What, You Need Bridge Financing?

That is decidedly NOT what you want to hear 72 hours before your new house is supposed to close. Especially when 48 of those hours are “weekend hours”.

That being said, Peter Majthenyi at Mortgage Intelligence rocks the mortgage world.

He’s got it taken care of. Calm, cool, collected, cucumber. There wasn’t even time for my panic to set in.

You need a mortgage.

You need Peter. 

technorati tags:Mortgage, Bridge Financing, Mortgage Intelligence

More for the Techno Socialite...

TechCrunch has now launched a sister site - Crunch Gear for the Techno Socialites who are desperate to know or to have the latest tek toys.  It’s following in the same footsteps as TeckCrunch, and the site looks outstanding!

CrunchGear

Hello, and welcome to the latest CrunchNetwork blog, CrunchGear.com, a daily journal of all things gadget-tastic. Our goal is to take a long, hard look at the daily gadget grind and separate the wheat - the gear we will actually buy and will actually reach our shores - from the chaff. Every day we hope to bring a digest of the hottest tech stories and intelligent and informed commentary on the industry as a whole.

Technorati Tags: Techno Socialite, TechCrunch, CrunchGear

I am a Techno Socialite

Oh my.
I NEED one. :-)
Well, perhaps I just like the idea of being a Techno Socialite. It seems so Lah-di-dah.

Communications Infrastructure > Network Devices > Sony WiFi device targets techno-socialites

Sony WiFi device targets techno-socialitesBy: Edward N. AlbroPC World.com (U.S.) (10 Aug 2006)

When launched next month, Sony Milo (“my life online”) will be one of the most versatile WiFi devices out there. You can IM with a mylo, you can make VOIP phone calls using Skype, and you can check your email.If nothing else, you have to give Sony credit for creative thinking with their latest product announcement. The mylo device they’re talking up today is unlike any other I’ve seen.In form, it’s a little like a Sidekick, with a 2.4-inch screen that slides up to reveal a full QWERTY thumb keyboard.

But unlike a Sidekick, it doesn’t connect to a wireless phone network. Instead the mylo depends on Wi-Fi networks for its connectivity.Sony says the mylo (the name stands for “my life online”) is designed for a life form they call the “techno socialite” and it’s largely about communicating, presumably with other techno socialites. You can IM with a mylo (as long as you use Yahoo, Skype or Google’s chat services), you can make VOIP phone calls using Skype and you can check your email (if you have a web inbox with Google or Yahoo).It’s also got a web browser (Opera’s mobile browser), it plays MP3s and videos, shows photos and you can edit simple text files. You have only 1GB of onboard Flash memory. To store more songs or other files, you’ll need to use Sony’s memory sticks.

Technorati Tags: Sony Milo, Techno Socialite

Crikes, I'm Old

If the world wide web is 15 year old, man, I'm OLD.
Where were you in 1991?
It's a wee bit painful to admit that i was in 2nd year university, and was likely squirelled away in the university library, figuring out the computers, and how email worked, how news groups worked, and of course, how Lynx worked, so I could use Gopher, and Archie and Veronica to tunnel through the web and find bits of information to use in essays on 3rd world politics.

And then there was the phase of meeting boys via email. That was a hoot.
And in 1993, you could actually take a distance ed course on line, and that sealed the deal for me.  The internet was in my blood. ;-)
In 1994, I was able to turn my interest into a paying job.  Paying job translates into "tech support gig for an ISP. And then, 1995 - Netcom. Tech support becomes sexy.  Funny, I still remember when windows 95 came out, and changed the internet forever.

Yup, I'm old.


27B Stroke 6

For those of you who don't remember, the Web was announced to the world on August 6, 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. You were a subscriber, weren't you?

