I need some help.

I have been using a Blackberry 7130e for the past 2 years.  It's been a good phone, but it's getting a little long in the tooth.  It does media only slightly better than 2 cans and some string.  I need a new phone.  Fortunately, I am out of contract with Verizon, my current provider, so I am free to pick any phone and any provider I want.  Sort of.

There are issues to be dealt with...

Like most big companies, my firm uses Microsoft Exchange Servers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers.  Like many big companies, my firm does not use IMAP, I assume because the decision makers do not believe it is secure enough.  Which means that, as much as I dig my wife's iPhone, if I ponied up and bought one, I could not access my work email, contacts, etc. with it.  This is a problem.  Ideally, I want to carry one device to get all my mail and to serve as my phone.  Carrying a phone and a separate Blackberry for work is inefficient and is not my preference.

Plus, as much as I like the iPhone, it is not without other drawbacks.  It's not 3G compatible, the camera does not have a flash, there is no voice dialing and some of its features require a Wi-Fi connection.  And, as I have said before, I don't want to be tied to iTunes to synch my data or to manage my music.

As I mentioned the other day, in an effort to keep me as a customer, Verizon sent me a Blackberry Pearl 8130 for $50.  I thought, incorrectly, that no contract extension was required.  I learned today that a 2 year extension is required, but that I can return the new phone and be free of the contract extension.  The fact is, however, that I really like the 8130.  It's fast, it has a camera with a flash, it does voice dialing, works with Google maps (with GPS), and it is set up to receive my work and my personal email seamlessly.  In fact, I would strongly consider extending my Verizon contract, keeping the 8130 and waiting for the Blackberry 9000 to hopefully rock my world, but for one little complication...

After I activated my old phone, but before I got the 8130, my firm decided that everyone's Blackberry should have a forced password on it.  This means that after 30 minutes of inactivity, my phone locks, and I have to enter a password on that little Suretype keyboard before I can access my email, contacts, camera and other applications.  This is not a huge problem for most people at my firm, because they do not use their firm-issued Blackberries as their phones.  On the other hand, I use my Kent-purchased Blackberry as my phone, for my personal email, etc.  Plus, I do a lot of calls while driving, and having to enter that password every 30 minutes is, practically and psychologically, unappealing.  In sum, the password thing is close to a deal stopper for me as far as the phone and personal stuff goes.

So I see my choices as:

1. Getting an iPhone for my personal stuff and carrying a firm-issued, password enforced and likely rarely used Blackberry for my work stuff.  This seems really inefficient and unnecessary to me.  I don't want to lug two devices around.  On the other hand, I would be able to quench my iPhone-lust.  But if I can't get my work contacts, calendar and email on it, it's not really serving its intended purpose.

2. Keeping the 8130 and living with the forced password.  I can't adequately describe how intrusive I find the password thing.  I wish I could learn to live with it, but I don't think I can.  On the other hand, if I could somehow come to terms with it, I could be happy with the 8130, and potentially thrilled with a subsequent 9000.

3. Returning the 8130, reactivating my old 7130e and waiting to see how the 9000 shakes out.  Unfortunately, because of account deletions and creations with the new phone, even if I go back to my old phone, I will have the forced password problem.  The only way this makes sense is if the iPhone will be able to pull email from Blackberry Enterprise servers within the foreseeable future.  And nothing I have read gives me any reason to believe that's going to happen.

I end up caught between two less than satisfactory choices.  One, if I want an iPhone, I have to lug two devices around.  Two, if I want to have one device for everything, I have to live with a forced password.  Honestly, I find neither choice acceptable.

What should I do?

Four of my favorite bloggers,  MG Siegler of ParisLemon, Steven Hodson of WinExtra, Frederic Lardinois of The Last Podcast and Louis Gray, have combined to create and moderate the aptly named Elite Tech News,  a custom Reddit for tech-related news.

Here's the URL, and here's the feed.

Highly recommended.

Randy Morin with a lesson on how not to treat your customers.  Reminds me of the time I got completely blown out by this hag at the airport because I tried to pay for a water bottle at the wrong cash register.

