Hope everyone has a great Turkey Day!

I have been thinking about the poor shopping cart guy a lot lately. It's hot outside and here is this guy going all around the parking lot of the Wal Mart, grocery store, whatever...gathering up all the shopping carts and pushing them back into the store. What a thankless job this must be! No sooner does he get them all gathered up and back to the front of the store than he looks out at the parking lot and sees 5, 10, 20 or more scattered all over the place AGAIN!

OK I know some of these guys have that little electric cart-pusher that makes their job a lot easier than the guy in the picture but still, wouldn't you feel like you had a true dead-end job if every time you finished a project you had to start it all over again immediately? And again...and again...and again?

I salute shopping cart guys all over the world.

Yep, and it's anatomically correct. They are apparently selling like wildfire. The orders keep coming and coming. Website goes up and down like...well, never mind.

If you want to take a look at the site, beware because you might have to go at it several times to get it up.

Doesn't look much like him, does it. Except for that one part...

 

Lately I've been using a great tool called "Dropbox." This allows me to have files that are available on my home and work computers, my Blackberry smartphone AND my Blackberry Playbook. It's a cool tool and a 2GB account is free. Gets a little pricey IMHO when you go to paid accounts, but 2 gigs is plenty for what I need to do.

Use the link below and we both get an extra 250 MB.

http://db.tt/5V8zyY0

I have been watching news from RIM, maker of Blackberry smartphones and, now, the Blackberry Playbook tablet, for a long time. Last September they announced the Playbook and I have been anxiously awaiting its arrival ever since. Well, it was released on April 19 and I was there. Having saved up some extra money under my mattress over the months, I plopped it down and walked out with a 32gb version of this cool new toy.

I brought the thing home and played with it for hours....tons of fun. Great graphics, fast, lots of apps (though not as many as there are for iPads and Android tablets (but more on that in a second).

I also did what I never thought I would. I started downloading eBooks to read on the Playbook. It uses the Kobo ebook reader. I have found that I have a lot more time to read now that I can carry all those books around with me instead of having to haul the hard copies. It really is convenient and I am enjoying it a lot.

As for apps, RIM has announced that they will soon be releasing an app that will allow virtually ALL Android apps to run on the Playbook. And since it's so easy to convert iPad apps to run on Android OS, that means that almost any app available for tablets will have the potential to be released for the Playbook. I can't wait! But in the meantime, there are way more apps for the Playbook than I would ever need available already.

If you're thinking about getting an iPad, think again. There are still hundreds of thousands of websites you can't really view with an iPad since it doesn't support Adobe Flash. The Playbook does, and you can see all those websites in their full glory.

The version I got has a 7 inch screen (see photo) and can easily be held in one hand or even put in your pocket. They Playbook 2 will be available with a larger screen like the iPad if that's your preference.

I found a great resource that I need to share. It's a website called NetSpeak. Netspeak.org is a phraseology search engine--it will help you complete a "misremembered" phrase ("a bird in the hand is worth--what was that again?" Just type in the part that you remember and the search engine will find the most often-used next word or words. It's also a great way to find the best word to use when you just don't know what to say.

Check it out! Netspeak.org.

Saw this video last night. Tried it this morning...seems that I too have been tying my shoes incorrectly all these years...

http://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes.html

800Notes: Directory of Unknown Callers

If you're getting repeated calls from some number you don't recognize, it could be a bill collector scam. They have war-dialers that call random numbers and try to get money out of people. Some people have so many past due debts that they immediately assume the collector is telling the truth (MISTAKE!) and give them money, so it actually pays these guys to do this.

You can use the link above to search for the number and see where it is coming from. You can help improve the content of the site by adding your own information that will ultimately help others.

I guess I haven't been keeping up with my blog. I decided to check it out today and it has been EXACTLY ONE YEAR since I posted here. Amazing. I guess it was meant to be that I would check in and decide to start blogging again!

(This probably hasn't been good for my search engine optimization campaign...)

OK, so that's debatable. But many people believe that today, 40 years ago, the internet was officially born.

What? You thought the internet was only 20 years old or so? Well, that means you don't know the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web, which is about 20 years old.

We won't go into the details in this post but maybe on one of my other blogs (see my Yovia blog or my Examiner.com page).

The internet was born 40 years ago today, when the first computer to computer message was sent from a computer in a lab at UCLA to Stanford. The message was supposed to say "Login" but the sending computer crashed after "o" so the first message ever sent between computers was "Lo." How profound.

Below is a picture of the internet from CAIDA (The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis):

The internet is WAY COOL, dude! and that is what this board is about...cool stuff.