Phantom Hybrid on the streets of Boulder, CO

IMG_0736.JPGIMG_0737.JPGWhile escorting a lady friend back to her car in downtown Boulder, CO I noticed a car with it’s lights on. My friend commented that she remembered seeing the lights left on when she left to join me at a coffee shop some 2 hours earlier. We both had a little chuckle at this poor bastards folly but then I noticed something rather odd, the engine appeared to be running too. Upon closer inspection I realized what craziness was going on, this was no ordinary car but a hybrid! It seems that these cars have an undocumented feature. If you’re unfortunate or stupid enough to have left your lights on, do not despair, when the electronic wizardry detects you battery is about to shit the proverbial bed it will automatically fire up the engine and charge it, then automagically turn off the engine. Wow, and I though the only benefit of a hybrid was saving baby unicorns and lousy looks. So there we stood, jaws open watching this car singlehandedly burn though our precious high priced gasoline reserves, all by it very own-some. I could just hear the sound of a Saudi prince rubbing his hands together in glee!

In the republic of Boulder, Hybrids are as common as choir boys on a late night visits to the Vicars house so to see one that has fallen so far off the wagon was both alarming and comical. On a serious note though, I wonder what chain of events led up to this fall from grace. Perhaps the keys were still in the ignition, person left car with lights on and the rest is just history. Was this Toyota Camry Hybrid mad at it’s burkenstock wearing, sushi eating, yoga mat carrying owner. Perhaps all was normal as she left this non desrcript sedan, then some part of it’s flight of fight brain kicked in, “I shown you bitch!” and it switched on the lights! Then after a while some higher more enlightened part of it’s brain kicked in and it begrudgingly turned on the engine to charge the rapidly depleting battery. Then the whole cycle repeated it’s self, like some bizarre OCD manifestation. Perhaps as I sit here writing this article some 24 hours later the car continues to cycle on and off, headlights burning brightly in the night? I wonder how long it could have kept up this silly game and I would of loved to of seen the owner face when she returned. But as I shot a few blurry photos with my iPhone, bade my friend goodbye and started on my bike ride home I left the scene with more questions than answers.

Web Success Pros – websuccesspros.com SPAMMER!! -oneyearplan.net

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Web Success Pros – websuccesspros.com / carbon copy pro / oneyearplan.net is a SCAM and a big time Spammer of Craigsist! Do not do business with this spammer, do not buy their product. I’ve been subscribing to several Craiglist RSS feeds lately. Nothing is more annoying than seeing the same Spam Ads being posted, day after day that have nothing to do with the the topic they are filed under. Hardworking honest citizens of the web use Craigslist to get work, pay the bills, feed the cat and kids.

Web Success Pros – www.websuccesspros.com (links to Carbon Copy Pro and -oneyearplan.net) loves to post their keyword laden ad links every couple of days. While I have nothing against people trying to market these schemes I am dead against this shite turning up on CL every day. I am hereby starting my own personal crusade against these low life maggots of the interwebs. I encourage anyone who is equally disgusted to contact the ISPs of these companies and have their sites pulled. Craigslist is one of the last bastions of spam free classified Ad and let try to keep it that way.

Epidemic Spamming of Craigslist

Do a search for craigslist and websucesspros.com and you’ll see how much spam these guys are putting out. I got 30 results returned – wow, these guys are wasting serious job hunters time on a monumental level!

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Below is some of their marketing BS. Some hired goon posting next to a friend who has a real job’s BMW.



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George Carlin Dead – Video – Religion is Bullshit

RIP funny man – “CNN – George Carlin, the influential comedian whose routines used profanity, scatology and absurdity to point out the silliness and hypocrisy of human life, has died. He was 71.”

Husky and gumball machine = Smart!

Found this cute video on MySpace video of all places, them Huskies are pretty smart especially when it comes things food related!

This Isn’t Gum

Firefox 3 – out now, faster, safer and smarter!

Picture 23.pngFaster, safer and smarter than Firefox 2 that is. June 17 was download Firefox 3 day. It got off to a bit of a piss poor start as yours truly attempted to download this brand spanky new version of our favorite browser only to discover a website that had clearly shat the proverbial bed due to the rest of the world and their mother attempting to do the same thing. It’s 11.52pm now and I’ve just got my paws on the new version and I can honestly say she seems faster than the older version and looks nicer too. The zoom function is way kool too!

So go ahead and get you copy of her here

Here is a list of new features:

Password Manager Remember site passwords without ever seeing a pop-up.
One-Click Bookmarking Bookmark, search and organize Web sites quickly and easily.
Improved Performance View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.
Smart Location Bar Find the sites you love in seconds—enter a term for instant matches that make sense.
Instant Web Site ID Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity.
Full Zoom See any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.
Platform-Native Look & Feel Browse with a Firefox that’s integrated into your computer’s operating system.

New TopGear on BBC – Funny Ad

A new series of TopGear is about to be unleashed on UK viewer, check out this funny promo video. Tea and biscuits anyone ?? Time to fire up the bittorrent client and get a downloading! Come on chaps, put it on the iTunes music store and I’ll gladly pay for it.

Setup XP to connect to WPA2 Wi-fi network

Picture 12.pngJust spent the best part of half an hour getting a buddies supposedly up to date Dell XP lappy connected to my Wi-fi network. I’m running a secure WI-FI network using the WPA2 protocol. This is lot more secure that the old WAP protocol so if you’re running a home wi-fi network then you probably want to use WPA2 instead of WAP on your router.

Problem is that XP with SP2 does not support WPA2, no biggie but if your computer can’t connect to the network or interwebs then how the bloody hell can you get the download from MicroSoft !! Out with the thumb drive and the biggie here is that you need a Validated copy of XP!! Luck I have parellels and a legit copy of XP on my mac. After copying the file I found here , I handed off the thumb drive to my pal, he installed the 1.2 meg patch, rebooted then was able to log onto my network after entering the password.