MG Seigler brings truth to the Continental free not-Wi-Fi story.  Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger and the Blackberry network?  Obviously, Yahoo is paying Continental some money to force people to its network, at the expense of everything we really need.  This is bad news getting spun as good news.

Stereogum points to some new Sun Kil Moon.  Here's where you can listen to it.  Glen Tipton was my favorite song of 2007.  On the retro hand, Stereogum also has some vintage Hall and Oats, complete with bad hair and intermittent lip synching.

After all the (very tasty) deer I ate this past week, it was troubling to learn that vegetarians are healthier, smarter and richer.  Maybe, but that deer was a vegetarian and he got eaten.  That's not so smart now, is it?

So 80 people go to Chuck E Cheese, get in a brawl and end up getting pepper sprayed.  The next day it almost happens again.

I really enjoy Survivor and the Amazing Race.  But a show about Michael Vick's dogs is absurd.  I wonder if they go visit him now that he's in the pound?  I hope I don't accidentally record every episode and watch it.

Here are some cool photos of a diamond rush ghost town in Namibia.  Here's more about the town's history.

Thomas Hawk on Barack Obama, Dave Winer and pot.  We have a good friend who is very interested in politics.  She's always putting signs for all the wrong people in her yard.  I told my kids they don't have to study up on elections- that all they have to do is drive by Sharon's house, write down every name on the signs there, and vote for the other person.  I'm pretty sure that I would take the same approach with signs in Dave's yard.  Or on his blog.

Here's reason number 112 why I say no when my kids ask if they can play with their turtle.  Reason number 1 is because if he bites you, he won't let go until it thunders.

Good advice for living a happy life.

It was bad enough when he didn't see the first one coming.  Then there was the second one.

PDFTextOnline converts PDF files to text, for free.  Oh yeah, and online.  Text...PDF.  It didn't work all that well for me based on a couple of test documents, but it's a cool idea.

I've mentioned more than once that young people who play behind the Facebook walls should proceed (and post) with caution, since things said in the faux-safety of that place of a thousand friends can come back to haunt you.  Here's an object lesson on that topic.

Meet Lucas Caparelli, until recently a running back for my alma mater, Wake Forest.  Lucas is described by college sports site Scout as having break away speed and vision. "Gritty player that just loves to compete. Athleticism and competitive drive could carry him far at the next level."  The Deacons were thrilled to sign Lucas, who was also recruited by Maryland, Pitt, Virginia and Virginia Tech, among others.

Lucas arrived at Wake Forest at the beginning of the golden era of WFU football under the guidance of wonder-coach Jim Grobe.  The Demon Deacons won the Atlantic Coast Conference and played in the Orange Bowl last year and won nine games including the Meineke Car Care Bowl this year.  Things are good for WFU football (they are not so good for WFU basketball, but that's a topic for another day).

Lucas has, or had, a Facebook page.  At some point, he apparently wrote on his Facebook page, that he was going to "blow up the campus."  He also wrote, according to published reports, a post in Facebook's trademark third person saying "for those left standing he will have an Uzi locked and loaded in his bag."  After another student saw the Facebook posting and, quite correctly, notified authorities, Lucas got a visit from the police.  While the police did not find any weapons in his bags or dorm room, Lucas has been dismissed from the football team and suspended, at least for now, from the university.

Here's a lengthy discussion about the matter, including some current WFU students, at ACCBoards.Com.  Here's a related post on the Old Gold & Blog, a Wake Forest sports blog.

One of the local television stations spoke with Caparelli (here's a video with portions of that conversation).  He admitted he did a stupid thing.  He apologized, and said he "never thought it was going to snowball into this."  But that's the thing.  In this post 9-11, post Virginia Tech world, no right-thinking school, employer or friend (the real or Facebook kind) can afford to take chances.  Threatening things written must be taken at face value, regardless of the intent or state of mind of the writer.  There are no do-overs anymore.  Thanks to technology, easy capital and cheap storage, things that may be intended as one-off rants, jokes or juvenile nonsense are captured, archived, indexed and, often, distributed.

