January 2006 Archives

Following a google ad for "everything jeb" on my own blog, I landed on an e-bay item entitled "Adorable Jeb Sucking Thumb." I have 3 hours and 37 minutes to decide if I should by this for my Mom.

If you find a website that you want to revisit, where do you store the link? You can bookmark the link, but I don't like this because I use more than one computer and the bookmarks end up on different machines.

I've used bookmarks.yahoo.com for a long time to store links I regularly visit... bank login site, 401k site, and the like. I put the bookmarks module on my.yahoo.com page. I even keep important (and difficult to remember) links that only work inside our company including human resource links and reporting links.

But what about links that you want to share and maybe revisit some time in the future once or twice? This is where del.icio.us comes in. You can quickly store a page on your del.icio.us page and go back and quickly find it later on. You can even share it. My public site is del.icio.us/fishback. I'm surprised how often I go back and look things up there.

One of my most recent links is to an article on how to include your del.icio.us links on your MovableType page using Feed Digest. You will see my most recent 10 links to the right.

It took me a while to understand how to use del.icio.us. Remembering how to spell it and where the dots go was one hurdle. However, I installed two bookmarks in my various browsers: one to del.icio.us/fishback for my own reference and one that lets me quickly post new links. Along with my.yahoo.com and bloglines.com, del.icio.us has become an important web surfing tool for me.

Oh... and in December, Yahoo bought del.icio.us, but I have not seen it show up as a Yahoo module yet.

I carry a small pocket knife that includes scissors, a pen, and a small LED light. It is very useful, but I am unable to fly with it. I typically leave the knife at home or in my car at the airport.

Last Wednesday, I was off for a 4 day business trip, and as I walked into the airport I discovered I had brought my knife along. Inspired by Ted's aquarium visit, I decided to look for a place to to hide the knife. I needed a space that was permanent and neglected, not likely to be discovered by some kid, security, or cleaning crew. There are a lot of plants in the airport, and I considered hiding it on the edge of a pot. Watering, though, might short the LED. Scanning as I walked, I looked at indentations in cement posts, phone booths (who uses them?), chairs, newspaper stands, and even a cardiac arrest emergency kit. I then spotted a self-service shipping station and walked in. Little more than a short hall with vending machines, a shipping scale, and a FedEx box, the station hid me well. There was a small space between the FedEx box and the back wall which seemed like a good spot. I slid the knife along the floor into the crack. It fit fine and was out of view. Off to the security gates.

Towards the end of the four day trip, I was eating lunch in Orlando with two company friends and told them I did not want to forget to retrieve my knife. I told them the story above. They were both alarmed that I had hidden a knife in the airport. It sounded illegal. Maybe a federal offense! I countered that the security gates cautioned that no knives were allowed past that point. This implies knives are allowed before this point. (Of course it also says no guns or bombs.) One of them said that when the same thing happened to him, he was worried about having a knife in the airport. So he went to the men's room, scanned for security cameras, washed his hands, and then secretly slipped the knife into the paper towel as he dried his hands, throwing the knife away in the towel.

"I wanted to keep my knife," I said. They both wished me luck on retrieving the knife and hoped I would not get arrested. Upon my return to Atlanta, I went to the shipping station and found my knife safely tucked in the shipping station's knife garage. Good way to end a long trip.

In response to Ted's iPod At Peak.

Buying, sharing, and managing your music collection (legal or pirated) is a need that makes up a very broad, multi-generational, multi-cultural, and multi-class market. Talking to one another on the phone is equally broad. Managing an electronic calendar and address book I believe is much narrower.

I want a thinner cell phone. I don't want to read e-mail on it or listen to music with it. I just want you to be able to hear me now with long battery life.

I need screen space for e-mail, especially as e-mail becomes richer in content. I really like my 12" wireless iBook.

And I want to use iTunes to manage my music. I like speakers which are social, not headphones which are anti-social. So I have not purchased an iPod. (And I really am enjoying outsourcing music management to XM Radio.)

The iPod is more than just the iPod. It is iTunes. At Spring Hill kids can all legally tap into each others' iTunes music collection and listen to (not copy) one another's music collections because each copy of iTunes is a mini, auto discovering music-streaming service. The iPod is also the iTunes Music Store (and now podcasting and now video store.) Apple has legally sold an average of 10 songs per iPod.

I'm not sure anyone can put together Apple's unique collection of services that are so simple to use. I think they are just getting started and have a huge market ahead of them with no Microsoft in the way.

I drew myself into Simon occasionally. Once it was to beg for a job. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, made an appearance on Monday. Now he's stuck. I'll keep adding to this series here. For those of you using RSS (I use bloglines.com) you can subscribe to Dilbert:

http://www.tapestrycomics.com/dilbert.xml

Google's Adsense Reporting has a new feature that allows you to create custom reports and have them e-mailed to you periodically. I set up an "All Time" report to have e-mailed weekly. I'm up to $74. The comma-separated-file (CSV) was easily imported into Excel to make the chart below... which sure looks like more than $74, but many days are zero and most are 8 to 13 cents.

Click to zoom in:

This 30 day average report shows trending better, showing how much was made in the previous 30 days:

Kelly ran into an error using Ecto:
No ObjectDriver defined at lib/MT/Object.pm line 144

Uploading a new version of XMLRPCServer.pm fixed it:
Movable Type Knowledge Base: No ObjectDriver defined at lib/MT/Object.pm line 144