Technorati Tags: WWW is 15, Netcom, Lynx, Goperh, Archie, Veronica, Sentex

No Wonder My Lap Feels Like It's on Fire

Dell Battery Return Program

Dear Dell Customer,In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Dell is voluntarily recalling and offering free replacements for certain notebook batteries that were sold for use with some models of Dell Latitude TM, Dell Precision TM and Dell Inspiron TM notebook computers. It is possible for these batteries to overheat, which could pose a risk of fire.Potentially affected batteries were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers or separately as secondary batteries: * Latitude D410, D505, D510, D600, D610, D800, D810 * Inspiron 510M, 600M, 6000, 8600, 9200, 9300, XPS Gen 2 * Precision M20, M70

Wow - Oak Ridges

Oak Ridges is a suburban community in northern Richmond Hill, in Ontario, Canada, about 42 km north of Toronto. It has a population of approximately 12,000. The community developed about Lake Wilcox, the largest lake in the area, and has continued to expand since its amalgamation with Richmond Hill. In the 1990s, Oak Ridges experienced tremendous growth, which spurred environmental action by numerous organizations.

technorati tags:Oak Ridges

So - what's a Blog?

A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order.Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although many focus on photograph (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting).

Blog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've also been asked, by a few zillion folks what a blog really is, and where it came from.  Doing a quick wilipedia search came up with the excerpt above.  I am starting to see that Wilikedia is even better than Newton's Telecom Dictionary (aka my personal bible)

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999.^[2][3][4] This was quickly adopted as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog").

So - no one has a website any more, everyone has a blog... it's just the web 2.0 version of a website.  No more static yickiness, easy to edit, easy to change, jusdt easy.  Corporations have web sites (still), people have blogs. Blogs are interactive with their visitors, and can create a sense of community.  Websites are ofen not terribly interactive, and don't provide many options for visitors to be involved in the site.  Websites are notorious for having stale information. At some point, the entire web will be live and interactive. Soon.

technorati tags:what is a blog, weblog

About RSS Readers

An aggregator or news aggregator is client software that uses a web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites.

Aggregator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One of the tasks i've been given is to differentiate between Blogs and RSS readers.  To create something for the average joe to twig on easily. RSS readers really just to the dirty work for you, going out, checking your favourite sites to see if there are any new articles, and then organizes your news, making it easy and quick to read and scan.  I've run through a few different readers, part of me uses Google's Custom Page reader, and the other part of me uses NetVibes, which offers some neat widgets that can also help you waste time ;-)

Readers can either be web based, or actual clients that you can download.  I'm all for the web based ones, as I am usually working off 3 computers at a time, and it's simply handly to have it available, wherever I am.

Most of the readers are free, but I've also come across some that are subscription based, especially those for mobile devices.  There are a few for the Blackberry, and some that aren't tied to specific devices.  Mark Evans recommends Virtual Reach for mobiule devices, and you get a 7 day free trial ;-)

Pulling from Wikipedia:

Aggregators, or RSS Readers, reduce the time and effort needed to regularly checkwebsites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personalnewspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to checkfor new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update.The content is sometimes described as being "pulled" to the subscriber,as opposed to "pushed" with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some "pushed" information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.

Aggregator features are being built into portal sites such as My Yahoo! and Google; modern web browsers; e-mail programs like Mozilla Thunderbird; Apple's iTunes, which serves as a podcast aggregator and other applications. Devices such as mobile phones or Tivo video recorders (already aggregating television programs) may incorporate XML aggregators.

The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in asingle browser display or desktop application. Such applications arealso referred to as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators or news readers.

The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom.

technorati tags:RSS Readers, Google RSS, Virtual Reach, aggregator

Stats....

101 Visitors (past 24 hours)

341 Visitors (past week)

909 Visitors (past month)

98 Subscribers (jules dot ca)

64 Subscribers (tech whisperer)

63 Subscribers (the curious tale of the girl and the telco)

2/10Google PageRank

Curious. Don't you wish you knew who the subscribers were?

:-)

technorati tags:stats, subscribers, Google Page Rank

A Billion Blogs....

