Maybe Howard Dean Can Be Someone's Surgeon General...

A Political Blog Post.
I try to avoid this crap on my blog because there are plenty of places you get your news and politics, but this one issue is a BIG one for me, so I want to vent... The points I am making are things I have yet to see mentioned elsewhere. This video should also be titled "My Family's Ultimate Reason to Not Vote McCain". First, watch it:

I'll make a few statements here in an effort to convey my problem with McCain's idea:
1) Waiting for a medical problem to get so bad that you can go to the emergency room does not equate to good health care. However, many people are forced to take this route because they have no other options. Yes, they get a choice, expensive Emergency Room care that they will likely never be able to pay back, or suffer. If you were in that position tell me you would rather suffer just to not have some unseen "someone else" pay your emergency bills? Convince me I'm wrong if you want.
2) The same type of people who complain that Walmart is destroying the small businesses in every community would hypocritically see this idea as a good one. But they are also the ones that don't want universal government health care because they fear they will have to go to a Dr. the government tells them to go to. They want their fancy doctors with a "I got mine, too bad for you, loser" attitude. Because, in their mind, not everyone deserves the absolute best medical attention. A sort of "I am not my brother's keeper" philosophy. Convince me I am wrong.
3) Doc In A Boxes - You know, the Redi-Med offices, and those sorts of places - are a lot of people's only option for common, but non-emergency warranting health problems. We have this sort of idea McCain is talking about right now, but competitively. Why then does it make sense to him to be basically proposing that one company be given a monopoly to dispense health care. Convince me I am wrong.
4) Even if I suspend disbelief in this idea and try to let him convince me by brainwashing myself with it on repeat, he comes off as not knowing what the hell he's talking about.

Here's an idea! McCain should just propose the average person pay for this Walmart Emergency Room Service with food stamps! Then you can choose between this awesome minimal healthcare for Sally's broken arm, or food for all of your kids....CHOICES!

Convince me I am wrong. Oh and try to do it without mentioning the words Republican or Democrat, because that will automatically mean to me that you are looking at this with a closed partisan mindset.

Oh no way ZD!?!?!

I don't write much but man how inspiring: Ziff Davis filing bankruptcy... If anyone cares really. I know I do, it means I have to look at less auto-deleted ZD mail when I look in my email trash.

See previous posts for why they suck and where they went wrong in my eyes.

Bastards.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a6bISm6.ln5E&refer=home

DOWN WITH THE ZD BORG COLLECTIVE!!!!

Red lobster

Out on the town...not sure what's covered in butter sauce most here...
Shrimp?
Lobster legs?
Scampi?
The baked potato?
Or
Becca?

-Jeff @ Mobile

OMG again

Ok so yeah, I can attest that this afternoon's Ziff Davis unsubscription was not successful since I got the same damn email from the same damn people about the same damn thing to the same damn work email address. Duplicate. SPAM.

Guess I'll have to filter anything with Windows AND Games AND Magazine in it. Good going Ziff, way to create some brand awareness for your client.

On a related note, let me ask you Ziff-y-o, how's business been?

Ziff Davis is worse than a Russian Viagra Spammer

I like to quote myself, as well as talk over and over about the same old crap:

Previously in The Real World:

You see it takes 7-10 days for light to travel from one coordinate in the Ziff Davis Borg Hive to the emailing list coordinates. No wonder my request gets lost. It wasn't really lost, it was assimilated!

A bit of more Ziff Davis spam got past my "manual unsubscription" technique where any crap they send me goes directly to the trash. I've tried to unsubscribe for years, but as I have written before, that doesn't work.

It was sent without the words Ziff AND Davis and came from Games for Windows: The Official Magazine, a magazine I don't care for nor ever heard of. I know I didn't sign up for Xbox or PC Gaming crap coming to my work email address, but yet here is this mail.

Also, I did have a slight bit of paranoia regarding the spam they sent. It was signed by what must be my Ziff Davis Doppelganger Drone, Jeff Green, Editor-in-Chief, Games for Windows: The Official Magazine.

OOooooeEEEEEEoooooOOooooo.

Classmates.com is a scam in my opinion

I don't know about you, but I don't appreciate the trickery at classmates.com. You've seen the ads..if you have never tried it, here's what to expect:

You go there and see that a number of names are available of people you went to highschool with. You go to click on a name and it allows you to send that person a message.

Hey! What's that name there... That's my old neighbor I grew up with! I'll send her a message! At no point was I made aware that in order for my message to be read, either her or I had to pay these extortionists a $23 a year subscription. Well I sent that message months ago and now I get a notification she wants to read it, but neither of us are 'Gold' members so she can't actually see the message they let me send. NEAT! What a great system! Bait n Switch for the web is what this is.

The email you sent can't be read, Jeffrey.
Go Gold

Let friends read it!
Activate your Gold membership now.
Once you're Gold, friends can read the 1 message you've sent. Even better! As long as you're a Gold member, it's free for them to reply, so you might get a friendly note back.