College kids behaving stupidly is nothing new.  When I was at Wake Forest, a guy drunkenly told me he was going to kill me because a few of us intercepted his pizza delivery, paid for it and ate it (that was our "on demand" hack of the Domino's delivery system).  I didn't really think he was going to kill me, but his words when spoken sounded as serious as they were slurred.  Imagine how they would have looked in writing.  During that same period, we used to joke that phones should have breathalyzers on them so we couldn't come home after too many beers, call our girlfriends (or prospective girlfriends) and mumble out what we heard as suave and the girls heard as stupid.  Thank goodness the internet didn't exist back then.

By all accounts, it doesn't look like Caparelli planned to commit any actual acts of violence.  It may very well have been a stupid joke, a poorly thought-out response to some dissatisfaction with school, or just misguided late night ramblings.  But regardless of his true intent, this event will likely affect him for the rest of his life, to one degree or another.  Hopefully, he'll learn from it.  If Jim Grobe recruited him, chances are he's a good kid.  But his life just got harder than it would have otherwise been.

In a few years when he applies for a job, this unfortunate event will almost certainly come up, particularly if his prospective employer does a background check.  And if somehow it doesn't, he'll have to choose between disclosing it and risking the reaction or living in fear of Google.

The obvious moral of this story is to write every post as if everyone you ever know will see it.

Because the chances are pretty good that they will.

Cassidy received an award tonight for reading all 20 books in the Texas Bluebonnet book program, and writing a summary for each one.

She also got to pick one of her summaries to read at the presentation.

Cassidy reading her summary of
Hubert Invents the Wheel.

Technorati Tags: books

Lifehack has 7 Habits to Win in Office Politics. I'm a little bothered by the "win" in that title. How about to manage office politics? Anyway, habit number 6 - seek to understand before seeking to be understood - is also one of traits of the best negotiators. And probably the best bloggers too.

Rick Mahn says bye-bye to Facebook. You know, no matter how hard people try to make it otherwise, Facebook was, is and always will be primarily for college age kids. I really agree with Rick when he says:

While some have made a pretty good case for Facebook, it doesn't change how it's viewed by business, or how useful it is for me. I'm astounded at home much time everything takes and how limited everything is. Not to mention the data-ownership question.

Facebook, like most of the social networks, is amplified cocktail chatter- everyone talking over each other and no one really listening. Net out the advertorials and you end up with a lot of really marginal content.

Today's list: TDavid on the 8 types of blogs for 2008, with a little Newsome.Org editorial:

1) Linkblog. Only marginally interesting without added content. I can find plenty of links in my feed reader.
2) Moblog. Accretive if used in moderation.
3) Podcast. Fun to do, but does anyone really listen to them?
4) Video blog. Home movies were boring in the 70's. Videos are a plus if done well and in moderation.
5) Microblog. A graffiti wall. Fun in small doses.
6) Miniblog. I don't know much about these. Why spread your content all over the seven seas when you can consolidate it in your main blog? All this data spread can actually work against personal brand building if it's unchecked.
7) Liveblog. Seems like an awful lot of work and not much bang for your buck. As soon as the event is over, you've lost the advantage over regular blog posts.
8) Regular Blog. Here comes my main point: why can't a regular blog encompass all 7 of the others?

Now that we've managed to bring wolves back from the brink of extinction, let's start shooting them. Amazing.

My wife recently joined a book club, which seems to be the soccer moms' preferred social network these days, followed somewhat closely by Bunco groups, which I thought until recently was some sort of organized crime (actually, the more I learn about those groups it may be).

Anyway, my wife joins this book club.  The first thing I noticed is that they read all these nerdy, high falutin' books like the A Thousand Splendid Suns and whatnot.  Those books are too hard for me.  I'm still at the edges of post-traumatic stress disorder over having almost read Wuthering Heights in the 11th grade.  Thank goodness for Cliff's Notes.  The second thing I noticed is that a couple of the founding members of this club keep picking books they have already read.  That sounds more like playing school than a book club.  If I was in that club, I'd call b.s. on that the first time it happened.  The second time it happened, I'd start turning furniture over.  But women are too nice to do that.  They either dutifully read the selected book, or they go all passive aggressive and start going to class unprepared.

