Troll Ninja Stalker at Red Eye

Troll Ninja Stalker at Red Eye
Originally uploaded by jeffdiogenes

-Jeff

Geni.com

Geni.com is pretty much amazing to me. It's a genealogy site ("boring Jeff, boring!") but has more of a social network kind of look and feel to it. You put in your parents, spouses, and siblings and you can be done there if you want. However, the neat-o cool thing is you can invite those people to your tree via their E-Mail and they can also add whatever they want. Sort of like a wiki family tree in that sense.

I've tried all those "other" genealogy sites along the way but none of them ever made me feel like putting in my mother's maiden name in the wide-open web was a good idea. I'M LOOKING AT YOU ANCESTRY.COM. In Geni, privacy and information seems to have found a balance. Geni is also in a completely different universe from those other sites in terms of design, usefulness, and functionality. A good, different, universe.

I don't want to sit here and describe all the cool things about this site. You'll see them yourself if you are interested. If not, give your mom a link to it, I bet she'll get right into it.

I found a video for it if you want a little more info:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271552949/bctid769369612

Omg's 30boxes.com + Facebook

More 30boxes evangelism to mention: It seems, and I haven't checked it they've announced it or anything, but my 30b account is now allowing me to link it to my Facebook account. Its able to pull Birthdays in, and looks like it will help me track that Face-time-suck-book site.

Omg's.

Omgs.

That is all.

Wait, no...

Omgs.

Friday is Douglas Adams' Towel Day

And Becca will be all set, for her towel hath arrived.

Originally uploaded by jeffdiogenes.
Friday is Douglas Adam's Towel Day

-Jeff @ Mobile

Speak and Tweet (Jott to Twitter)

First off, let me thank 30boxes for doubling my blog traffic readership to 3* with their brief mention of this post from this Tweet. Yes, soon afterwards, my wife decided to actually read my blog. Thank you 30boxes. Of course she's leaving me, and taking the cat, now that she's found out I've been posting pictures of her eating at various restaurants. But she's still got me 'on follow' on Twitter and probably can't stop the notifications. Joke's on her, that cat stinks.

Oh and I think because of that, I'm back down to 2 readers.

Thank you both.

And thanks to amuse for inviting me a few weeks back to try out egorcast. I remained steadfastly silent about my experience, but a comment to that Jott to 30boxes post from a dude named Bob at ladow.net prompted me to go back to amuse and ask if it was ok to share the site with others. After mulling on it for a couple hours, weighing whether replying to my email was worth his time for exposure to my 3 2 readers, he typed up a reply and accidentally hit Send.

So now that the door has been busted down for both of you, I can speak freely about egorcast. If you use Jott.com (or don't) and hoped you could just Tweet away without having to type that crap from your phone....egorcast fills that void. You sign up, and then it gives you a special email address to add to your Jott contacts. When you Jott to that contact, the Jott shows up in Twitter. It also works with filling the void between Jott and Jaiku.com (it's like Twitter, sorta) and WordPress Blogs (which this blog is not.)

So for Bob, dude, if yer still around, there ya go: Jott to Twitter.

Now I bet my wife will wish she didn't leave me before I setup her egorcast account. HA!

*I rounded down because I don't read what I post, either.

More 30Boxes & AdSense Gaydar

2 quick things:

• 30boxes.com has added full To-Do functionality to their site. Me likes. If you happened to have followed my instructions earlier this week on how to Jott to 30boxes, you may care to know that it works for the new 30boxes.com to-do's. The catch is, when you call, you have to spell out "T-O-D-O" instead of saying "To Do." Just mentioning it because it might not be obvious at first. Then again, I'm probably the only one calling his calendar up and talking to it...I tell ya, it makes you feel like you have a secretary...
  
