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I’ve recently switched over to their new format, so we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’ll start working on some new reviews of the coolest 2.0 websites and gadgetry available.

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First, I’ve hooked up with Jay of RocknHouston to get the scoop on all the great bands that are playing the Houston area – especially the ones he thinks will make for interesting photos. In the past, he’s turned me on to the music of some of my favorite local bands, like Mercury Down, Sound Breaking Ground, Stalking Chloe, Damascus (rip), Savage Evolution, and too many more to name. He’s batting a thousand – he tipped me off to Assylim playing at FBI this weekend. (Cover band 4Play opened for them.) Both bands were great, and we had a great time! Oh, and I got some good pics.

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Invariably, I discover a mistake immediately after publishing the post – and re-publishing the entire blog – that needs to be corrected. But Blogger says it can’t find any previous posts. Not a one. Gone. Into the ether. Vanished. However, my errors have managed to hang in there and are out on the Internet for all the world to see, in perpetuity.

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Hi Beau. I¹m leaving John¹s comments in cause he¹s a nice guy and I know
this was difficult for him to send on through. I¹m also blind copying a
whole list of folks who will most likely copy a whole other list of folks
until maybe this spreads like a good email should and end up on 100,000
websites to show the world what a collective bunch of tasteless morons you
all are.

Dime¹s birthday is this coming Sunday and your timing couldn¹t be worse. Not
that there is a good time. In fact, in honor of his birthday, I think I¹ll
send this around to a few of our favorite music websites who will most
likely print the whole damn thing word for word, including your phone number
and email. For good measure, I¹m going to throw in the top 50 major daily
music and some of the top TV writers in the country and why not, the
weeklies as well.

I realize there is nothing anyone can do to stop E! from producing garbage
like this below, as you¹ve built your audience on the backs of other
people¹s private lives, creating some type of warped reality out of your
garbage, which is merely excuses for programming on the cheap and at the
expense of others.

I would like to request that you please read this out out loud to all the
creative geniuses in the programming department that came up with this idea.

…

We have received your request to license footage on Dimebag Darrell Abbott
for your upcoming production of, “25 Most Chilling Hollywood Murders.”

While we realize the average E! audience most likely has the IQ of an
umbrella, they collectively are a smarter bunch than the lot of you. Your
programming creativity falls somewhere to the bottom of the middle at best,
and that¹s saying a lot.

I ask that you all please take a moment from your busy days and close your
eyes. Live out the fantasy of playing your favorite instrument onstage.
Your closest friends in the world surround you, either in the band or in
your crew. From one side of the stage, a man approaches. Thinking he¹s a
security guy or a drunk fan who¹s just a bit out a line, you continue to
perform. Two seconds later, he lifts his arms, aims a rifle at your brother,
your best friend, your buddy and blows his brains out, not three feet from
where you are. In the nanosecond it takes you to comprehend the magnitude of
what just happened, he does it again …and again …and again …and again
…and again …and again before taking aim and murdering additional members
of your extended family as well as fans that have come to see you play. Two
of your crew are shot but survive, but of course, will never be the same
gain.

Now imagine it¹s a few years later and you turn on the TV set. Just in case
you may be having at least a five minute respite from that scene that plays
over and over in your head, just in case …..you flip through the channels
and there it is. Again. Only with some two bit actor who thinks this is his
big Hollywood break.

And please, if you don¹t like that scenario, make believe it¹s your child
who got his brains splattered all over a stage in Ohio. And then you turn on
E! Oh, the magic of television!

In case none of this appears clear enough and you need a definitive answer
to your request…no. The answer if no, and on behalf of everyone that was
there that night and everyone that misses him every day, you can take that
no and shove it up your collective asses.

And, for your second request, yes, you can quote me on that.

Sincerely,
Jane Hoffman

Well said, Jane!

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Today was the all-you-can-eat technology buffet for me, in between trying to find good diet and recipe software for my MDA, and getting my portfolio site on the web. (Still looking for THE job. I know it’s out there. It took me 26 years to find the perfect husband. I guess the job can’t be far away now.)

