Hello folks,

This summer, one of my goals is to get organized and find useful tools that can help me better organize my life, both in the real world and in the online world. Therefore, I’d like to know if you have any suggestions of Web 2.0 sites that I’m not currently using but that I should consider checking out.

Also, if anyone out there actually knows how to use Facebook for useful purposes, I could sure use some help figuring that site out!

Please hie thee hence to the comments section and offer your suggestions. Thanks!

Tags: comments, Facebook, Help, social networking, suggestions, Web 2.0

Don’t ask me why the guys at JibJab are so awesome, but they are, and the latest proof comes in the form of their latest video: “Time For Some Campaignin’,” which beautifully sums up the entire 2008 election in two minutes. This is simply awesome.

Tags: Barack Obama, campaign, election, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, JibJab, John McCain, Video, YouTube

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Yes, I don’t care if Mac OS X Leopard finally makes it such that iCal’s Dock icon dynamically updates to reflect the correct date. Today, July 17th, 2008, marks six years since iCal was first announced at Steve Jobs’ last keynote at Macworld Expo New York in 2002, and it is a day worth remembering, especially since everyone using Leopard no longer has a Dock icon that can remind you.

And so, Happy Birthday, iCal! And Happy iCal Day to everyone out there on the internets.

Tags: iCal Day, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld

Today I’m at the Social Media Camp taking place at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. Admission here is free, so if you’re attending or want to drop by, feel free to do so! (Those of you that are here can feel free to say hi in the comments section.) My friend Daniel Brusilovsky will be giving a presentation here later today, which I’m here to see, and I’m also going to be taking notes on social media/social networking and how a certain non-profit organization that I volunteer for can take advantage of it.

Anyway, for the readers on my blog, expect a report on my experience here in the next day or so. And for everyone at Social Media Camp who have heeded my shameless plug(s), hello and thanks for visiting my blog!

Update: I’ll be doing a session on “The Art of Personal Blogging” at around 2:15 PM today in the second room.

Tags: BarCAmp, event, research, San Francisco, Social Media Camp, visitors

Well, the iPhone 3G release is just days away now, yet for some reason, the hype doesn’t seem as awe-inspiring as last year’s did. Which is quite surprising, given that right after I watched Steve Jobs’ keynote last month, my thought on the new iPhone and the 50% price reduction was, “At last, Apple finally got the iPhone right.” And that’s a big statement coming from me, as someone fully certified as being immune to Uncle Steve’s Reality Distortion Field. But yet, in the past month, many revelations have come out to smash Apple’s party, and most of them from the cell carriers, the gatekeepers needed to allow the iPhone to function.

In the post I made yesterday on MacFocus Magazine I ranted about cell phone carriers and how they hinder the iPhone, which has been more than clear in the past month. Even ignoring how other cell carriers are screwing would-be iPhone customers (I’m looking at you, Rogers), the iPhone 3G comes with plenty more strings attached. I could start with the basic craziness of charging an extra $10/month for the 3G service for the iPhone, which not only eliminates the iPhone’s $200 price drop, it actually makes the total cost of the iPhone more expensive. I could then go to the unexplained reason for the iPhone no longer being activated in iTunes. Not only does it take one of my favorite attributes of the old iPhone and throw it out the signature-free window, but it’s going to make the already ridiculously-crowded Apple Stores much worse and cause people the hassle of having to go through all the usual cell phone heck. (Plus, not having an online option is going to mess it up for the people who don’t live near an Apple or AT&T Store; are people going to have to make iPhone pilgrimages now?)

Oh, and it’s nice that AT&T will finally offer an contract-free option (note how AT&T didn’t say “unlocked” anywhere) for the iPhone, but putting it at a $400 surcharge, plus tax, is ridiculous! It would be smarter to buy the iPhone for $200 or $300 (instead of $600 or $700), sign the contract, pay for one month of service, then cancel and pay the $175 early termination fee on the contract. By my math, that would save you over $150 over the contract-free option. And why exactly can’t the iPhone be activated with GoPhone pay-as-you-go yet?

That’s why I’m still not interested in an iPhone. The phone itself is nice, and finally is something I would desire except for it having to go through AT&T under a two-year contract at a substantial monthly fee. No thanks, I’m not that desperate to go mobile.

