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We all know that we sit down too much during the day.  This is true of teachers, people who work in the Internet sphere, etc, and etc.  How can we avoid this you might ask?  Well how about a cheap-as-chips standing desk that can be found at Target.  Find yourself a solid wooden table, I chose red but there are multiple bright colors (as well as “natural”) and a stack-able shoe rack.  Add some duck tape and BOOM, a standing desk that is ergonomic (lifts the screen as to be eye level) and completely transferable. 

Of course, the desk itself isn’t free but most businesses, wherever you work, will provide you with some kind of basic desk.  The only thing that you need to keep in check is how high the first shelf needs to be in order for you to stand tall and have your arms be nearly 90 degrees.  If you are clueless on why you need a stand up desk then you need to read this piece by Graham Peterson (or someone in the company).  If Target isn’t near you then may I recommend IKEA due to most of their stuff being incredibly hackable.   

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This guys seems to be riding around New York City for the mere fun of high-fiving people’s hands who are hailing cabs.  Now generally I would implore a level headedness about the whole situation and claim his actions as heresy due to harassment of lack-a-daisy New York “foreigners” who forget to lower their hands as bikers pass however; it is simply too damn funny.  Of course the video speaks for itself but at least take a look before passing judgment.

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There is definitely a theme going on here…at Lowe’s motorspeedway.
Although there seems to be a serious ugly duckling

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If you were under a rock for the entirety of the day, you might not have any clue that Mint.com was bought by the likes of Intuit.  Intuit is the owner of a little piece of shitty software called “Quicken.”  Quicken happens to be one of the numbest names for software ever.  For a long time this software was really the dominator in the field of personal money management software.  Intuit focused heavily on the desktop software while many other folks, Mint included, crept their service to the cloud.  The cloud software was updated on a regular basis, was accessible from any computer or mobile phone, and could easily, and silently be updated…oh yeah and was free.  Intuit witnessed that people did not want to pay for software every year, they wanted something simple, sexy, and streamlined that could allow people to actually effectively manage their money.

Time stamp yourself 2 years into the future and through countless attempts by Intuit to one up Mint’s success and you have today.  Intuit has purchased Mint.com for a healthy sum of 170 million.  For a bunch of econ nerds, 170 million is an amazing exit strategy, no matter any way you spin it.  I could leave it here (and you would be bored) but as you remember, if you actually read this post, Intuit has been playing catch up for years and really has nothing worthwhile to show for it.  Moreover, people went to Mint.com because they were not a huge business, had a sensible UI, and had constant and consistent updates.  So what happens to us Mint lovers now?  Are we left out in the wind to rot and spend what little money have all “willy-nilly?”

Apparently Intuit is taking over the service but Mint will remain the same.  “Same” being a relative term after Intuit sits their banding engine down on it for a while.  What we hope is that Mint remains the same and Intuit breathes some old fashion fun into it as Mint continues to sojourn into its new life.  Just remember Intuit, the more you screw it up the quicker peeps will run away from it and the quicker your 170 mill investment will look like a large whole in your pocket. -Pic is from Mint in March 2008, perhaps 5 months after their TC50 launch

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Labor day is for suckers! This is the current work situation at the new house. It might be an amazing day outside (and tennis sealed that deal) but sometimes your love of work holds up nothing. Someday the side projects will pay for it all!

Braden Douglass
t: twitter.com/bradendouglass
q: “Sent from somewhere over the rainbow…rainbow created exclusively on the IPhone.”

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Labor day weekend getting to my secon and final Snow Leopard update. The 17 was the last to go due to some serious infrequent use on account of no desk syndrome. Soon…very soon

Braden Douglass
t: twitter.com/bradendouglass
q: “Sent from somewhere over the rainbow…rainbow created exclusively on the IPhone.”

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I know, I know another comment in an already filled sea of news and blogs talking about the Google, Apple, AT$T trifecta of FCC awesomeness.  I am not quitting so try to hold your breath and I will refrain from boring you too much.  However, have you read this Apple comment on how they approve the apps…all 8500 a week?  They set two (potentialy awesome) folks on the trail of each app to see how it works, how it is coded, the likes and from their if everything seems OK or kosher for all of the Jewish peeps, (insert random comic book attack here…I chose ‘bam’), and fin!  Think about it for one sec…how do they actually push the app to the app store…made ya think didn’t I.  It is probably some James Bond stuff where they both need to be bio metrically scanned, they have to insert a drop of blood along with two special keys into their respected holes, and turn them at the exact moment!  Yep, you heard it here, my take on how an iPhone app gets it’s wings.

