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Today I upgraded to Comcast high-speed Internet. Wow, I guess I was a little slow to catch on to this service. The performance is so totally superior; I don’t even recognize the Internet at my house anymore. I am getting download speeds more than 10 times faster than DSL. I’m able to watch videos more easily, and downloading a 50 MB file is snappy. I’m online a lot, so I figure I just gained half an hour to an hour of productivity or more by making the switch. Oh and it costs less than my DSL service too. No contract.

I’m going cancel my DSL line, and with that my home phone line. The only reason I kept the landline phone was because of my DSL, and now I certainly don’t need that. I actually hate my landline phone from SBC. It costs a lot of money, and it doesn’t have free nights and weekends, and the charge me for “long-distance� calls which can be just the next town away. To avoid getting ripped off on toll calls, I subscribed to Sprint long-distance at an additional cost and they bill me an annoying service fee that just went up even if I don’t make any long distance calls in a month. Most of the calls or receive on my home phone are from solicitors anyway so it is pretty much a SPAM phone. I’m going cable modem and cell phone only, and I don’t see why I would ever want to go back.

I am so done shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. The last few days I just had too many frustrating experiences. What a waste of time! I got a copy of the movie Sahara from Peerflix, which is a pretty cool service by the way, but it wouldn't play and I really want to see the movie so I was a Target and checked to see if they had a copy in the video section. I would've bought it even at full price, which really doesn't make a lot of sense, but they were sold out. Then on my way home I stopped at a store called The Learning Center to pick up some addition flash cards for my son. Of course, they had every flash card imaginable, but were sold out of addition. Finally today, I needed a four foot card table, so I went Office Depot and, of course, they were sold out of four foot card tables. What a nightmare for them because instead of coming back later or buying something else, I'm just going to buy these items directly on the Internet and most likely from someone else with cheap or free delivery, no sales tax, and a lower price.

Recently, I've even been shopping for groceries on the Internet. I happen to have a computer in my kitchen and it's super convenient order food from Safeway.com right there in my kitchen where I can see exactly what I have and what I don't have. They also remember what you purchased before. And they don't charge by weight so if you want to order 10 heavy cases of water just go for it. Finally, last month, I signed up for Amazon Prime. This is the new service you pay Amazon like $80 a year and get free two-day shipping on everything you buy. At first I thought this didn't make a lot of sense. Actually now I think this is a great program, because I buy a lot of things on Amazon and I don't know about you, but I at least often fall into the trap of buying extra items to bring my shopping cart total over $25 to get the “free� shipping. A lot of these extra items I'd buy just get the “free� shipping I really don't need to buy at that time so it's a waste of money and then anyway the free shipping usually takes a week or more to get to me which is very frustrating.

I wanted to share something really incredible I found. If you’ve never visited the Internet Archives it’s a site worth visiting. I found out about this a few weeks ago. In the future everyone will have a camera and this is already changing the way news is reported. The archives has a collection of publicly contributed audio and video files some of which are very remarkable.

Checkout the amazing home videos taken of tsunami. There are films that people took on their camcorders as it was happening! People didn’t even understand what was happening. I mean who’s ever experienced a tsunami, right? Check out this video of a restaurant flooding. There are other videos of people standing on the beach as the waves come in and then you see the person taking the film turn and try to run away when they realize the danger they are in. Click here to view video.

AOL Buys Weblogs to Boost Blog Presence - Yahoo! News According to this article, AOL paid $25M all cash for Weblogs, Inc. This is pretty amazing, and shows how blogging is heating up. I happen to know that about half of their traffic comes from engadget.com, so figure that one site engadget turns out to be worth about $12M.

The Internet boomlet is here! This week I’ve been attending Web 2.0 in San Francisco. This conference is totally jampacked with sessions and people! There’s obviously a tremendous amount of interest all things Internet again. And there’s clearly a tremendous amount of possibility and creativity emerging. The Web 2.0 conference covers a lot of ground, including Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using Ajax or Flash, new ideas in search, mash ups, open source, video games, online music, and online advertising, etc. A lot of really great demos are being shown. Some of the speakers are real characters including Barry Diller, president of IACI, John Battle, journalist who is like the MC of the conference, Reed Hastings, the president of Netflix, and even Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead! I recorded some of their talks and will post later.