The alternative would be the iPod touch, which thanks to its imminent App Store upgrade will finally become the best non-cell phone PDA out there. (Palm originally beat it in my opinion by having open access to applications that actually did things, but now the iPod touch has that too, and with far better quality.) The only main differences now between the iPhone 3G and the iPod touch are the phone part, the lack of GPS (though the iPod touch still has the somewhat-less-accurate Skyhook function, but even the original iPhone didn’t have that), and–oh yeah, the ability to be online without access to a wifi hotspot.

See, that’s my one remaining issue here. Yes, the iPhone has the ability to be online wherever there is a good cell connection, while the iPod touch is restricted to just wifi networks. At that point, wouldn’t it just be smarter to rely on my laptop instead, since it also can only connect to the internet at wifi hotspots? Besides that, at present, the iPod touch (which clearly has less functionality) is $100 more than the iPhone. Granted, the iPod touch doesn’t have to be hindered by a service plan, but it does make one wonder if Apple isn’t planning to up the specs on the iPod touch this fall.

I have never been interested in an iPod because I’ve always said that I’m satisfied with listening to iTunes on my computer, and don’t really need my music elsewhere in most cases (except maybe a 12 hour flight, which I don’t do very often). I’m not strongly interested in an iPod touch, because it pretty much has the same, if not less, functionality of my MacBook, albeit in a smaller form factor and a different interface. I might be interested in the iPhone, since it does have a few tricks that my computer doesn’t, except for it being connected to AT&T and therefore being far more expensive than I could ever hope to afford in my current position thanks to that darned service plan crap.

What exactly is the place of these pocket-sized devices in my life? They may be more attractive to me than they were a few years ago, but Steve Jobs is going to have to full just a few more tricks out of his hat before I’m in the mood for one of these iDevices.

Tags: activation, AT&T, carriers, devices, dilemma, iPhone, iPod touch, laptop, rant, rate plans, services

Hello to everyone out there in No Man’s Land. I’m in the middle of a brutal war, one that you may have engaged battles with in the past: the war on spam. But today, the enemy has pulled out a secret weapon that is completely decimating me, and could pose a very serious threat.

No, I’m not writing this way to be funny, I’m very serious about what’s going on. It has to do with one of the websites that I maintain, the one for the 17th District PTA. Because its webhost gave up the ghost about two months ago, I’m currently hosting it under the same hosting package as the one for Webmacster87.info, but today it’s apparently been scapegoated into a pretty difficult situation. Here’s a copy of the dispatch that I sent to my webhost just a few minutes ago:

To whom it may concern:

I’m writing concerning a rather serious issue which has come up today concerning one of my domain names. The main domain name for my site is webmacster87.info, however this one is concerning 17thdistrictpta.org which was added on.

Today I have been receiving an abnormally large amount of spam coming to my personal e-mail (webmacster87@gmail.com)–about 1800 in the last twelve hours alone, and still counting. However, all of these were actually “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” messages that, when I examined them, showed that it appears that some spammer has been sending out spam e-mails with From e-mail addresses that have @17thdistrictpta.org suffixes. Because many of these spam e-mails were sent to invalid addresses, they bounced back, and since the fake From addresses (like “ahplatne_1979@17thdistrictpta.org” and other random things like that) don’t exist, all of those bounce-back things have been sent to my own personal e-mail, since it is the “catch-all” address.

I am concerned that some spammer or group of spammers somewhere is using our domain name fraudulently as a scapegoat from which to send out spam messages, and I am concerned that this could have grave ramifications for the name of the organization that it represents, such as it being blacklisted by e-mail services, or possibly being reported to you or someone else as though I was responsible for those spam messages. I’m also quite concerned about the impact that the amount of bounce-back messages is having on my bandwidth and your servers.

I don’t know if you have the ability to do anything about this issue, but since you are my web host and your servers are the ones being affected by the tremendous amount of bounced-back messages, you would be the best ones to report this issue to. I would appreciate any advice and assistance you could possibly offer on how to deal with this issue so that I am not affected by further ramifications (and can possibly stop the deluge of bounce-backs).

Thanks for any help you can offer.
–Douglas Bell
Webmaster, California 17th District PTA
http://www.17thdistrictpta.org

As you can see, this is very serious, and I’m very scared about what the possible blow-back from this could be, so I could REALLY use any help you could offer. Have you ever had an issue like this? Do you have any ideas of how I can stop this? Please sound off any advice you may have in the comments!!!

