a business social media presence, but a good number of them are applicable to individuals or branding.

Favorite Android devices

http://mashable.com/2010/07/19/android-twitter-buzz/

A nice article on which Android devices are the best, based on both user reviews and user complaints.  Although there are a ton of Android devices out there, the recent death of the Nexus One says that the major Android devices are stifling the competition more and more.

Weird Fact of the Day!

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33.
She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.

Philosophy of Bruce Lee

http://www.dumblittleman.com/2010/06/11-inspiring-life-lessons-from-bruce.html

A terrific nice and quick article on just a tiny bit of the philosophy of Bruce Lee.  Always nice to see people understand his teachings on a deeper level, or just a perspective different than Martial Arts.

Inception

Seems that this blog is turning more and more into my springboard for new ideas for my main blog, I like that =)  Anyways, I've heard some good things about the movie 'Inception' and I'm hoping to go see it Tues. or Wed.  If I'm not too behind schedule, expect a review up on my main blog soon!

Weird Fact of the Day!

Studies with high-speed cameras show that most lightning flashes are multiple  events, consisting of as many as 42 main "strokes," each of which is preceded by a "leader" stroke coming from the ground. Each stroke is a powerful stream of electricity which follows the ionized path created by the leader. (Ions are atoms stripped of their electrons - this happens when they get caught in a powerful electrical current.) The average interval between these strokes is 0.02 sec and the average flash lasts 0.25 sec (one quarter of a second).  The duration of each powerful stroke is no more than 0.0002 sec (i.e., 2 ten thousandths of a second!), so the intervals between strokes account for most of the duration of a lightning "flash."  Thus, we see that each stroke of lightning is mostly "empty" time, much the same way that "solid" matter is mostly empty space!!

Stumbled across a tutorial for the Android SDK

http://hackaday.com/2010/07/15/android-dev-101-%E2%80%93-part-1hello-world/

Looks very good for starting to get your feet wet when it comes to developing apps for Android.  Certainly worth hacking into a bit, and seeing if there is something I would really like to do on the Android platform.  I think I posted awhile back about the emulator for Android 2.1 (and earlier).  Perfect excuse to test out some apps!

Trying out some new Wordpress themes

http://www.wpzoom.com/wordpress-themes-sets/50-free-wordpress-themes-for-personal-blogs-of-high-quality/
http://www.noupe.com/wordpress/outstanding-free-and-premium-wordpress-themes.html
http://wpcrowd.com/free-wordpress-themes/100-the-very-best-of-free-wordpress-themes

My personal blog has long been a source of frustration, as I keep trying to get it both more user friendly, and more writer friendly.  Plug-ins have been the trick so far, but it seems a little dull and user-unfriendly still.

That is just too damn funny!

Formspring gone crazy

http://www.formspring.me/

I have to admit, I am very much thinking about jumping on the Formspring bandwagon.  Not attaching it to empireavenue.com or posting it like crazy to social networks or anything, just linking to it so people can click through and ask me questions.  With all the totally crazy people I know, should get interesting.

Improve your blog

http://dogandogs.com/5-ways-to-improve-your-blog-today

Interesting, I'm looking forward to trying a couple of those ideas out on my main blog.  I'm mostly interested in seeing if improving the 'user experience' gets more visits/followers to my blog.

Trying out Android

http://lifehacker.com/5587260/how-to-test-drive-android-on-your-pc-without-buying-a-phone

I found this to be a great way to explore the differences between the versions of Android you might encounter on phones out there.  The real help it might prove to be is in developing apps for Android in the future.  Rather than programming an app and then seeking out people to field test it on different Android versions and different hardware out there, I could emulate the hardware and OS versions with ease!  I hope to have the time to test it out in the future, as I am planning on developing at least 1 Android app in the not-so-distant future.  I really like being able to see how hardware limitations might cripple certain features before deploying anything.

Doctor, can you take a look at these growths?

Tattoos on MMA Fighters

Usually, I would say I'm a big fan of lots of tattoos, especially when someone works out as much as an MMA fighter.  I guess this guy didn't get the memo that it doesn't look so hot when you're scrawny:

App Builder for Android

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

This actually looks very interesting, I'm thinking about trying it out a bit.  I have no doubts that it is doubly inefficient (less than efficient implementation of the instruction set, and the 'building blocks' adding additional redundancy) but if the feature set of the 'building blocks' is impressive enough, you might be able to do something actually useful with it.  Maybe...

Weird Fact of the Day!

Bulls are colorblind, therefore will usually charge at a matador's waving cape no matter what color it is -- be it red or neon yellow!

Narrow-minded view of online 'reviewers'

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/For-online-super-reviewers-apf-1731998810.html?x=0

Its a legitimate viewpoint, that people (like me, even) who do large numbers of online reviews of movies, games, music etc provide 'free' digital content for sites like amazon.com and review-specific sites.  What it completely fails to consider, however, is the ulterior motives some of the reviews might have.  Sure, maybe a large number of reviewers are vain and do it purely for the status symbol, but what about those that do it as part of a larger goal?  If you are a well respected reviewer of games, and I am a small game developer, might I be more inclined to hire you to promote my games?  Not review it, of course, but if you can get many people to read your opinion, isn't that just one step away from marketing a product?

Weird Fact of the Day

In Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, it is never disclosed what the main character, Willy Loman, actually sells!

Blockbuster - Going... going... gone??

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/110018/10-brands-that-may-disappear-in-2011

This is the third time I've heard this rumor so far, that Blockbuster is eventually going to be folding.  I can see it needing to do some serious restructuring, but going out of business?  I really doubt that, seeing some of the smaller video-rental chains are still hanging in there.  Don't get me wrong, Blockbuster does suck.  It's business is not as streamlined as many of the smaller chains, and its prices across all its offerings is too high to compete.  They try to compete in video game rentals, but online rental places are gaining more ground on them, and have them beat on price.  I am signed up with gamefly.com myself, but the wait times often annoy me, and I rent from someplace in town.  The only other rental place went out of business not too long ago, so Blockbuster is all I have.  Just like the overly expensive movie rentals, their game rentals are a few dollars more than that small video store that went out of business.  I think that Blockbuster is starting to get the picture, and are going to try and directly compete with companies such as redbox, netflix, and gamefly, using their numerous locations to move items faster and hopefully cheaper.

Cruel Prank?

This seems like a pretty harsh joke to pull on someone.  I can't even imagine how much hair that will yank out, not even considering his head!

Next artist for UFC posters?

I really like this fan-submitted UFC poster.  Sure, its all about Anderson Silva, but at least it catches people's attention more than the bland 'fight card' posters.

testing

Just trying to see if this point works....

EAVB_NDOSIUXIUJ

Mean, but too funny to pass up