Last week I attended a special program from Landmark Education called “Living a Created Life.� This three hour special program focused on how much we are controlled by our bodies and lower brain functions, and how little we really are in control of our own lives. If we’re just reacting to our bodies needs for survival, hunger, and other physical stuff then who we think we are is really just mainly along for the ride. I read an article a few days ago about how when two people are attracted to each other so much of the attraction is based on physical and chemical interactions that we’re totally oblivious to. What we think when we are in love means nothing which is, of course, really not at all surprising to anyone who has been there. The psychological term for all these things we do without really understanding why is the “adaptive unconscious.� In any event, if you haven’t attended any programs previously from Landmark Education, I highly recommend them. Landmark offers a series of group personal development and communications courses, and seminars, and a bunch of other stuff too. What to learn about yourself might surprise you.

To totally show off today, I am posting my first video blog entry. I took my handheld video camera to CTIA on Wednesday and recorded some clips. My first clip is a demo from my friend John Chaffee, President of Splash Data. In this video, John demonstrates his product SplashBlog which lets you instantly publish photos from your camera phone to an online photo blog to share with others. I thought this would be very appropriate for my first video blog. It's a great product, and I will let the video speak for itself. Click here to view video.

How hard was this? Plenty. I attended a presentation last weekend at Webzine 2005 about video blogging which pointed me to the excellent tutorial site http://www.freevlog.org/.

What could possibly go wrong? I had immediate video compatiblity problems between the my PC and SC-X105L camera. I couldn't get either Quicktime Pro or Windows Movie Maker to edit the AVI videos created by the camera. I downloaded numerous codecs, and diagnostic tools. Interestingly, I could view my videos just fine in Windows Media Player 10 but editing them is a different matter. After a lot of messing around (read days), and downloading stuff, I was able to get this done using Ulead Video Studio 9 which also includes a plug-in to make PSP movies in MPEG4 format. The PSP verison of the video is very cool. I didn't get a chance yet to play with all the cool editing and mixing features of Ulead Video Studio 9.

Now, I am the media, and I can broadcast video.

I went to CTIA in San Francisco today to connect with some friends, and see the Windows Mobile Treo 700W. Even though I have a lot of experience with Treos, I have chosen not to write anything about Palm’s move to Windows Mobile on this site. It was interesting to see Bill Gates at the Palm booth, sort of. They had a video of him running from the press conference. What was disappointing to me was that the Treo 700W was not available. The only model at the Palm booth was a non-working model, and there was another non-working model under glass at the Microsoft booth. People told me that it will not be available until 2006. My random photos from the tradeshow floor can be found here to save you the $80 cost of admission.

I started this blog about thirty days ago, and today I received a wake-up, feedback email from a friend of mine. He told me very politely from how reading my new blog it was clear to him that I had lost my mind, was in need of therapy, how arrogant I am, and who was I trying to impress with all this bullshit I post here anyway? He was very sincere, and honestly trying to help me. I totally got what he said. It made me stop and rethink the whole purpose of this blog, and how it is being received.

What drives me or anyone to write a blog and post about their life and thoughts anyway? Blogging is a new, very popular and totally unnecessary, vain, self-aggrandizing public activity, so yes; I am guilty of showing off and trying to impress you the reader. Funny thing is that I have not even uploaded a fraction of the cool stuff and features I want to really show off! I just have not had the time and skills. And maybe only crazy people blog about themselves, so then I must be crazy.

For me this blog is an experiment. Maybe it is therapy too. I am not sure about that part yet. Just reading blogs is one thing, but I don’t know how to learn more about something than by doing it. I have been to two blogging conferences recently. (I didn’t even write about the first one here to not show off....) I will tell you one thing, the first time you meet a blogger at a conference they ask you, “What is your blog?” And then they never read it.

Are there good and bad reasons to blog? Should sane people not blog about themselves? I have friends that blog about TV shows or PDAs for example. I have plans to do a blog like that too someday. And I have a friend who started a blog last week to document her trip through India. I think that is much better than sending out an email to everyone.

So far in 30 days and two conferences, I have learned maybe 5% of what there is to know about blogging. Here are some of the things I learned.

• It takes a lot of time, and energy to do one--way more than you would imagine by just reading one. Maybe I have not even done mine right.
• A blog is a great tool for communication and sharing information. I have gotten a lot of feedback and discussions based on having this blog that I would not have gotten otherwise.
• There can be downsides and consequences to having a public blog and personal website.

Send me your feedback how this blog can be improved, changed, etc.

I don’t have time to write a review of this product, but I attended a talk about Yahoo! APIs on Monday and the speaker featured the Yahoo! Widgets. The widgets add helpful floating tools on your Mac or Windows desktop. Previously, this product was called Konfabulator and sold for $20 before it was acquired. Now they are free which is very nice of Yahoo!. These widgets are part of Yahoo!'s plans to start getting stuff onto your desktop, but that is the subject of another post. There is also a whole gallery of free add-on widgets. I am going to mention them here before I totally forget about them. These widgets are cool, and they look great.