Update: Here’s an example of what I’m dealing with, as you can see in Gmail’s spam box, and an example bounced-back e-mail. But it’s not the fact that I’m getting these bounced-back e-mails that I’m worried about, I’m worried about blacklists and people seeing the domain name on these spam e-mails and thinking bad things…

Tags: 17th District PTA, Delivery Status Notification, e-mail, spam, urgent, web host

The Fourth of July may have come and gone for this year, but the Muppets apparently have a really funny variation of the Stars & Stripes Forever that will top off any Independence Day Holiday. Kudos to whoever put this one together.

Tags: Fourth of July, Independence Day, Muppets, parody, Stars & Stripes Forever, Video, YouTube

Today I had another opportunity to take advantage of one of my favorite Leopard tips, but interestingly enough, it’s one that isn’t very well known out there. You may have heard of this tip, you may have not, but I thought that it might be interesting on this Fourth of July to take a break from my usual string of blog posts to share this tip from Mac OS X Leopard.

Have you ever used an application that had a menu item that you said, “Boy, why didn’t the developer think to give that menu item a keyboard shortcut?” I sure have. For example, in the new Safari 3, I use that “Merge All Windows” feature from the Window menu quite frequently, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut at all. Well, Leopard gives you a way to assign keyboard shortcuts easily.

Open System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse, then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Not only does this tab let you see the various system-wide keyboard shortcuts available to you, including some you may not have known about (did you know that you could show the Help menu with Shift-Command-/ by default or look things up with Control-Command-D by default?). To add a new shortcut, however, just click on the + button underneath the list, which will bring down a new sheet. If you’re adding a shortcut for a menu item in a specific application, choose it in the pop-up menu. If you’re adding a shortcut for a system-wide menu item, like a service or an Apple menu item or something like that, leave it to All Applications. In the box that says “Menu Title,” enter the exact name of the menu item you’re editing. Capitalization counts here, and if the menu item includes an ellipsis (…) at the end, include that as well. Don’t worry about what menu or submenu the item is in. Finally, in the last box, enter the keyboard shortcut you want, being sure that it doesn’t duplicate an existing one in the application or in the system. Then, click Add, and restart the affected application.

If you entered it correctly, you’ll find that the menu item should now display its keyboard shortcut, and for most applications (definitely Cocoa applications), the shortcut will be functional. Incidentally, this trick also works in Mac OS X Tiger, except that the shortcut won’t display itself in the menu item. This doesn’t work everywhere (Firefox wouldn’t go with it), but in Safari, it’s sure a lot easier to merge all windows into tabs with a Shift-Command-M than it is to have to go into the Window menu manually.

Tags: keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, Leopard, Mac, Mac OS X, menu items, menus, tip

Twitter is down (so what’s new?), so I guess that means that I’m going to have to blog my outrage to the news that a judge ordered YouTube to give its user data to Viacom. All this in the midst of the $1 billion lawsuit that forced Stephen Colbert off of the ‘Tube, made Google wish it had never thought of acquiring the video sharing service, sparked one of the major reasons for the recent writer’s strike, and now led into yet the latest infringement of internet privacy.

First off, what is Viacom’s problem? Why can’t they just do what the other major networks have done and partner up with YouTube! For Pete’s sake, I can already watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report IN FULL on their own website with almost no ads, why are they making such a big deal over YouTube?

But what really makes no sense is why Viacom even needs to see the complete records of every single video ever watched on YouTube, complete with username, IP address, and time watched (which must be millions of pages long, I would imagine), along with copies of every video ever removed from YouTube. That’s not copyright infringement, that’s privacy infringement. It shouldn’t be any of Viacom’s business how many times I watch three guys sing about their missing legwarmers or a tomato and a cucumber sing about the difference between a monkey and an ape.

But while those examples may be somewhat humorous and intentionally revealing, internet privacy is quite serious and has affected lives. The article I linked to gave an example of someone who was sent to a concentration camp because Yahoo! was forced to give up information to the Chinese government.

The judge at this case dismissed Google’s concerns over privacy as “speculative.” Well, I may not be a lawyer, and I’m certainly not one to gamble, I’d be more than willing to speculate that this is going to set a very, very bad precedent for the privacy of the internet as we’ve come to know it. I do hope that someone rules this to be illegal, and if not, then there had better be some sort of internet outcry, because this is just wrong and immoral.

Tags: court, Google, judge, privacy, ruling, Viacom, videos, YouTube

Our news media is already difficult to follow when you’re listening to it normally, but what if you’re watching it somewhere without any kind of volume, voice, or sound for context. Then you get this hilarious result, which was exemplified by The Daily Show in this awesome sketch called News at the Gym.

Tags: funny, gym, Jason Jones, Jon Stewart, media, News, The Daily Show, Video