Anyway, I'm not in a book club.  But I like to read.  Lately, I've been in a science fiction phase.  Here are some books I have read or reread lately, and enjoyed.  Other than the first one, I'm going to skip all the obvious must-reads, like Stranger in a Strange Land, Ringworld, etc.

First, and as I have mentioned before, I just reread Hyperion, followed in order by its four sequels, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and Rise of Endymion.  These are all excellent books, and this has become my favorite sci-fi series.  I also reread another old favorite, The Eyes of Light and Darkness by Ivan Cat.  It's as good as I remember it.  I am currently reading Cat's second novel, The Burning Heart of Night.  It's not as good as the first one, but it's still to early to make a judgment.

I also recently read Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold.  I bought it years ago, because it is in my favorite sub-genre: post apocalyptic, but didn't get around to reading it.  It was considered pretty controversial when it came out in the 60's.  I didn't find the racial elements to be all that interesting, and I thought it was a pretty good story with or without that element.

Lastly, I started to reread the California Voodoo Game series.  When I read these books the first time, back in the 90's, I thought they were great.  Among my all time favorite science fiction books.  I don't find them as compelling this time around, but they are still worthwhile reading.

That's my part.

Now I need some good science fiction recommendations for my next visit to the bookstore.  Can anyone help me out via the Comments?

So there's this cat.  With no eyes.  Yet it hunts birds and squirrels.  That's pretty frickin' awesome.

Rob Gale has a nifty Rambo Death Chart.  When Rambo finally goes in another year or so, they'll have to add old age to it.

Richard Querin discovered that you can embed Google Docs Presentations.  That's pretty cool.  Here's one I did in about 2 minutes:

I have to admit, the more I really look at Google Docs, the more impressed I am.  I have set my kids up with Google Docs in lieu of Word.  They're happy and it saves me money.

Sad news of the day: we've got global warming extincting polar bears in the north and the U.S. government extincting jaguars in the southwest.  You can always make another dollar, but you can't make another polar bear or jaguar once we kill them all.

RIM upgrades the Blackberry, which is fine and dandy, but until it opens up the system to third party developers, it's always going to be playing catch-up.  If (and based on the fact it doesn't already, this may be a big if) the iPhone is ever able to pull Microsoft Exchange email, Blackberries days will be numbered.

I was wrong about Last.fm.  Rather than join the video herd, it's joining the audio streaming herd.  Here are more details.  As usual, Techdirt brings truth to the equation.  I went to Last.fm, looked unsuccessfully for the new features for a minute or so and split.  All this streaming may (or may not) be wonderful, but if no one can find it, it doesn't matter.  It looks like Yahoo (and eventually every other site on the net) is going to get on the bandwagon.

Penelope Trunk has an interesting read on happiness.  I agree with most of what she says, particularly the part about people too often blaming their jobs when the true happiness inhibitor lies elsewhere.  I'm a little underwhelmed by her good job or bad job test.  I scored 5, which is pretty good.  Somehow, though, I'm not sure 4 questions is enough to tell how good or bad your job is.

Prob Logger (sorry, that's just how I read it) has 9 benefits of Twitter for bloggers.  Here they are, with a little editorial:

1. Research tool.  Maybe but searching your Google Reader feeds is a lot better and easier one.
2. Reinforce your personal brand.  Definitely, as long as you use Twitter to supplement your blog and not to replace it.
3. Promote content.  As I've mentioned before, this is spam.  I've done it once or twice, but I generally un-follow people who do this too much.
4. Find new readers.  Probably, but this is dangerously tied to number 3.
5. Networking.  Nah, I don't buy this.  I think the social networks are neither.  They are just amplified cocktail chatter, where everyone is yapping and no one is listening.
6. Previews.  I wouldn't know.  I doubt I have a single reader who's interested in a trailer for my future blog post.
7. Speedlinking.  I don't know what speedlinking is, so I'll pass on this one, other than to say I suspect sharing via Google Reader is easier and more efficient.
8. Story gathering.  Maybe, but again feeds are much better for this.
9. Find out what people really think.  Here's what I think- I bet the percentage of Twitter posts that actually get responses is miniscule.