You'll also get access to these Gold perks:



See guestbook names

Gab on message boards

Plan events and reunions

Bite.
My.
Ass.

So I'll never see what my old neighbor said because there is no way I'm paying $23 for less than 1k of data I actually care about. So Crista, if you are ever reading this, sorry, but that's just jacked and I'm not going to support that model of extortion. Unethical really.

These people work for Ziff Davis or something?

Ziff Davis is dead to me...DEAD

Dear Ziff Davis Publishers,

Much like I take time out of my day to hit 'Report Spam' on each of the emails your conglomeration sends me for the past 5 years, I am taking time to write this entry. I have just finished writing a filter that sends every message with the word 'Ziff' in it to my email trash. There, that should FINALLY get me off all your email lists. Yes I know, there is no actual conceivable way to actually get off a Ziff Davis mailing list. You hit the link to unsubscribe that is provided in the email, it sends you to a form where you can unsubscribe. You fill that out, and next page of the form tells you it may take 7-10 days to fully remove you from the email list. Sure seems like a long time, being that we are part of the INTERNET AGE. But I wait, hell I've marked "10 days" on the calendar each time I've done this. Yet, the messages, continue, every, day.

Sure, I hit the "mark as spam" button but then I realized, you will never be blocked as spam since your company is, 'somewhat legitimate.' - Because you provide a unsubscribe link.

You see it takes 7-10 days for light to travel from one coordinate in the Ziff Davis Borg Hive to the emailing list coordinates. No wonder my request gets lost. It wasn't really lost, it was assimilated!

I wouldn't write this if I didn't care who you've turned into. I used to enjoy reading each complimentary issue of eWeek back when our office was still 'pooling modems' to get everyone on the internet. You were pretty spammy then with 4-5 subscription cards falling out of each issue. You were pretty spammy telling me every 2 weeks for 2 years that unless I fill out your online form that I will never get an issue of eWeek again.

Around that time, I really hoped you were serious, as we had moved to a DSL line at the office for internet. My need for news concerning my industry was being taken care of by multiple sites 'run by amateurs'. Sure, the amateurs weren't even close to acting like a journalism unit most of the time, but they had the story in front of me as soon as they wrote it. By the time eWeek showed up in the mail, I had already read all the stories. Amateurs or not, they beat your professional pants off in doing what news should do: BE NEW.

Eventually you got a clue and stopped sending me threatening messages and eWeek issues. I'm surprised you didn't send your mother over with a pie to try and mend our differences really.

While I'll probably eat the pie she brings over, I'm definitely not going to forget how you treated me these last few years. You didn't grow with me, ignored me, and we grew apart. I let go of this relationship, I think it's time you move on too.

Rhoda Stevens (Baker) Tree

Rhoda Stevens (Baker) Tree
Originally uploaded by jeffdiogenes

School Is Over

School Is Over
Originally uploaded by jeffdiogenes

We had no idea how to celebrate.

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.

Calendar Sanity

I'm in love with 30boxes.com. I don't know why, really. If I had to pin down a reason, it's because until this site, Becca didn't want to enter in all the birthdays and anniversaries she tracks into a computer. Every year I suggested she put it into Outlook or ANYTHING, just get it off paper.

She did what I guess a lot of people do: Every year, manually copy down all the notes and events to the next year's wall calendar/planner. I personally can't do that because my mind is always in "how can I do this on a computer instead" mode since about age 12. Just makes sense to me to have a computer handle remembering the things that repeat.

Plus her fear of computers doesn't help.

In her case, every year, it would get later and later into the year before she had this manual "upload" to the next calendar completed. If you were born between January and April, you might want to consider moving your birthday to about mid-May. Now that she's entered it, she doesn't have to do it next year.

So what did 30boxes have that Outlook didn't? It was a pretty calendar? That's one guess. Was it the fact it shows the forecast automatically on the calendar? Maybe. Was it because it has a natural language entry? ("Mom's Birthday, March 10" becomes a recurring yearly birthday). That's another guess. Text message reminders to her cell phone a day or two before? That's another good guess. I don't know really. Google Calendar could have done all this (maybe without the pretty calendar part?) but she just didn't like it like she liked 30boxes.

If you want to know why she likes it, you probably should ask her. I like it because "she can use it." That's all that matters to me, that a calendar exists that she will actually use.

From the nerd perspective, it even makes me like it a ton. It has the most options, settings, features, you name it, of any calendar I have tried online. It finds MySpace, LiveJournal blog, and shows them on my calendar if I want. It shows Becca's calendar on my calendar (cuz I want!) It shows my Google Calendar on my Calendar. It shows my Twitter.com on my calendar. I can email add @ 30boxes.com with a subject line of "Mom's Birthday, March 10" and it would add that to my calendar.

I donated some cash their way the other day, and received the shirt pictured. And just so you know, I didn't realize I was getting a shirt until after I donated.

If you sign up, and want to watch/stalk me, as always, I'm jeffdiogenes@whatever.