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Hey XP, Leopard called and asked you to please support WPA2 out the box and Bill, I want my 1/2 hour back! So hopefully this page will rank nicely and get all you folks sorted out who need to run WPA 2 on Windows XP over their wi fi network.

Choose a secure password will you!!

Also remember if you’re setting up a network make sure you choose a password that is long, (20 characters or more is best) and it should consist of words or phrases that are not in the dictionary. If you’ve got lots of new pals coming over often then reading off the uber long password to them will get old fast so at least choose a password that does not contains words that are in the dictionary.

Twitter Feed

description, 10); // Change this to the number of characters to remove from the beginning of each post. This allows you to remove username: from the beginning of each post.
$tweet = ereg_replace(“[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]”,”\\0“, $tweet);

print ‘ ‘.$tweet.’

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Iphone 3G – New Iphone July 11th

New-Iphone-GPS.pngThe new Iphone is here, not really new more of an evolution than revolution. In the bottom line department the new iPhone is gonna be 1/2 the cost just $199 compared to the $400 I paid for the 8 gig model, ouch (the price of early adoption). The data rate when you’re not on wifi is now 3G as apposed to slow 56k pokey Edge so 1700kbps vs the 200kbos of edge. GPS is now built in also a nice feature. Audio is supposedly better, audio quality was ok in my opinion. They have added Exchange support for business users too. It’s coming to 54 odd countries including South Africa and Australia!

I think the biggest thing to look forward to is the ability to add apps to the phone. I want a decent IM client, be able to use SKYPE to talk to South Africa for free, a blogging client to update this bloody blog to name just a few apps. The good news is from what I’ve seen this is all possible, that for me is what I’ll be waiting for!

My personal experience with 9 months of the old iPhone

  • The Bad

  • ATT in my neighborhood sucks, as many dropped calls as dropped trousers at a bachelor party! I appear to live in a ATT bermuda triangle really, and it does seem to be localized a block or so around my house.
  • No video, come on we want video – perhaps iphone 2.0 upgraded software will allow apps to use this!!
  • Simple cut and paste – no sorry can’t do on an iphone
  • Headphone jack recessed – new iphone has fixed this but old one required an adaptor to use a mini plug found on regular headphones
  • No instant messaging – will be taken care off soon I hope
  • The Good and great

  • Ipod is excellent, really great
  • Interface – nothing like it in ANY phone for twice the price !!
  • Browser – a real we browser, you can actually use it
  • Ease of use, fantastic. I like to think of myself as being a tech savvy guy but I’m been stumped numerous time trying to figure out how to do something simple on high end Nokias and Sony Erickson phone. I’d like to say anyone can pick up the phone and start using most of it’s features right away.
  • Phone and ipod integration great, jammin to tunes or listening to BBC podcast, call comes in, audio level from ipod drops down and call ringer goes up. Hang call up, ipod starts playing where you left off, volume is faded back up
  • Ergonomics – a slippery little bugger, needs a case or a skin or even tape on the sides to stop it slipping out of your hand. Great size otherwise.
  • Screen, I can finally read a cell phone screen in broad daylight

Picture 6.pngSo in summary, the worlds best phone just got a whole lot cheaper and some nice additions too. I think they’re gonna sell a ton more of these pups now, glad I still have some APPL stock.

Free Online backup – Mozy 2 gigs Mac + Window

Mozy.pngBackup, what backup?? Some of you have heard about my backup mantra speech so excuse the redundancy (ok bad pun) Backup is important and needs to happen automagically without my intervention once setup. Did you know that most hard drives only are rated for 3 years of use, there warranty is only for 3 years, interesting so if your running around with a 3 year old or older laptop computer you’re asking for trouble if you’re not doing regular backups. But forget failures, laptops get stolen at an alarming rate and it’s bye bye data, as well as the inevitable breakage of a device we drag around in a flimsy bag or backpack.

Dot Mac users for $99 per year get nice automatic backup, also Mac users can use Time Machine although Time Machine backs up to a local drive. It’s vital to have some type of off site backup and so for those who don’t want to fork out $99 / year or those infidels in the PC world may want to look at Mozy. Mozy is for mac and windoze and gives you 2 gigs of free storage.You’ll get a chunk of 256 megs added to this for each person you sign up. It’s not gonna store you 20 gigs of MP3s but it’s fine for Documents, address book, keychains and program preference files. So go ahead, click and my link below, get free storage and share the love!

YouTube video – Smiley faced TV news folks extoll the virtues of backing up your shite – Shite, we knew that!

From the Mozy.com site

Why all the fuss about backup?

Chances are you have a lot of important stuff on your computer like financial documents, email, digital photos, music and more. Unfortunately, computers are vulnerable to hard drive crashes, virus attacks, theft and natural disasters, which can erase everything in an instant.Current statistics show that one in every ten hard drives fail each year. The cost of recovering a failed hard drive can exceed $7,500, and success is never guaranteed.

Insurance for your data.
Mozy is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable.
What makes Mozy so great?
Mozy makes online backup possible for everyone with an affordable, secure solution that’s easy to use. Don’t just take our word for it. Check out the news section to see all the nice awards we have received and what the experts are saying about Mozy.

Funny copy from the Mozy site – funny but true

Alternatives to MozyHome

  • Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store it at your brother-in-law’s office.
  • Pay $200/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
  • Buy a $200 external hard drive and hope your office doesn’t burn down.
  • Do nothing and don’t worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating “I’m in my happy place, I’m in my happy place.”)
  • Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line.

Ok we get the bloody picture mozy!!