Mahalo Daily: The Oscars in 60 Seconds

Another great 60 Seconds video from Veronica Belmont @ Mahalo Daily!

Free Google WiFi Through your Toilet?

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Thanks to Eric for giving us the heads up on this new Google Labs Beta program. You can out more here and here. I have always found that the Loo is quietest place to surf the web in a busy house, but now it also has the best reception.

Any Random Evening at the Fat Dad Household

I have on more than one occasion used this excuse when the missus calls me up to bed.

Hadn't posted any KCD in a while.

Unicat RV: Now this is a Land Yacht!

My parents spend their winters driving around the south in a 34 foot RV with an expendable kitchen and living. I _USED_ to think it was real cool until I saw this Unicat! Even Bobby DeNiro would be envious of this rig. I so need one and I have already set up a special savings "goal" in Cha-Ching to make it happen, I only have put aside $380 a week for the next 30 years, sigh...

Twitter and the SuperBowl Effect

I have to admit even I found this a little shocking and very cool.

[via Daring Fireball]

Social Networking Bankruptcy?

A good friend and fellow techie, Steve McGurn,  has done the unthinkable and declared amnesty on his social networking profiles. I know this will sound insane coming from a WEB2.0 evangelist such as me, but he's right. The idea of all these networks sounds great. Find old school chums on Facebook, keep up to date with all your mobile pals on Twitter, micro blog on Tumblr, see what other people are looking at with del.icio.us, see your online pals through their Flickr uploads, share with Pownce and then again with Mahalo, aggregate with Jaiku, watch with YouTube and Viddler, and then if you have a few minutes left, you post to your blog. Well that doesn't leave much time for checking your Google Adsense and Analytics let alone the bank and so on.

It got to the point that my Facebook profile was starting to look like a 12 year old's MySpace page. Big SHOUT OUT! I don't want to be a vampire, lesbian, favourite pop signer from the cast of lost. I really don't care how many doughnuts or raw fish you sling at my head. Truth is that you didn't create that application yourself, and it really doesn't tell me anything more about you or what's going on in your life. Sure a war poke is funny for about five minutes but what the hell is the point of the SuperPoke, MegaPoke, EyePoke? So I did waht Steve has done and stripped down the Facebook profile to some of the essentials. I know it's harsh, but I am writing and creating some fun stuff on my own Blog and web sites that I really don't want to spend anytime doing it on any other site again. Programmers always repeat their mantra: "Write once, run forever". Yet we spend hours and hours repeating ourselves from site to site.  That's one of the great things I love about RSS, you write it once, include the feed on your social networking site and Whammo! It looks like you've spent all day keeping Facebook up to date when in reality it just takes care of itself. The big problem is that all this great stuff (content) that you have created gets lost among all of the fortune cookies, places you've been and quizzes about movies you didn't really like anyway.

I never really liked the fact that Facebook claims everything you put on their site. After you upload it, you surrender your rights to it. SUCKS HUH! But they can't claim anything that is public forum or that is not hosted on their site. Enter RSS! It's your stuff, you're just licensing it out. I am going to keep my pictures on my own site and in some cases I'll post more public pics on Flickr.

But going forward the deciding factor in what networks I stick with is portability. Will it run smoothly with my MacBook and can I access it from my BlackBerry. Picassa didn't make the cut on both counts, which is a real shame for a Google Goodie. SMS support and Twitterberry has made Twitter a real fave and before the BlackBerry Facebook  application crapped out, I was really starting to enjoy messaging through it.

Flock, the Mozilla browser , was really starting to turn into a pretty cool tool for keeping in touch with all the social site at once, but it required a colossal amount of set up time and in the end if you did use it all the time as your main browser, it just became too much of a mess to clean up. Although it's RSS reader is probably one of the better ones I have used in a long time. 

I think I will end up going back to the Google Reader, beside I had all my cool Yahoo Pipes mash-ups working really well in there.  I am little concerns about the M$ hostile takeover of Yahoo! MicroShaft has a tendency of really screwing up great products: Visual FoxPro, Visio, Sharepoint... Yahoo on the other hand have been pretty awesome at not messing with Flickr and Del.icio.us (yup they belong to Yahoo).