Counterfeit Girl Scout Cookies

Meanwhile, in the heat blasted deserts where only Servers survive, the codemonkeys at Counterfeit Girlscout Cookies wage a desperate, rear-guard action against the elite shock troops of Google's Search Engine. Men versus Machine. The Machine grows daily and it's power increases exponentially. But the Men are learning...

I am posting this video in the story section, despite it being an obvious candidate for the tubes content type. I am posting this video here, because I want to point out that this is just the sort of nerd fueled creative engineering for the sake of building things that I simply love. Since the time when I ran around my parents yard in Huggies, I have had a love to break, then attempt to re-assemble things.

I also have a love of making Internet videos. My current fascination is the driftmustang.com project, but who knows, maybe toy guns from video games will be next.

I feel that many people do understand this love. I think that one of my life goals is to never stop building things purely for the sake of building them. I think construction is one reason that both pot smoking and halloween are so popular.

Just ask my wife about the ridiculous coffee table turned server rack that she "tolerates" here in the counterfeit girl scout cooke fortress of solitude.

One of the gripes I've had with being an iPhone / OSX user is being able to keep my email synchronized. First, a breakdown of what I tried:

1. .Mac - Since paying for email is soo 1995 and the +20 to pretentious achieved from weilding a 'mac.com' address was less than desired, using Apple's .Mac service was out of the question.
2. MediaTemple - The next place I tried was the webserver that this site is on - MediaTemple. While I had no problems getting IMAP to work, MT's reliability and speed rank way to low for me to use as my main email.
3. Lastly was the official iPhone email provider - Yahoo. Yahoo boasts the coolest feature of them all, Push IMAP actually pings your iPhone when you have new mail so your mail is always current and you can save battery life. Of course, Yahoo is not without it's flaws; it has crappy email addresses (can't even use Push IMAP with a Yahoo Business account?) and the oh-so-brilliant lack of being able to check your email with ANY desktop client.

Fast forward to last week.. With my domain back in my posession from squatters, I decided to give Google a whirl. The solution that Google offers gives me the following features:

• Send mail from a custom domain.
• IMAP synchronization
• Arguably a great web client, though I'm not used to it
• Excellent spam protection
• Works well with apple Mail / other desktop mail clients
• Very fast and reliable

and what you'll need:

• A domain name
• Access to advanced DNS setup (MX records)

To get this setup you'll only need to do two simple things:

Go to Google Apps website. Setup a Google Apps account. There you will be walked through a few steps to get email setup on your custom domain name.

Setup the iPhone using Google's simple instructions.

My impression of GMail so far has been quite good. The speed and reliability has been better than any other email account I have tried on the iPhone. Apple Mail works flawlessly albeit slightly slower than POP. The only things that don't feel quite right is GMails use of labels instead of the traditional folders and the slightly awkward 'All Mail' label. Other than that, this seems like the best way to get your mail on an iPhone and stay synchronized with a desktop client.

This past weekend both myself (DriftLive) and d3p0h picked up Halo3 determined to determine what makes top selling title of '07. As a major feature of Halo3 is online cooperative mode via xBox Live, that is what we opted for.

Friday Night:
We start out crash landed on a lush planet full of little alien fodder and the occasional brute. Think "Battle of Endor" except your goals is to kill Ewoks while dressed like a green version of Darth Vader with no cape. I only had time to play for an hour of two, but just because I placed down my controller, does not mean that d3p0h had to stop. In fact he played for another hour of so in what I like to call "warp zone mode." The reason that I call it "warp zone mode" is because d3p0h pulled my lifeless Master Chief through and additional 2 hours of the game. Some of you might argue that I was missing out on important plot informations, but you are wrong. The Cinematics and story in this game look as if they took significant time to develop, but that does not make them en-gauging.

Saturday Night:
d3p0h was busy doing relationship stuff so I pushed on solo campaign style determined to play for a few hours. At this point I noticed that the game seemed to have lost some of it's entertainment value. I now felt like I was simply going through the motions. What little passion I had for the game was now gone. Soon my younger sister showed up with a Rock Band for ye olde ps2 and the Master Chief was once again placed in hibernation.

Sunday Night:
Day three of Halo Three is then the magic happens. Halo3 ends in much the way that the first Halo ended. Master Chief hops on a Millennium Falcon warthog and makes a full throttle escape from a self destructing death star Halo ring. The best part of this whole sequence is that we had 3 players via xBox live all riding on a single warthog. There are few things as entertaining in the world of video games as greifing your pals by hopping out of a warthog at full clip just before hitting a huge jump. Watch as they fall helplessly into the endless voids that populate so much of the Halo universe. I must have been responsible for at least a dozen respawns, but somehow each fatal crash provided copious laughs and good times. After we completed the Double Dash style warthog race, some other boring cinematic stuff happened, but I don't really recall what was said as the three of us were chatting about how awesome the whole warthog sequence was and that they should make entire games based on that mechanic.

Think Mario Cart Double dash with turrets, jumps, and chasms.

I recently stumbled across as sweet little application called Connect360 from the company NullRiver. Connect360 allows you to essentially turn your OS X Macintosh into a media server that the xBox360 can access and stream video and audio directly to your television. How is this awesome you ask? Well if you are like me, you enjoy the BBC show Top Gear, but living here in the ole USA, broadcast television does not carry it. What is a fan to do?

