Rand Wacker

Its been several months since I and a good number of friends have started blogging somewhat regularly, and it seems to have stuck with an overwhelming number of people.

I do have this one friend, Erick, who thinks its ridiculous to read a close friend’s blogs. “If I want to see how he’s doing, I’ll call him on the phone.”

I have to disagree with him, for many reasons. The stuff that I get out of (most) friend’s blogs are more like updates and commentary on things which my friends find important or interesting. I’ve got a lot of friends and I don’t get to see them often enough over beers to hear what they thought about random news event X or strange online meme Y. Besides, I’m strong-willed enough that too often I’ll drown out their opinions too early in a conversation. Yeah, it’s gonna be one of my New Years Resolutions.

So it’s nice to learn little things about your friends by subscribing to their feeds. For example:

• shac is addicted to RockStar
• payam just had a baby (yeah, major event, but we’re only two-degree friends, and it’s still nice to know)
• chucky draws a lot (and just re-did his CSS)
• aaron is a liberal wedge of spite (and as good for news articles as Tom Tomorrow)
• lila…lila can’t be summarized very quickly…
• brain is obsessed with really inane trivia
• wes needs to learn to appreciate his lessons more
• aspo has a kitten
• dpassage is quiet
• sameer is obsessed with fish ponds
• and finally, cristine watches Newlyweds on MTV

I should post some personal stories over the next week. We’ll see if I have time to do it.

ESPN.com: SPORTS NATION - SportsNation Trivia

ZDNet UK - News - Phones 4U bans staff from email

Caudwell said in a statement: “I saw that email was insidiously invading Phones 4U so I banned it immediately. Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of being constrained by email proliferation… Phones 4U staff have been told to get off the keyboards, get face-to-face or on to the phone to colleagues. The quality and efficiency of communication have been increased tremendously in one fell swoop; things are getting done, people aren’t tied to their PCs.”

I’m speechless. I was just thinking the other day that I can’t imagine how slowly companies must have operated back in the days of voicemail and “memos”. The pervasive power of email to increase communication and speed resolutions is a major part of why I think we do things so much faster these days (although, I would admit, not always better).

And my feelings aren’t just because I work at an email company, I’ve used email in a massive way ever since my first job in college, and at every job since.

Is it just me, or does everyone else think this guy sounds like a crackpot? (Even though he is listed as the 26th richest man in the world)

Before	One Week Later

I’m pretty impressed. After only one week — and most of a tube of Neosporin and most of a box of Band-Aids — my palm is pretty much back to normal.

Yes, and really, I just wanted to put the gruesome before picture up again. =P

Yes, the Treo 600 is coming out at the end of the year, and yes it looks wicked cool. But I get the feeling that no matter how rugged it is, I’m not going to feel comfortable carrying around a $500 phone in my pocket when I drop my current one on the floor at least a couple times a week.

The main things I’m looking for in a phone are: Bluetooth (so I can use as a modem for my PowerBook and my Palm), good support for text messaging (including sending short messages to an email address), and possibly a built-in camera (just because). Two phones which have been intriguing to me lately (besides the basically solid T68i) are the Nokia 3650 (funky buttons though) and the 6800 (damn, no Bluetooth).

Gizmodo has things for me to look forward to:

The Nokia 6850 will have the same bad-ass fold-out keyboard of the 6800, with integrated Bluetooth and a camera.

The 3660 looks pretty sweet as well…ah, never mind, the 6850 is where it’s at.

At the same time, there are some great looking accessories coming out for the Palm Tungstens.

brain has a quick post about the MT Netflix plugin, which sounded like a really good idea when I first started reading it. I agree though, it sounds like a hack, and not something I would want to deploy.

I’ve had lots of conversations with friends lately about some things Netflix could do which would be really cool and add a bit of a community-oriented aspect. While I like getting recommendations based on the rankings of the ginormous user population out there, I would love to be able to see recommendations from a specific set of people I know that I trust the opinion of. Also, I don’t think their ranking algorithm is anywhere near as good as Amazon’s.

Specifically, I would like the ability to have friends on Netflix click a button and broadcast the title of a movie they really enjoyed to me. Perhaps this could show up in an independent queue of suggestions which I could approve or reject and have them added to my rental queue. Also, I would like the ability to specifically open up my rental history and rankings to my friends, so that they could see what I liked and then they could pick and choose from amongst those movies.

The promise of an MT Netflix plugin is compelling as well, but until Netflix exposes a reasonable web service at getting at that information, it’s not going to happen. But wow, think of what you could do with a Netflix web service? GUI clients to manage and re-arrange your Queue. Automatic tools to re-order your queue if you’ve got multiple people in the house using the account, etc, etc, etc. Of course, the most creative ideas in web services usually come about some time after people publish them and some crazy on the Internet comes up with a brilliant idea which we never would have thought of.

Netflix, go for it!

Hot Chick of the Day Feed (RSS)

No, its the other Rands…

All my blog-enabled friends need to read this. (And from what I can tell, all my friends who read this blog have blogs of their own).

As usual, it’s funny as hell and full of wisdom (or something like it).

Someone forwarded to me (I have no idea from where) this hilarious video that’s another (sort of) spoof of the Mac Switch ads. There’s no religion here, it’s just funny as hell:

• Quicktime
• Windows Media 9

isometric screenshots