Stereogum has Patterson Hood on the Drive-By Truckers' demanding, and excellent, new record.

Cracked just gets better and better.

Netflix beats its fourth-quarter estimates.

PC World has a pretty detailed look at the forthcoming Windows Vista SP1.

If you've been waiting for the fat lady to sing with respect to the high definition DVD format war, it looks like she's warming up.

Engadget reports that with the Warner defection, Blu-ray players have 93% of the HD market.

Meanwhile, Universal continues to carry the HD DVD banner, Toshiba slashes the price of its HD DVD players, and thousands of people have signed a petition to "save HD DVD."  A petition (and some nuts- both kinds) worked, at least temporarily, for Jericho.  I'm not so sure it will be as successful for a DVD format.  Can you say Betamax?

And in the other corner, it seems 6,000 people have signed a petition to let HD DVD die.

James Berardinelli, my all-time favorite movie critic, posted his thoughts a couple of weeks ago:

Like an improperly balanced see-saw, the high def industry is tilting toward Blu-Ray. It's happening in slow motion, but it is happening, and it's hard to imagine that any force can stop something possessing the momentum of inevitability. Paramount and Universal, not wanting to anger a cadre of consumers, have pledged on-going support for HD-DVD (and Warner isn't cutting off the format until May), but they have been conspicuously silent about their Blu-Ray plans (if any). The expectation is that both companies will soon announce they will produce titles for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, at least near-term. That will end the format war. Once every major studio in on-board the Blu-Ray bandwagon, it's all over - even if some of them are still supporting HD-DVD. It took Betamax a while to die after VHS won that war. Sony knows from experience that killing the enemy isn't necessary.

MG Siegler notes that "the early 2008 sales numbers are looking very bad for HD-DVD. The format apparently only accounted for only 15% of high-definition disc sales in early January and failed to land a single title on the best-sellers list - all were Blu-ray discs."

I don't own any high definition DVD players, having decided to wait for this battle to play out.  I'm not ready to buy one yet, particularly given the Profile 2.0 fiasco, but if this trend continues, it won't be long.

Those of you unfamiliar with the differences in the formats and the players can get a quick primer via Paul Stamatiou.  For those wanting to write a thesis on the topic, there's the Wikipedia entry.

Blunt drops out of the Missouri governor's race.  Cheech and Chong reportedly bummed.

CBS and Last.fm about to announce...something.  Undoubtedly something video related.  Yawn...

For those who, like me, wonder why in the world Bank of America is buying Countrywide, CNN has the answer.  Sort of.  All I know is that I bought BOA one morning at $40 and change, thinking it wouldn't go below $40.  It did that very afternoon.

When I was a kid, I loved the Brady Bunch.  I've seen every episode, and I even read Barry Williams' Growing Up Brady book.  So I was excited to read that Barry has joined the blogosphere.  Mashable has more.

In addition to a few other services, most notably Haloscan's trackback service, that increased my pages' load time, I have also dumped Technorati and started tracking inbound links and comments via Google Reader.  Louis Gray tells us how to track inbound links with Del.icio.us.

The Telegraph has a list of 100 books every child should read.  It's a good list, but where in the world is Goodnight Moon!?  Or the Nutbrown Hare?

Any time I see a list of the worst anythings, I just know number one or two will be something absurd, just for the sake of a reaction.  Calling Vista the second biggest all-time tech flop is ludicrous beyond words.  Is it perfect, no.  Does it need work, of course.  But it is on way too many computers and soon to be on way too many more computers to be placed up there with DRM and push technology.  Speaking of push technology, I had a PointCast receiver (or whatever you called it).  It was, by far, the best screen saver I've ever seen.

For every job found due to web cams, ten will be denied or lost.  I hope this fad goes the way of the pet rock before my kids hit their teenage years.  And, yes, I'm really glad it didn't exist during mine.

Stereogum has a new Springsteen video.  Good song.

Why in the world would Google buy the New York Times?  All it would be getting is the brand name.  Newspapers are dead, but there's no way the folks who own the New York Times would admit that in public.  If I were Google, I'd wait a few years and watch the price go down as old media continues to struggle with online distribution.

