MobileTracker has seen a nice spike over the last two days. Not because of my hard work and dedication, but because Paris Hilton gave her Sidekick password away. Over 36K pages were served yesterday, about a 2x spike. Today looks to be just a bit higher. All in all it will help average out being a 28 day month.
She may be a dumb blonde, but she’s got pull.
I ordered a set of double walled drinking glasses from Bodum after seeing them in Fortune (December issue, but they have been on backorder). It’s the little things in life–a glass of ice water that doesn’t sweat like a fat man at the gym is an extremely gratifying experience. Not to mention that they’re spiffy.
Construction wise the glass feels thinner than normal, but I think it may be due to my body sensing the thickness and feeling the lighter weight (there’s air in the middle).
Well not really–but Reuters flubbed the facts about the E1060. It doesn’t have iTunes! I first got wind of the story at 3AM ET right as I was heading to bed. Instead of sleep I sent off requests to various press contacts in Europe, hoping for a quick reply (it was business hours there at the time). By about 6 I had what I needed and the story hit just before 7AM. Chasing a scoop is ridiculously fun… Even if it means giving up a night’s sleep.
I’m 20 today. My second birthday on TypePad, man time flies. I’m spending the day mostly offline with friends which is sure to be fun.
How do you get new muisc?
I’m an old fashioned hipster and buy the CD usually. CDs at Target or BestBuy are pretty cheap and you can rip them at better qualities. Not to mention getting non-DRM infected MP3s.
I picked up a new book today, and it looks like a winner: The Paradox of Choice—Why More is Less. While the web has not been mentioned yet, 37Signals lives and breathes the philosophy of this book: simple is best.
Google Maps may be the most technological mapping system on the web (from a development point of view), but it’s dead simple to the user. When I go to Google Maps, I’m not hit with a million choices.
I think a surplus of choice is is why a lot of people aren’t attracted to "smartphones". Smartphones aren’t really smart, if they were then they wouldn’t have so many choices. On the other end of the spectrum we have the iPod Shuffle which is one of the most simple devices out there, It’s a huge hit because its main feature is not having features. Bizarro world!
I’ll enjoy the rest of this book. You should check it out.
"The rich should pay more in Social Security taxes."
They already do. Besides paying at least $14,860 dollars a year in FICA, most "rich people" are employers and thus pay half of their staff’s employment taxes.
How to fix social security? Extend the minimum age for benefits. It’s not reasonable to assume today’s workers need to support yesterday’s workers for 1/3rd of their lives.
About the only downside to being self-employed is the lack of health insurance. For some reason, US insurance companies decide to give decent rates to large groups and gouge individuals and small businesses. Car insurance isn’t like this, they just gouge young people (possibly the reverse of what health insurance should do?) and unsafe drivers.
I found my policy through health.yahoo.com, as lately I have been plugging in what I am looking for dot yahoo dot com and find a great resource. However, as of this writing it appears they have changed the site and I don’t see the health insurance search feature. It was powered by eHealthInsurance which is just as easy to go to.
The papers were all filled out online which made everything easy. I appear healthy enough, most likely because of my age, that they didn’t send anyone out to poke and prod.
If you’re looking for a policy, I suggest going the same route. I got a good price and the convenience could not be beat.
I have been really good with backing up my data lately… I would say that I’m on my longest streak of being all the way protected that I have ever had. My webserver automagically pushes compressed backups to another server from another host in a whole other part of the country. All data on my laptop is most-nightly put onto a FireWire drive via Data Backup. This drive is normally kept in a fire proof locked box, but I’ve had some recent trouble with said box (namely the lock breaking).
Why does it feel like such a chore doing regular backups? Having a current backup after a disaster is the most comforting feeling possible. Even with paying for another server and buying a tiny FireWire drive, keeping current backups is a cheap insurance policy. The downtime I would have from losing either my server or laptop would be enormous.
The FCC may have one of the most poor websites of any major government organization:
There is a lot more wrong with the FCC’s site, but you can get my point. It’s a mess.