Blog 500

Saw this pop up on digg, and thought that I would share with those who haven’t seen it:

I came across this site while doing research for a client. My client has a list of 2,600 contacts spread out across 4 different locations. I obviously had to try it out before recommending it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how nicely it worked.

Basically what it comes down to is that email clients often have difficulties syncing locally stored contacts to web-based mail services that don’t use Exchange Server (in which case, sometimes contacts get over-written anyway). Soocial solves this issue by storing your contacts in one centralized location. Not only can you sync your contacts between your email and web clients, but you can also sync your contacts with your mobile device. This means that if you have to change phones or services, you won’t loose your contacts.

The biggest benefit that I saw is with my iPhone. iPhone now has Exchange support, but I am weary of activating it for fear that my contacts will be lost. Now that I have my contacts backed-up externally, I can do all that I want with my phone without loosing my precious data.

Soocial also has a really nice contact management interface that allows you to merge your contacts from your different sources, and streamline your address book (AKA no duplicate contacts to worry about).

Keep in mind, I’m not affiliated with Soocial. I just really appreciate the service, and think that my friends should know about it.

This has to be the most practical use of a Roomba that I have ever seen. I sold appliances for a number of years, back when the Roomba first came out. I thought that they where pretty cool at first, but the thing is that they are NOT robotic vacuums, their basically just glorified and over-priced hokies because they have absolutely no suction. This means that they don’t actually suck the dirt out of your carpet, they just sweep the surface dirt into a trap.

Regardless, this is an awesome video:

Today Em and I are celebrating our 2nd anniversary, and yesterday we finally got around to carving pumpkins. I did mine completely by hand, check it out:

I think, also, that the weather is starting to get to people. We went out to dinner and did some shopping, and everyone that we ran into was really rude. We were trying to enjoy our dinner and the waitress was just in a really bad mood, then we went to Walmart and all of the employees were just not pleasant. I don’t normally go to Walmart  because that’s normally the case, but nothing else was open.

On a side note, it seems like the smaller the town the Walmart is in, the nicer the employees are. I’m in semi-close proximity to the city, so our Walmart is brutal (actually our Walmart is a hole-in-the-wall dump, the Walmart we went to was a little further and a lot bigger. Still brutal though).

We plan on going out over the weekend, probably to Wildfire (who’s website I actually did work on at one point in time, though it’s been redesigned since). I hope the weather clears up so that we can actually enjoy ourselves…

Look at that! I did my presentation just a little too early. It turns out that yesterday Google struck a deal (monetary) with Twitter to include a real-time search of social networks. Read more about the deal on Tech Crunch. This seems like a promising technology for getting up-to-second results on current trending topics, as it takes longer to write an article than a tweet.

I promise to have more links that I have uncovered during my research, but I just saw this pop up today. I was a little angry because it would have been great to include in the advantage that Google has over Facebook.

Who’s ready to try it? I hope it’s better than the mighty mouse and the hockey puck. However, it’s supposed to be really responsive, and do much more than any PC mouse. So all you PC people can stop complaining about the lack of a right click! Alright, here’s the video:

This reminds me of the farside format, but I think it was done well:

I was just reading on tech crunch that Microsoft is getting ready to open a Windows 7 Cafe in Paris France. They will have all sorts of toys to play with, but they will be selling nothing but drinks and snacks, and only remain open for a few weeks.

It’s actually fairly cleaver on the part of Microsoft, as their strong-hold on International markets is not as great as it is here. They can also control the environment in which people view their OS, making it a little easier sell because it won’t be running slow. Besides that, the know that they can get the geeks hooked with offerings of coffee. Nicely played, Microsoft…

Here are my screen shots for looking for info for my presentation.

I had to adjust it because the advanced search wouldn’t allow the “~”.

Got it all set up in my alerts.

I came across this awesome interview with Jeffry Zeldman (okay, I found it on twitter), but he makes a great case for twitter helping web designers to write more effective content. It’s a great read,  so I thought I would share it.