So this dude grabs a photo of Sooty, the amazing guinea pig, right off my Err Bear Music page, uses my bandwidth to display it on his page, with no attribution (and no link to my song about said guinea pig from whence the photo came) and, on top of all of that, he gets link love from me in my Recent Inbound Links box (in the right column).

You have to love the internet.

So not only is Google Reader now serving me my feeds and you my inbound links and recent comment boxes, it's also serving as my bandwidth watchdog.

Liz Strauss has a very good post on increasing your visibility in the blogosphere.

Like retailers, bloggers benefit from and should seek visibility.  Obviously, this assumes you have the goods to sell, and no one should open their store or blog before it's customer-ready.  But once the doors are open, visibility is the key to traffic.

I would add one more item to Liz's list.  Be visible on your own blog.

One person simply cannot create enough content to create any sort of community vibe.  You need other people, with other perspectives, to help.  And the way to do that it to engage people in the Comments to your posts.  This is easy to overlook, and I have done so myself more often than I like to admit.  The way to build a true community is to create a site where every post (or at least as many as possible) operates like a little message board where people can discuss the topic at hand.

You also have to respect the visibility of others.  If someone increases your visibility by linking to you, or commenting frequently or your posts, return the favor.  Some folks try to capture the market on conversation, but the better approach is to treat your corner of the blogosphere as a virtual pub crawl, where you move from one interesting place to another.

Blogs or pubs- it's more fun with a good crowd.

I was momentarily very happy today when I came across a story in my feeds saying the iPhone was going corporate. And then I read the post and immediately realized it was not going to happen.

All the rates and plans and promotions and parades and proclamations in the world are not going to bring the iPhone to corporate America until it has the ability to pull email from Microsoft Exchange Servers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers. Why? Because almost all of the big companies in America use one or both.

One of my partners stood in line to buy an iPhone the day it was released. I remember when he showed it to us at lunch the next day day. All of us were jealous. All of us wanted one. As the initial coolness factor faded in favor of the I need to get my work email factor, however, he found it burdensome to carry an iPhone and a Blackberry. He ended up getting rid of the iPhone and going back to the boring, feature challenged, but work-email compatible Blackberry.

Someone will say, "but you can get your work email over the web with an iPhone." That person has never worked in a corporate environment where immediate and effective access to your email and other data is critical to your effectiveness. In sum, that just doesn't work.

I would buy my way out of my Verizon contract and buy an iPhone today if it could pull my office email. So would a lot of other people I know. But it won't, so we don't.

Meanwhile, I got a letter from Verizon's customer retention department this week, offering me a Blackberry Pearl 8130 for $50. No contract extension required. I just called them, and they are sending it to me via Federal Express. It's no iPhone, but it's a start.

Lifehacker points to 4 ways to make your family rules stick. I need to call a family meeting right away to apply these.

Who needs Roy Jones and Felix Trinidad when you can watch Louis Gray vs Mashable. So far, I'd say Louis is winning convincingly.

JkOnThe Run takes a look at Amazon's Kindle. I'm mildly interested in the Kindle, but I'm not about to pay $400 for something unless I know I will dig it. Based on this review and my increasing far-sightedness, I'm thinking the lack of a back light is a deal stopper. Somebody must like them, however, since Amazon is currently sold out.

Brad Kellett takes a look at Office 2008. It's Mac only. Sort of like Earl :)

The butcher is dead. Long live the butcher.

I wrote the other day about my issues with PETA- that when you become so extreme in your position, you lose the ability to convince the undecided and actually have a negative effect your cause. Now, PETA says smiling chimpanzees in CDW ads are not OK. Maybe CDW should use macaques instead. I'm all about animal rights, but give me a break.

I'm testing some page improvements.  Please disregard this awesome post.

As promised the other day, Haloscan is gone.  It was slowing the load times.  I am trying to configure backlinks (yes, without the no follow tag) on the post pages to see if that will be a better "trackback" system.  Unfortunately, I don't believe the backlinks are getting picked up.

Back to the drawing board.