Speaking of diet software, I did start my “diet” today. As of this writing, I have had nearly 72 ozs. of water today, and am amazed at how clear-headed simply being hydrated makes you. However, I didn’t get to exercise today. I would like to log all of this, but I still haven’t found the right combination of software and/or Internet sites. (By the way, Pocket Cook didn’t work at all on Windows Mobile 5, and I’m having a devil of a time getting Big Oven to synchronize with my MDA.

Luckily, and just in time for my lifestyle change, a new exercise & diet site was launched called Traineo. The interface and design are fantastic and full of Ajaxy goodness. In fact, this might be one of the best designed sites I’ve come across. Although their feature set isn’t all that complex, the site provides a simple graphing function to track weight loss and caloric intake. What excites me about this site, as simple as it is, is that users can invite up to four people to be “motivators.” Motivators can be anyone you choose or you can browse Traineo members that have signed up to be motivators.Although other weight-loss sites like PeerTrainer focus on accountability, to my knowledge no one has combined it with weight-loss tracking features. If Traineo adds just a few more features, such as a food database, this site will be a contender. (My profile can be viewed here.)

Tags: Flock, browser, Traineo, Peer Trainer

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And moving right along to the technology portion of today’s post, I’ve been playing with the newest version of Flock, a browser based on Firefox but more focused on the social aspects of the web. Drag-and-drop integration with Flickr, blogging tools, a built-in newsreader, a spell checker, and favorites that are simultaneously saved to your favorite social bookmarking site, are just some of the features today’s 2.0 consumer will love. Since the browser is based on the same code as Firefox, many of the extensions developed for that browser work with this browser, too. (They finally added support for the AI Roboform extension, an extension that I can’t live without.)

My favorite feature would have to be the integration with Flickr, though. On install, a wizard walks you through adding your Flickr, Photobucket, and blogging accounts. Clicking on the photo button in the tool bar will then bring up a “topbar” – a designated strip at the top of the page – that displays a horizontally-scrollable banner of your photos. Leaving photos in comments (like MySpace) is made much easier by the drag-and-drop interface. Instead of having to visit Flickr, find your photo, choose the size, and select, copy, and paste the code snippet into the comment, you can now just drag the photo into the comment box and the code is populated for you. How cool is that? There’s also an upload option in the Flickr topbar with all the features the native Flickr tools have, plus a very neat tagging interface.

The blogging tools are pretty cool, too. Although I use the Performancing Firefox plugin (it works in Flock, too), I find that Flock’s blogging tool gives it a good run for its money. It has the standard rich-text formatting options that Performancing has, as well as a source code view, Technorati tags that are much easier to add than anything else I’ve used, and a spell checker (although the Performancing extension now has one by proxy thanks to one integrated in the Flock browser.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I use the Wiz RSS reader for my news feeds. Flock includes a news reader in the browser, and I find that I prefer the Flock one. For one, the interface is cleaner and better organized, but I like that “save” and “\blog” links are provided below each post. Some posts also feature “email this” and “save to Deli.cio.us” links. (I’m assuming that if one chose Shadows as their online bookmarking application, it would say “save to Shadows.”)

Speaking of the bookmarking feature, it’s especially convenient to save to your social bookmarking site of choice. By simply clicking the favorite icon and holding, a dialog will pop up that allows you to enter a description, tags, and categories. Clicking OK will save it in whatever service you chose in setup. Clicking on the Favorites menu displays your most recent entries at your social bookmarking site.

All in all, this might be the perfect browser. I suggest you flock right on over to their site and check it out for yourselves!

Technorati tags:browser, Flock, web, web 2.0, 2.0, Firefox, Internet

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Unfortunately, the very thing that makes this site so great might also be its downfall. Lately, some JB users have taken to flaming each other, which in itself is bad enough, but for those of us signed up for notifications, it can really clog up the inbox with ugliness. (I discontinued notices today, which is a shame because I like to find out about new places.)

I’ve also noticed a real increase in posts that don’t seem to about reviewing businesses or products at all, but rather a “what do you think about this (insert topic du jour)”, or even worse “please add this person to your friend list”. Ironically enough, people with a “Trust Score” of 8 or over are invited to apply for the “City Editor” designation, however, I don’t think it actually involves editing. That’s a shame, because some editing clearly needs to be happening here.