• As I was about to write this post I noticed AdSense has developed some Gaydar? Maybe my posts scream "I'm GAY!!!!!" I don't know. And it's not like I'm offended, more like I just had a flashback of some Football Jock saying that to me in High School... 'Cept now that Football Jock is some Complex Phd'd Google Algorithm.
  However if I ever see it trying to taunt me with the "Beat it" song, then I'm totally going to assume Google and all the Jocks at my old High School have found me. And that it's a conspiracy.

Compuuuter Maaan

Did you read the previous post? No, I didn't either, and I wrote it. Hey pictures and video! I'm just posting this because this is, you know, the way I am every day.



And these 2 videos have nothing to do with being a Computer Guy, but they have Jack Black and I noticed them linked off the video above. I never saw them before now. Pretty weird.

Every point of this post is true

I just read a completely perfect post titled, "10 Reasons it doesn't pay to be the computer guy."

A snip:

Reason #5 - People Ask You To Perform Miracles

The computer guy is often mistaken for someone who possesses the combined skills of an old priest and a young priest. I’ll sum this up easily by example:

“No, I really can’t recover any files from your thumb drive, even if you did find it after it passed through your dog.”

All of it is true, sadly - but that doesn't mean I hate my job. Go read it if you want to understand more about my job:

• It is really a 24/7 job
• It is generally unrewarding when things are going right
• Why the hell don't I charge the people at work to fix their home computers.
• Why I don't make housecalls outside of helping people at work

In other news, you will fail to read it because you won't care. Everything falls in line! That's what I'm here for! :)

2007 SVSU Business Expo

2007 SVSU Business Expo
Originally uploaded by jeffdiogenes.

I'm like a sandwich, a sandwich for the INSANE.

This is a followup post, sorta, to the one I wrote yesterday.... And I guess this will prove how nerdy I am and leave you wondering how much time I have on my hands. (The truth is, I won't be able to get anything done if I don't get this off my chest. It's a mental condition.) I'll lay out the ingredients:

• 1 30boxes account. http://30boxes.com
• 1 Jott account. http://jott.com
• 1 Gmail account. http://gmail.com
• 1 Cell Phone.

I haven't talked much about Jott, but I'll briefly describe it as a way to send email using your voice. You call a 800#, speak the name of the person you want to Jott (or say 'Myself') and then speak your message. Your message is transcribed by computer and then emailed or text messaged to the person or person's phone. As added insurance against bad transcription, it sends the person a link to the original audio.

You may have seen in a few past posts that I was trying to Jott directly to my blog. That worked, and is kinda cool but barely useful since Jott is designed for short messages. To do it, I setup a Jott contact with the "email-to-post" address. When I call in, I say Blogger and whatever I say shows on the blog.

But like I said, thats barely useful. Like I might use it at a party sometime to divert people from striking up a conversation with me and have them talk to my blog. But, what I am finding is useful is having a 30boxes contact setup. Now since 30boxes doesn't have a special personalized email-in address it would be hard for them to know who the Jott was from (it comes across as notify@jott.com).... But this is where the wonderful Gmail comes in. Because Gmail allows YouEmailName+SomeWordHere@gmail.com, I can set up a filter in Gmail to automatically forward any message sent to jeffdiogenes+MySecret30BoxesWord@gmail.com to add@30boxes.com. Now 30boxes knows who it's from.

I seriously didn't expect at this point for 30boxes to be able to pick the actual content out from the rest of the email, but Oh My God, it does.

So now, imagine me on I-75 dutifully trying not to get killed while driving:

• Call Jott -> "Who do you want to Jott?"
• Say 30boxes -> "Beeeeeep"
• Say "Some Stupid Event, Next Tuesday at 4pm"

And it's magically on my calendar. On the right day, at the right time. Freakin easy.

Overkill? I guess the perspective depends on if you are on my side of I-75 while I'm trying to enter a calendar reminder before I forget it, on my PocketPC, with a stylus, at, 70+, miles, per, hour....

By the way, I also leave myself stikkits the same way. At some other point I may post about this: www.stikkit.com, but I think I have confused you all enough for one day.