Dave Winer's arguments against AppleTV are very similar to mine against the iPod. Why does Apple get a pass when it tries to control our audio, and now video, experience? Everything about the iPod is designed to force you to use iTunes as a gateway to your music. And to sell some downloads, of course. If Microsoft did something like this, all the Apple heads would scream bloody murder.

I'm not saying Microsoft wouldn't have done it if it had the chance. I'm just saying.

On a similar note, why does Google get a pass when it tries to control our entire internet experience?

Back to iPods: Michael Walsh points me to his Digital Rights Manifesto, which I generally agree with, except that I will not accept any form of embedded DRM. Now that I can get DRM-free downloads from Amazon, I am buying much more music than I was in the less immediate CD format.

Michael also pointed me to this very timely comic.

Speaking of what goes around comes back around, get ready for the next big thing: wireless TV!

Some good stuff tonight...

Here's a different kind of alternative dispute resolution.  It's much cooler than arbitration.  I once agreed (with the client's consent) to settle a major business point in a large acquisition by flipping a coin.  We won.

Speaking of legal mumbo jumbo, this might be the most incorrect ruling ever.  As mentioned in the update, however, when something sounds this idiotic, there is often more to the story than we know.

Bonus (and hopefully last ever) legal tidbit: plaintiff's lawyers everywhere are lamenting the fact that, as unbelievable as it may sound, monkeys and chimps can't bring lawsuits.  Not even these monkeys.  Trying to rescue them.  Right.

The people who make Jericho are clueful.  They filmed two endings, in case they don't get a third season.  Stuff like this makes me want to lift my ban on new network television shows.

Here's a way to add public holidays to Outlook.  Now if they'd just figure out birthdays, we'd be all set.

All songwriters write songs about chicks.  Some of us actually tell the chicks about them.  Then there's Ryan Adams.  He later took the video down, saying "I removed the videos 'Sad Days' and 'Jessica' because it is really just hard enough as it is. Good Luck, Jr. in your future."  Personally, I think it's cool he lays it out there like that.

Calling all entomologists.  Here are the 5 most horrifying bugs.

Here's a nifty list of 200 free online classes.  I bet if you learned all that stuff, you could make a living from it.  Or you could just panhandle.

I recently dumped Bloglines.  Holoscan is next.  It makes my pages load slow.  Preview of things to come:  I am about to issue an RFP to recreate my blog in a Wordpress template and move all of my current content over.  Get your pencils ready.  All page post links must be preserved.

Frank Paynter has a really interesting post about...well...I'm not really sure.  Fake babies, abortion, hippies, the Grateful Dead and Jean and Edna Ritchie all play a part.  I have no earthly idea who or what Firenze Ghia is.  But it's a good read.  If Jerry Garcia was alive, he would make a great blogger.

I love it when people scam the scammers.  This is funny.

Star Trek is now on Joost.  That's pretty cool. 

For the three people who care:  the Crunchies winners have been announced.  One guess what won best of show.

OK, let me go ahead and get this out of the way.  I have capitulated to the inevitability of Google Reader.

I've written quite a bit about the frustrations I've experienced with Bloglines- the two most frequent ones being the need to reload at least once before I can successfully click on a post and the fact that it never seems to finish loading in Firefox.  I had looked into Google Reader before, but found its interface lacking.  But continuing difficulties with Bloglines kept driving me back to Google Reader to take another look.

The migration started slowly.  I initially used Google Reader exclusively to read my news feeds (newspapers, Google news, the Houston Chronicle, etc.).  Over a few weeks, I started to feel more comfortable with the interface.  A few days ago, I made the switch completely, paring my feeds back, dividing them into categories and putting them into Google Reader folders.  At the moment I have Music, News, Personal (the comment feed here, my Flickr feed, my Yahoo Pipes feed, etc.), Entertainment, Local News, Sports and Tech.

I have to admit, it's growing on me.  There are two must-have features that are strangely missing, but on the whole I am coming around.  Here are my major likes and dislikes.

Likes:

1) I like how fast and responsive it seems, especially when compared to my recent Bloglines experience.  It's also a treat to look up and see that the little circle in my Firefox tab is not spinning.  That's something I haven't experienced in a long time at Bloglines.

2) I like the implementation of the folders and the ease with which you can manage your feeds, with two glaring exceptions (see below).