Om Malik discusses the validitity of the claim that there are 50 million blogs in the *blogosphere*…. and the merits of how many of them are actually active…. I tend to be cynical. From experience.
It’s too bad there isn’t a way to tell how many active vs created blogs there are.  In the past 5 years, I have a feeling i’ve contributed to the explosion of blogs.  You see, I’m a habitual blog creator. It’s a bit of an addiction with me.  I’ve got 4 blogs with Live journal, 3 with blogger, 3 with wordpress, one silly soulcast, and those are just the ones I remember!! Not to mention the ones that are active; jules.ca, the curious tale of the girl and the telco, and tech whisperer. And just wait till floobergeist.com gets out of the gate!


GigaOM : » How big is the Blogosphere really?

There might have been 50 million blogs that have ever been created but there aren’t 50 million blogs in active use.

Technorati Tags: Om Malik, blogosphere, floobergeist

People Are Annoying

The wiz and I were out and about over the weekend, looking for odds and ends for the next, and griping in a good humoured sort of way about the general stupidity of people. Not just annoying people, but real *dyed in the wool* stupid people. We couldn’t figure out the insanity of folks walking on the road, and not on the sidewalk, the people who have absolutely zero consideration for the rest of the world.

• The people in the busy restaurant who though it was OK that their terrorist children run wild among the tables
• the lady in front of us at the cash register with the daughter who had to be all of 11, with a belly top, and a matching belly RING
• people blocking the aisles in the grocery store
• people stopping in the middle of the mall sidewalk to discuss where to go next
• people being generally slow in making decisions

I have such a LOW tolerance for annoying people, as does the wiz, and the article below, from pointlesswasteoftime.com, makes an interesting arguement about why we have such a low tolerance for idiots - because we now have the ability to weed the majority of them out of our lives, when we *do* encounter them, it’s unbearable. Read - and try and disagree ;-)

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable

Not enough annoying strangers in our lives.That’s not sarcasm. Annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we’re able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we’re able to handle it.

Technorati Tags: idiots, stupidity, pointlesswasteoftime.com

Seth Godin answers a Good Question....

Over the vacation time, I struggled with the idea of audience, and content for conversations.  The wiz and I have a marvelous  time watching Canadian news programs, and then developing interesting rants on them. The strange part is, despite how outstanding we may think the conversation/arguement is, it none-the-less seems to have an impact on: RSS Subscribers, and traffic.  Both seem to decline, post publishing, and it seems to take a few days for normalcy to return.

I brought that concern up with a few folks during vacation week; folks who happen to stop in here, and they were shocked that i would consider being influenced by traffic patterns etc, when it came to writing.  They provided some outstanding feedback (thank you 6 mile folks), and for that, i'm not going to be terribly concerned about what happens behind the scenes.

Guy Kawasaki asks Seth Godin the same question... about writing. Seth has a good answer.

Signum sine tinnitu--by Guy Kawasaki

Question: Why don’t you check your Technorati ranking?

Answer: Because the data won’t change my actions. Getting data for no good reason just drives you crazy. The secret is to get very flexible in the face of data you care about—changing your x every time you see y changes—and incredibly inflexible in the face of data you don’t care about.The reason I write is to have an impact. I measure that impact in the email I get and the way it impacts people’s actions. Even if 100 people a day read my blog, I’d write the same stuff.

Technorati Tags: Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Blogging By the Rules

IMS Insider Info

I continue to follow the ramblings of the global IMS conversation, and the IMS Insider does an outstanding job of documenting, conversing and "talking out loud" about the good, the bad, the curious and the troublesome questions of IMS.  In fact, they are thinking about the same things I think about, when thinking about IMS.

• How in the world are carriers going to get interoperability?
• Is there a compelling event to pull customers to IMS services, especially when the majority of the services being considered are already available for free?
• What happens to local number portability? DO we all just end up getting an IP V.6 address?
• What happens when Net Neutrality and IMS collide?

Read on, it's a good conversation...

IMS Insider

MS strategies today fail to justify how value-add is being created from the IMS infrastructure when people can already talk on Skype for free -- and most of the QoS problems on Skype are really either internal to the PC (e.g. contention for CPU or network access) or local to the customer premises (first-hop to WiFi access point).- Many of the IMS functions when decomposed are replicated for free on today's Internet (e.g. basic dyndns.org dynamic DNS routing -- eg. I can make a SIP call that will reach me wherever I am -- the "home agent" function is very cheap/free).

