Archive for June 2006

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time and #1 is AOL. I second that. Although, I’m sure something else that I don’t remember could top it… but that’s tough to do. AOL continues to have a rep of a “non-tech-savvy person’s Web.” I admit that AOL has gotten better, but it still has some nasty business practices in place like making it almost impossible to unsubscribe to it after a free trial.

I remember CueCat. The Dallas Morning News was one of its sponsors as well as the local Tandy Corporation’s Radio Shack and I thought it was a good idea, but I was wrong. Then its users’ information was exposed to really kill the product.

Remember any lousy products?

Even though friends gave me a hard time about my not pronouncing ’66′ correctly, ’6′ has always been a lucky number for me. It started when I went to a pizza place with a group from school. My order number was ’66.’

During yesterday’s speech therapy, I said ’6′ a few times and the therapist corrected me.

On the bright side, I got married in June (sixth month — anniversary is June 11). Paul was born in ’66. I can’t remember others, but the number just pops up a lot when something good happens and it did today.

I came in second place in the 6/6/06 Can You Find the Signs? contest from Four Idle Hands, a store that sells “devlishy good stuff.” Talk about a creative way to promote your business. I found out about the business through the contest somewhere else. I hadn’t heard of the store until the contest.

Update: I also won the E-Myth Mastery book! W00t!

Resources available in captioned media talks about the Caption Media Program (CMP), a great program that ofers free loans of open captioned programs. The program now offers Internet streaming videos and currently has over 1000 videos. I love this part because finding online captioned media is like the needle in haystack thing.

I just finished reading Winning Results with Google AdWords (reading it to do an abstract, not to advertise) and learned something interesting. Google Video relies on caption transcripts to make its videos searchable. Well, why can’t the captions be in the streaming videos, too? [ Read more... ]

I wrote a letter in response to the question [might require free registration] posed by The Dallas Morning News Collin County Edition: What did you learn from your first summer job, and was it worth it? During summer, are today’s teens better off getting a job or going to summer school?

The long version of my response:

I learned that I shouldn’t just take the first job offer that comes along. One of my biggest regrets is that I went to work for a store far away from me when I lined up an interview with a library within walking distance. The store gave me a job and I took it instead of waiting till after I had the library interview.

As for today’s teens — it depends on the kid and his needs. He may go to camp or travel with a group, both of which are beneficial. While having a job is great and teaches a lot of things, we’re only kids for so long and once we reach adulthood, we don’t have as much time for camp and travel. Perhaps it can be worked out to do more than one thing.
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The Geekend Wiktionary from TechRepublic is an “unvarnished glossary of terms for those trying to navigate the corridors of geekdom. No entry is complete until you’ve screwed with…er, improved it!”

Just had to post that for a little weekend laugh. Ha! Paul can relate to HelpDesk.

David Strom posted How to be a better blogger — and still keep your day job provides advice from many experienced bloggers and me. Blogging is still new to the business world and its rules continue developing and changing. If you follow nothing but one rule, it would be what I was quoted: “When you go on that job interview, do you want the interviewee to have read the [blog] entry?”

Been having one of those two weeks where things keep popping up and nothing gets done as you spend more time putting out fires than taking steps forward. Two family cars stopped running, so I had to schlep my mom and hubby to the cars and repair stations.
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