3) I like the ease with which you can change the view from expanded to list, and from all to new.

4) I like the ease with which you can click posts in list view, expand them, and then collapse them.

Dislikes:

1) I don't like, need or want all of the sharing stuff in the first list at the top of the left hand side.  All of this takes up a lot of real estate that I'd rather use for other stuff.  I'm probably in the minority on this, since I haven't bought into the social network craze.

2) I really, really don't like the fact that I can't sort my feeds alphabetically within a folder.  This would take about 30 seconds to code, yet for some indefensible reason it's not there.  This is almost a deal stopper for me.

3) I really, really wish there was a setting to mark all posts as read when you leave a feed in list view.  I find that I am using list view almost exclusively and it is a pain in the butt to have to remember to click the mark all as read button when I'm done.  This feature exists for the expanded view.

Google Reader feels a little like a work in progress and there are a lot of obvious improvements that could and should be implemented.  But it's starting to feel like my home base for news and feed reading.

All in all, I'm reasonably happy with Google Reader.

I can't believe I just typed that.

Rory Blyth and that girl.  Rory writes blog posts the way I used to try to write songs.  It's hard to explain, but that's a compliment.  I say try to write songs because I spent teens of hours writing more than a few songs that aren't nearly as interesting as some of these posts Rory cranks out, seemingly in one take.

Seth Finkelstein's New Year's Resolutions.  Good advice for many of us.

TDavid's sons rock (star).  I played Wii Tennis for the first time at a New Year's Eve party.  I thought it was a blast, which is why I can't let my kids talk me into getting a Wii.

Warner is right- this is wrong.

Earl says that for him iTunes is about convenience.  I get that, but I want my music, just like my internet content, to be free-range, existing outside of the Apple, or Facebook, walls.  The deal killer for me was when I found out I couldn't move music files directly from my computer to an iPod.  Rory tells me about ml_iPod in the Comments.

Steven Hodson talks about the same thing that got me all worked up with the Groundhog Day post.  I don't know if it's still getting pumped into Jake's feed- I unsubscribed when it kept showing up day after day.

So what do you do when you find a giant 40,000 year old mastodon skull?  Auction it off, of course.

Coming soon to the Ocho: competitive video gaming.  I will say that I'd rather watch someone play Frogger than poker.  Or golf.

It's a great day when you get to hear some new music by the best band in America- the Drive-By Truckers.

CMT (ironic, I know) is streaming full tracks of the DBT's forthcoming record, Brighter than Creation's Dark.  I had to fire-up Internet Explorer to get the player to work, but that's a small price to pay.  I'm listening right now, and so far it sounds like another excellent record.

Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars.  Here's Twangville's take.

We have previously rejected iPods, because we refuse to capitulate to iTunes, both the application and the format, as the toll road to our musical destinations.

We hereby reject iTunes movie rentals because we refuse to capitulate to idiotic viewing limitations:

[T]he convenience of downloading and watching a movie immediately isn't that great that you should lose the former rental flexibility, and so harshly.

Amen. Just because you can download something, doesn't mean you should.

Long live Netflix.

This proves what I have long suspected- that for some panhandling is a chosen profession, and not merely a sad necessity.

It reminds me of the time back in the mid-eighties a panhandler walked up to a group of us on the way to lunch and said "can you help me out with some money?"  To which Gibmonster replied "sure, how much do you have?"

On a related note, first there were bumfights, now there are bird fights.

Raina ran the 2008 Houston Marathon today, and finished with a fantastic time of 3:55:11.

Cassidy, Delaney, our friends the Clarks and I were there to cheer her on at mile 15 and again at mile 21.  She did great, and we are all very proud of her.

Below is a little video I made of the big event (link for feeds).  There are also photos on my Flickr page.

Or is this a funny headline?  I thought I was on the Onion for a second.

In other news, beer makers predict that people will drink a lot of beer this summer, and umbrella makers predict a very wet year.

Our friends the Cohns have two little girls, Emma and Olivia, who are friends with Cassidy and Delaney.  The Cohns took Max, their family dog, to the local PetSmart just before Christmas to get him groomed for t