Technorati Tags: IMS Insider, IMS, Net Neutrality

Technorati Tags: IMS Insider, IMS, Net Neutrality

The Red Table

redtable
Originally uploaded by julebule.

I need this table.
It completes me.
It completes the kitchen.
The problem is that it can only be ordered on-line, from Pottery Barn. And Pottery Barn doesn’t deliver to Canada.
I need help! Somehow I have to get it shipped somewhere. Somewhere where I can get it!!

Any Ideas?  Even if you know someone who knows someone who works at a pottery barn in the GTA, that could help!!!!

My RSS Wrinkles

… I’m starting to see a bit of a trend, with bloggers adding their RSS stats to their sites, quoting how many RSS subscribers they have.
I’m torn, and a little curious, as the sites who have these little “status symbols”, seem to be VERY popular sites, and the folks who read them KNOW that they are popular, and the people who read them likely have them as RSS feeds in their readers.
So, if you are popular, and you know you are popular, and the rest of the thinking world knows you are popular, what is the value of having a little stat-o-meter illustrating your popularity?

Hrm.
I’d rather see a feature on RSS platforms that allow me to see WHO is subscribing to my site. I know, not terribly confidential, and not terribly security conscious, but still…. ;-)  That sort of info would be valuable, as opposed to nameless, faceless subscriber information.

Technorati Tags: RSS Stats, Popularity

Tilting at Beach Stones

IMG_8374
Originally uploaded by julebule.

I am loving the clarity of the stones.
Like an Ikea Picture, but different

Gunn Point at Sunset

IMG_8404
Originally uploaded by julebule.

Taken from the deck at Inverhuron. Looking NorthWest across the Bay of Inverhuron. If there were no trees, you would be able to see the Bruce Nuclear Power Development.
Thank God for trees.

Tech and the Automotive Industry...

The wiz and I are at the very beginning o f deciding on what our next vehicle will be.  The Xterra we have is coming to the end of it's lease, and it's always exciting (and a wee bit frustrating) to fina a new vehicle.  We started early this time, last time it took us too long to decide and find something that was worthy.  ;-)

Leasebusters is our standard tool for picking up a lease-take-over, but we saw advertising on the side of an apartment building on the DVP for Releaseme.ca
Both sites are interesting, releaseme.ca is fairly new, and leasebusters has been around for a few years now.

We have been doing some comparison reviews, especially with gas costing what it does now, and it's curious that some automotive sites allow for competitive manufacturers to be included in their comparisons (Mazda and Nissan), and some manufacturers don't allow for this comparison feature (Ford).

If you know of any other Canadian leasing websites, i'd be thrilled if you shared.


Technorati Tags: Automotive Leasing, Leasebusters.com, Releaseme.ca

Amidst a Sea of Cardboard...

Yes, the packing is well begun, so well begun that the place is resembling a labarynth in a recycler's night mare. It's a good thing we've only got a week more to go, else we would likely put the dog in a box and be done with her.
Last night we took apart the crate designs beds for the chickadees, and what did we find: cookies, rings, and the dog's dentabone under the mattress. I can't begin to try and explain.
Considering the limited square footage of the tower, it's amazing that we've managed to sack away over 60 boxes of belongings. I'm not even going to go into details of the garbage we've parted with ;-)
Ok - I will - last night we threw away 3 keyboards, 2 mice and 21 metal clothes hangers. There.



Technorati Tags: Moving, boxes, cardboard

Have Berry, Will Travel

Curious, over the vacation I was desperately trying to get extra work bits resolved.  I found myself on Hwy 89, between Alliston and Walkerton.  I managed to tether my berry to my laptop, dial into the internet, and VPN into a Netmeeting. Now, how bizarre is that? The only downfall of the whole solution, I couldn't make a voice call with the berry, and maintain the VPN tunnel, but internet connectivity was just fine, thanks.

;-)


Technorati Tags: Blackberry Internet Tether