What I have done is gone out and found a 2 sweet little applications called TVShows and Transmission. These two open source, free applications combined with Connect360 turn the combination of your iMac and xBox360 into a sort of illicit super TiVo.

Open up TVShows and enter in the name of any number of popular television programs then quit the application.

TVShows has now set up a background process that will periodically search the dark sections of the Internet for the shows that you have entered. In my case, when a new episode of Top Gear appears, TVShows finds it then notifies Transmission to go ahead and download the show and save it to a folder on my computer.

The next step is Connect360, once installed one needs to simply select the directory of movies to share with the xBox. As long as your Mac and xBox are on the network, you are done at this point.

Go over to your xBox and at the Media->Video blade you will see that you now have access to your movies folder, as well as itunes video and iTunes music (through the audio blade).

The quality and performance of video streamed to the xBox is great and my wife and I quite enjoy using this setup to watch most of our television now. Viewing the newest episode of FireFly on hulu.com using the office computer is not quite as satisfying as viewing it down in the den on the HD bigscreen.

Verdict, NullRiver has done a great job with Connect360 and MS has done equally as well with the xBox360. The two combined with a good source of divx or h.264 videos (TVShows + Transmission) turns your gaming rig into an excellent on-demand entertainment center.

So I finally did it. I joined facebook. I had already passed through college at the time when facebook started to gain steam, so I am a bit late on to the bandwagon. According to the wikipedia, the site was launched back in February of 2004, but up until September of 2006, membership was restricted to students and certain other organizations. I joined on December 8th 2007.

I joined because of the recent pie in the sky valuations of 15 billion dollars being thrown around the Internet. I am an investor who fears irrational exuberance. Although the company is not publicly traded, massive fluctuations in valuation of a company like facebook have the ability to create ripples in other companies viewed to be part of the same industry. Before I even logged on to the site I knew that the 15 billion valuation was a moon shot, but after the checking the site out, I can see much greater issues ahead.

myspace.com and facebook seem to be very similar sites when you take a broad view from a great distance, however, when you start using the two sites, the differences become clear almost instantly.

myspace allows and encourages users to to create online avatars that do not contain much personal information.

facebook wants you to enter your actual information, and as you desire to expand your usage of the site, it requires more information. For example, in order to friend people without entering a captcha challenge, you need to give facebook your telephone #.

With the disaster that is/was beacon still fresh in mind, I with boldly claim that facebook is going to have a hard time furnishing significant revenue growth going forward. The technique that separated facebook from myspace was the use of personal information and data mining to focus advertisements. I am sure that in the mind of an advertiser, custom tailoring ads to clients is a dream, but in practice, it shots up alarms bells for most Internet users.

Maybe this would have worked back when facebook was seen as a protected environment for college students, but now that it has been opened up to the wilds of the Internet, I do not see this as working.

I believe that facebook has some strong advantages over myspace as a networking site. So far I have found it much easier to re-connect with past alumni and friends due to the "you may also know" fields that are generated using my behavior. Using my online facebook behavior to tailor my facebook experience is what I view as an acceptable use of personal information and data mining. The problems start when you try to connect that back to my real world. I am already connected to my facebook friends in the real world, we went to college together, drove across the country together, they stood next to me at my wedding. If I want someone to have my phone number, or know what I am up to tonight, I will tell them.

15 billion is 100% out of line, looking at what myspace has done to newscorp since it was purchased, I peg facebook at something more conservative, like 1/2 a billion dollars, and I think that is being generous.

myspace is a place for browsing skanks and hooking up, facebook is a place to give up some of your own privacy in exchange for a bit or information and a reconnection with your friends that you may have lost touch with.

So I learned for a quick glance at the press releases section of the YouTube website and discovered that Oprah Winfrey Launches "Oprah on YouTube" Channel.

So how well is harpo productions* doing on the site?

harpos youtube views (top 9) == 3,365,554 views

Tay Zonday's views (top 9) == 14,713,468 views

It appears that not even Oprah can just hop into the world of Internets. Making hits on the tubes requires a different approach and skill set. Or maybe Oprah's audience just simply does not use the Internets.

*harpo is like Oprah, only backwards and stupid.

Apparently the agreement that put NBC content on youTube is no longer and the NBC channel has been pulled down. I am a member of the hulu.com private beta test, and although it is a better place to watch full length television shows then youtube is, I don't think that both services can't co-exist.

To me it would make more sense to maintain a library of shorts and clips on youTube as a means for marketing NBC's shows to a wider audience. Think about it this way, many users like to browse around youtube and check out what is new. Maybe I am looking for funny videos of celebrity breasts being mauled by cats and I happen upon a comical bit from 30 Rock. I decide "this Tina Fey lady is rather funny, I want to see more." Now I browse on over to hulu.com and pee some 30 Rock episodes in a higher resolution.

If the NBC deal with youtube has profit sharing, it seems to me that the move to exclusive hulu.com would be a mistake. It is quite possible that the move is only temporary as an attempt to bolster traffic over at hulu and that we will see the NBC Channel back up on youtube in the future.

Until then I guess we will have to rely on an army of uploaders that manage to get copyrighted material up onto youtube everyday to get our non-hulu NBC fix.