The “City Editor”, or CE, designation is also causing me some angst. I’ve been a member of JB since May of this year, I believe. I’ve written 37 posts since then, 9 of them “official” reviews. I’ve had my eye on attaining the CE, but I’ve been focusing on quality versus quantity. However, it seems that JB is more interested in the opposite. Consider the user that had been a JBer for one week (!) but made City Editor. According to JB’s help pages, a user has to have a Trust Score of 8 before applying for the CE program. Trust Scores are calculated “by looking at more than a dozen factors, including:

• How many reviews and comments each member has written at Judy’s Book
• How many questions each member has asked at Judy’s Book
• How well-respected the member is in the community, as indicated by their total readership and the length of their membership at Judy’s Book”

In this case, the user estimates her post count for that week as being somewhere in the neighborhood of 250. (Can you get carpal tunnel in a week?) I’m not sure what algorithm JB is using, but I’m gonna take an educated guess here that post count is given much more weight than other factors. This might explain why there are so many nonsense posts popping up.

After receiving an automatic notice the other from a JB user that looked to have been copied directly from a chain letter, I decided to check out the competition. So far, the only other reviews site I’ve turned up is Yelp. I haven’t had too much experience with it yet, but my initial findings are:

• Judy’s Book has a nicer interface
• Yelp has a cool mapping feature that Judy’s Book doesn’t
• The quality of the Yelp reviews are better
• Yelp has a mobile site so that reviews can be accessed even away from a computer. (And you know how happy that makes me now that I have a shiny new MDA.)

I think that JB can overcome these issues if they decide to incorporate some editorial standards. If not, I’ll just Yelp!

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Although genebase bionet builder isn’t nearly as feature-laden as Amiglia, what few features they do have work, and work consistently. I’ve been a member there since mid-May, when I found out about them through their partnership with the DNA Ancestry Project. (From what I gather, the DNA Ancestry Project is similar to The Genographic Project run by National Geographic and IBM.) Genebase is pretty bare bones. There’s no GEDCOM import feature so each member of your family tree has to be entered by hand. For me, this is a deal killer since I’ve managed to trace my paternal line back to the 1500s, as well as the maternal and paternal lines of my husband’s family. As you can imagine, that adds up to a lot of people, especially when you factor in that until recently, families were typically pretty large. (My husband’s grandfather was one of 13; his grandmother, one of 11!) There is an interesting interactive photo album, but I haven’t given that a try yet. (I already have Flickr, although it would be really cool if they’d integrate with them.) Genebase is integrated with DNA Ancestry Project, though, and allows one to order kits and view results from within the Genebase app. One of the things that I find really aggravating, though, is that even though I’m the one that entered the stinking family tree, it won’t allow me to add a picture for each person. I have to invite them to join, and then they can do it. Never mind that I’m pretty much the only member of my maternal family that even knows how to turn on the computer, much less upload a photo. Genebase is still in beta, so I hope they’ll address this in a future release.

For now, I’ll stick with GenCircles.com, the companion website to my favorite genealogy software, Family Tree Legends. It’s (FTL) not integrated with Flickr (yet) but that’s pretty much the only feature it’s missing. (FTL does have a great scrapbook feature, though, for adding images, scans, multimedia, and music files. It’s supposed to let one publish to a Family Tree Legends homepage, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.) It does, however, have comprehensive and attractive reports, is easy to use, a well-designed interface, and close integration with the Internet, including a SmartMatch feature that lets users that share relatives to merge their information. This collaborative feature has helped me more than once to advance my genealogical research.

I could use a SmartMatch about right now, too. I’m stuck – no, I’m sorry – ancestrally challenged – on my maternal grandmother’s line. Have been for five years. Sigh. Oh well, back to chasing my own tale.

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Whenever I’m feeling down for any reason, I haul out the photos I haven’t processed, and choose one to play with. This is basically the adult equivalent of a coloring book. Today, I chose this photo of Harris (guitarist for Already Gone, an Eagles tribute band here in Houston.) It’s just an outtake from one of their practices, but I really like the composition. So there you have it – my doodle of the day. (Harris – you’ve been doodled. PV is gonna be hot with me. lol)

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