Apple Turning 34
15 Mar 2010
In a little over two weeks, on April 1, 2010, Apple will be celebrating its 34th year. Two days later the iPad will hit the consumer market.
The first Apple computer, sold in 1976, was little more than a circuit board for users willing to build their own computer case. For a stroll down Apple’s memory lane, you might want to stop over at Apple-History.com and use the left hand navigation to view various Apple computer models over the years. Don’t stop there though. Make sure to wander over to The Apple Museum where you’ll find historical information on every product line to pass through Apple, company facts, and more – well worth a stop.
The History Channel features a short video on YouTube describing the early days of Apple:
Apple was established as a company on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California and was incorporated in 1977. It has come a long way from the first start circuit board to the marvel of the iPad set to release on April 3, 2010.
Corporate Jargon – BS Bingo
13 Mar 2010
Corporate mumbo jumbo can sometimes be funny or downright irritating to those of us who like plain language and clear communication. There’s a great article on this – Corporate Jargon: Please. Can you speak like a human being? – worth a read.
If you are one who has to suffer through this sort of thing at meetings, maybe you need to turn it into a game. Falling asleep in meetings and seminars bored with the jargon? Bored with conference calls? You can change that by playing BS Bingo. Here’s your card:
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How to play: Check off each block when you hear these words during a meeting, seminar, or phone call. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout BS Bingo!! (Well maybe you had better just write that on your notepad)
FCC Asks You To Test Broadband
12 Mar 2010
The FCC is asking citizens to test their broadband and smart phone speeds as part of its mandate to ensure that all people in the U.S. have access to broadband capability. The tests are designed to show the federal regulators and consumers what speeds are actually available and not just promised by internet service providers. Stop by http://www.broadband.gov/ and take the test.
Leaping Backward Into the Dark Ages
12 Mar 2010
Well it looks like the Texas Board of Education is doing its best to lead a charge back into the dark ages where dogma was taught as fact and fact disregarded when in conflict with dogma. Well maybe not the dark ages entirely. I guess despots have also tried to rewrite history and education to suit political ends and/or religious beliefs throughout time. Nonetheless, it is troubling that in age where our education system is lagging behind other nations, that one of the largest states has elected to put a political stamp on the content of education. While there is certainly room to correct past swings in the opposite direction, dropping Thomas Jefferson from history texts because he espoused separation of church and state seems to go too far.
It doesn’t matter what flavor the stamp is, whether conservative, liberal, or otherwise; schools should be places for learning and not boot camps for political dogma. And where there are conflicting views, students should be exposed to all views where ideas can be compared on their merits. We should be cultivating critical thinking.
There is a good article on this turn of events in the New York Times that is worth a read. See, Texas Approves Curriculum Revised by Conservatives
Information Assurance for the iPhone
9 Mar 2010
The folks at Booz Allen Hamilton have developed a nifty iPhone app called iAssurance that should be pretty useful for anyone that has to deal with information security. The app is free. Download the App via iTunes
The from the application’s description:
iAssurance, developed by Booz Allen Hamilton for information security practitioners and managers, provides online access to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
iAssurance provides the ability to search NVD for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). Upon returning a CVE, iAssurance displays the vulnerability description, date published and modified, an impact section that includes a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score and the vectors used to derive the score, and a configurations section.
With this app an Information Assurance professional can quickly tap into the National Vulnerability Database from just about anywhere to get critical information to meet security challenges. A must have.
Twitter to Delicious
8 Mar 2010
If you frequently send tweets with urls that you just might want to find later, consider a visit to Packrati.us. Packrati offers a services that will collect your tweets and send any embedded URLs over to Delicious to add as a bookmark in your account. Even better they will convert the short URLs most of us use to the original URL for the bookmark.
Social Media Cheat Sheet
8 Mar 2010
Check out the Social Media Cheat Sheet at the thenextweb.com. The Social Landscape chart there shows which social media websites do well with
- Customer Communication
- Brand Exposure
- Traffic To Your Site
- Search Engine Optimization
If nothing else, the chart suggests that to get the most out of social media, you need a diversified approach to cover all the bases. It is not just enough to get brand exposure on facebook and twitter. You need more to get traffic to your site and for that the old stalwarts, Digg and StumbleUpon are the best for bringing in folks that are apt to click through ads.
Getting Amazon Free Shipping
7 Mar 2010
You’ve just lined up a purchase on Amazon for what you want – a Blu-ray movie. The cost is about $23.50. With shipping it is going to be more like $26.50.
If only your total purchase was $25.00, you’d qualify for free shipping. Spend $1.50 to save $3.00 – that’s a good deal. And it might even be more depending on what you are buying and where you live.
So how do you find something in the $1.50 price range to avoid the higher cost of shipping charges? Take a look at SlickFillers.net where you can punch in the dollar value you need to spend and give an idea of purchase categories that might be useful. I gave it a try and found that I could add a replacement Panasonic Digital Camera battery, which would be handy. Cheaper price and a little bit of a stocking stuff to go with it works for me.
More Twitter Services of Note
6 Mar 2010
Find People Like You
Wefollow
Wefollow is a great place to start becoming engaged in the Twitter world. When you register, you have the chance to declare your location and top interests using tags. Your Twitter stream then will be categorized based on your input. Visitors to the site can locate other Twitter users based on location and by tags.
If you want to be found because you have an interest in a particular area, this site will list you. Similarly, you can find people that are in a particular location or who have a particular interest.
If you want to find out what people are saying about an ongoing event in a particular area, you could use this site to find stream of tweets from people in the effected area.
Just Tweet It
Just Tweet It advertises that it will help you find other Twitter users just like you. On arriving at the site, you’ll see a cloud of popular directories of Twitter users. You can pick from these directories to find people that are talking about things of interest to you. At the top of entry page, you can use a scrolling drop-down menu to find an area of interest as an alternative to using the cloud of popular directories.
Find Lists
Listorious
Listorious presents you with a “Directory of Awesome Lists on Twitter” If you want to follow all of the tweets of the editorial staff of The Onion, for example, you could navigate to http://listorious.com/TheOnion/onion-editorial-staff and become a follower of the list with all of the editorial staff’s tweets.
You can navigate on the site using tags for lists, check out the top lists, find the newest, and so on. Following lists is a great way to get a stream of relevant tweets for your interests. And of course being on a list at Listorious is a great way to get seen.
Locational Streams
Tweetie
Tweetie is for Mac and iPhone users only. Aside from being a full-scale Twitter app for managing just about every aspect of our Twitter experience, it also is location aware with a mapview. The iPhone version earned the 2009 Apple Design Award – clean interface and user-friendly. Awesome app.
TwitterLocal
TwitterLocal is a desktop client that allows you to watch as many location based Twitter feeds as you want. It does require installation of Adobe AIR Ver. 1.5.
Happn.in
Happn.in is a web application/Google maps mashup. You can click on a particular city (if your city is listed) and see what the current stream trends are (topics of interest) and get the latest from the location’s feed. You can also elect to follow updates from the city/area on Twitter.
More Twitter Services – Resources
Looking for more information on Twitter services and applications? Check out these blog entries:
Microsoft’s Counter to iPad?
6 Mar 2010
Microsoft is nearing release of it’s “Courier” Tablet Computer. The “Courier” appears to me to be intended to compete with the iPad. More information is available at Engadet: Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’: exclusive pictures and details (update: video) and at Gizmodo: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet. Here’s the Gizmodo video from YouTube.com: