Amazon’s OLPC Program - Just in time to get your Holiday Geek-on

Just in time for the holidays, Amazon has launched their OLPC Program today enabling the world to get an XO if they Give One.These are actually pretty sweet little lappys if you are in the mood to shell out $400 bucks to get your $200 laptop. I've seen a couple in action, and they seem to work pretty well, and they are small and very portable.

For the longest time I thought getting one of these would be cool, but with the influx of inexpensive 8" and 9" laptops lately, it hardly makes sense if you take away the donating factor. But since the XO is being switched to accommodate Windows XP, I would rather wait, or just get something else and donate money to funds directly. You can even get a little Acer Aspire One at Walmart, Staples and of course Amazon for as little as $395.00, not to mention all of the other little guys out the from ASUS and Sony. Although the Sony lappys are insanely expensive.

I still think about getting an OLPC see though whenever I see ads for programs and articles for it. It would be a fun little gadget to have, just because of what it is.

How to fix your ailing Sony DVD player

The wife and I went to play a rented DVD the other night, and if you have rented movies lately you probably can understand why I hate doing this. The discs are just about always scratched up by some ignorant sod buster with pugil sticks for hands. Well, luckily this one was not, yet my Sony DVD player kept saying it was dirty. WTF? After a bit of fumbling around I found it to play just fine in my other Sony player in the kids toy room, so I decided to do a bit of sleuthing. Since this wasn't the first time I had run into this I was looking at two options really; either my DVD player is dirty and needs to be cleaned, or it damaged and in need of a good fixing - most likely Office Space style. Luckily, option 3 presented it self.

The offending error is C 13:00 error, which in some cases can be cleared up by calibrating the player back to Single Layer (SL) and Dual Layer (DL) discs through the diagnostics menu. What menu you say? Well, I'll show you.

From all that I have read, it is best to calibrate both disc types starting with a single layer disc first. You can identify disc type by color since  Dual layer DVD's have a gold tint to the data side and single layer DVD's have a silver tint. The other way is if you have any burned discs from your computer, I did and I just used one of those as the single layer disc.

Take the disc out, turn the DVD player Off to standby mode using the remote. Then press the following 3 buttons Title, Clear, then Power within a second of each other. This will open the diagnostics menu:

Test Mode Menu

0. System Diagnosis
1. Drive Auto Adjustment(Calibration)
2. Drive Manual Operation
3. Mecha Aging
4. Emergency History (has total hours of playtime)
5. Version Information
6. Video Level Adjustment

To perform the disc calibration press option 1 on the Test Mode Menu to enter the Drive Auto Adjustment menu.

Drive Auto Adjustment

0. All
1. DVD-SL
2. CD
3. DVD-DL
4. SACD

Exit: RETURN

From here selection option 1 to calibrate the single layer disc first. The drive bay will open, so insert the disc and proceed. Once it has completed the player spits the disc out and you can proceed to option 3 for the same series of steps. When everything is completed, just hit the power button and go from there.

Viola!

This worked like a champ for me, so hopefully I will get another 7 years out of my DVD player. I'm beginning to feel a bit like an AV tech since I have fixed my own TV too. Now if only I could find some BC's with tape on them….

Change has come to America

Having served in the Marines, I have always been proud to be an American. Always feeling very strongly about the values that started this nation, even if they sometimes appear to not be part of the more current administrations agenda. Today, that pride is heightened by the almost overwhelming perception that things will change; things will get better; there can be hope.

Over the last 8 years I have felt none of this really, President Bush has seen to that by beating the American I love into an empty hulk of what it once was. At the start of the running, I had every intention to not vote. I figured it wouldn't have a made a damn bit of difference. The politicians don't care, they enjoy being rich and in-power caring little about their constituents. I don't feel that way any more.

Congratulations belong with all Americans for our decision yesterday.

I find it ironic that I agree with John McCain more in defeat, than I have in five years:

"A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time," McCain told the upbeat crowd at the Arizona Biltmore in central Phoenix. "There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth."

Amazing run-up to election day

I have to say that so far the 2008 Presidential Election has seen the most activity running up to election day that I can remember. I have received emails urging me to vote from Lance Armstrong, Trent Reznor, & Babies R Us just to name a few of the ones that stood out. I have received a metric ton from Al Gore, PAforChange, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, blah blah blah. Not to mention the overwhelming number of phone calls I have received from various celebrities, officials and campaign lackeys all trying to get me to vote.

This is change I can believe in. It's encouraging to see so many individuals companies and organizations getting behind advocating people to get off their couches, out of the office, and off their arse to get out and make a difference and cast a vote. Along with countless others I firmly believe that election day should be a national holiday, work is canceled and municipalities and organizations organize voting parties to help people get more caught up in it. It's far too easy to get stuck into the mindset that it doesn't matter, that the rich white oligarchs in Washington couldn't give two squirts about the people who pay to keep them in office.

I'm casting my vote tomorrow, and so should you. Don't vote; don't b!tch!

If you don't know where to go to vote; find your election hall with Google.

Corporate email lists - Forgetting how to communicate

If you own or run an online business you probably understand, if only on a basic level, how important it is to communicate with your current and potential customer base. If you don't, you really need to spend some time boning up on your basic eMarketing principals.

What a lot of companies seem to forget though, is how to communicate effectively with people who have signed up to an email list. Every week I get hundreds of emails, a lot of which are from some company wanting me to buy from them. While most of these are direct sales, a few of the good ones are indirect sales, and the really good ones are inserting their product/s into my lifestyle to make the experience and products relative to my day-to-day existence. Almost all of them, however, have one thing in common; they fail to communicate with me effectively. What do I mean? Quite often I receive an email with no text. None. Just a big fat empty page with an opt out and a link to a privacy policy. Why? Because I have images turned off by default, so I have to specifically request to see the images. One could argue that this is my fault, but it isn't, and I'll tell you why.

The sender has no idea how I will be viewing the email so they assume that I will happily download and digest the images, being bathed in their commercial propaganda. So what if I am on a mobile device with limited connectivity? What if (God forbid) I am only on dial-up? Why should I be forced to have to wait and view the images? Most the time they aren't even all that compelling, so by not considering this detail, they get the door slammed in their face.

This can happen for a lot of reasons. People tend to get too caught up in the new catch phrases. I mean, I think if I hear another word about making content relevant I am gonna hurl. Of course it has to be relevant to the recipient, otherwise it wouldn't be much different than SPAM (not Spam). It could be through lack of experience, the use of a poorly developed email tool, or simply because they are too concerned with getting something out the door that what si going out the door becomes secondary to actually hitting the send button.

The real kicker here is that it's pretty simple to create an email that has been designed and coded to accommodate both viewing options, by adding some inline styles to the text, and cutting out the headlines and essential message copy to be placed as actual text, not images. Rather than take the extra time on the front-end, they are losing customers before they even get to their site. The same rules and standards apply to email development as to website development, and it's pretty easy to code an email.

• don't use ID tags
• don't include CSS files, use inline styles instead.
• don't embed images in the email, link to a public web server where the images will be hosted.
• add ALT text to all of your images
• format the page so that it will still be easily readable if you have to use a large number of images
• don't use 1 big image for the email.
• as a general rule don't use images for text, especially body copy. Using images for header text is okay, just be sure that the ALT text is the same as what is in the image.

You won't be able to cover all your bases all the time, but having a well drafted email presented to the recipient regardless of whether or not they want to see the images is a must.

The Great Cthulhu too!

First Annual Great Cthulhu Giveaway

Okay, here's the deal. I happen to have another Great Cthulhu - and according to some archaic law, this Cthulhu must be housed in a new dwelling lest there be a battle amongst Cthulhu's in my home (does not want!).

The first bloke to post I want my Cthulhu! in the comments gets it!

*Disclaimer: Actual Cthulhu may vary.