Got a theory of your own…comment up and I will post the ridiculous ones on twitter tomorrow morning!

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A lot of folks these days…well a couple of days ago (shit, blogging is big again, who knew?) had this crazy idea that twitter could relieve themselves of their Rss fix.  This was mainly due to what can easily be seen in exhibit 1.  There were so many folks out there simply diving into their Rss feed and reproducing each article as a new tweet.  The folks who followed you would adopt the infamous ‘re-tweet’ and share it with the folks on their own twitter network, thereby spreading the word.  There is an inherent problem with this and I hope to compose myself long enough to make this coherent.  Ready?  Good.

Your Rss feed silently creeps into your house every mourning, opens your refrigerator because you were clearly too concerned with yourself to leave him some milk and cookies, gets some food and regurgitates a user specified amount of information directly into your blue tooth headphone (remember to take it off before you went to bed?) or computer for your morning pleasure.  Who actually picks up and reads the newspaper in the morning while you consume your heavily glycemic loaded breakfast?  If you do, then great, but for the rest of us we desire a much more ‘diverse’ amount of info.  So what happens when you open your Rss reader of choice?  Usually you are awash with a number discerning how lazy you are or how many feeds you should consume.  What happens when you open your Twitter client?  I follow a good amount of people and what I usually see is a metric ‘shit-ton’ (yes, this is a large reason why we do not use the metric system) of personal, pious pimping.  Everyone is simply tooting their own horn and if by some amazing amount of luck, they are tooting someone elses horn, it is probably something they got off their own Rss reader (and refuses to give props where props are due). 

Your Rss reader is a warm and fuzzy place where you can flip through at your own risk and watch every video without having to worry about every shortened URL and where they all go.  Everything from music, text, and video is contained in that little block until you move on to the next feed.  If you use gReader and are old enough to know what ‘Vi’ is you will derive a healthy amount of pleasure pushing your ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys.  What do you get with Twitter?  Well something sticky right in your eye usually, but on a healthier point, something completely different.  I am not bashing Twitter except for the fact that it might be heading the way of ‘Ze Wikipedia;’ good for casual stuff but absolute rubbish for fact finding.  Ask yourself right now, how many tweets do I read per day?  Do you spend a good amount of that time listening, watching, looking, and tweeting about stuff that you find passionate?  What would a twitter world be like if you were forced to read a certain amount of tweets before you could post one?  I bet it would be the community that FriendFeed is and will hopefully always will be, Facebook willing.  So the next time someone says that Rss is going the way of the Dodo, shove that Dodo where it can scratch it’s way out. 

Have a feeling about how this could be completely wrong?  Well do not sit by the wayside and curse me out miles away and under your breath, comment something up! 

….Thanks for reading by the way.

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I am almost positive that all of you people know what LaCie is, however; in the case that you don’t, they make external hard drives and monitors.  Sure their monitors are a bit on the pricey side but, let’s face it they are some of the best when it comes to color reproduction.  For a long time I thought their hard drives were also, really quite solid.  They have never failed me (I am incredibly safe with all my external hd’s) and I have tooted them to all my friends, family and clients for some time now.  However, I just had a bit of trouble on a raid - 0, 2TB Big Disk.  What occurred was my power board (the board that is in the enclosure that manages, usb, fw, and spinning up the hd’s when you plug it in) failed on me.  It was actually quite a boring failure; the drive simply would not turn on and the light on the power supply would just blink.

What did I do you might ask?  Well since it was well within warranty I gave LaCie a call to see what they could do.  Here is where the shit hits the fan.  They are willing to send me a new power supply but I know this is not the problem (I have tried several) or they are willing to take the external enclosure in and test it out.  If they do bring it in, they will wipe the drives and fix the power board but they HAVE to completely format the drives (unacceptable).  OK, so you might think…just take the drives out and send them the empty enclosure, well sir, thank you, but this would void the warranty.  Basically LaCie has charged me with figuring out a way to get my information off the drives, either through Drive Savers (great guys but expensive) or by my own means…thanks?  I am also very willing to pay them real money (the kind of money that they would not get if I sent the enclosure in under warranty) for the power board that they make!  To make a long story short…simply avoid LaCie, I am and will make a positive point to move all of mine and my client’s important information onto Drobo’s.  I will also never buy another LaCie product for the rest of my life.  Which is actually a super sad thing because a lot of their stuff I really like and salute them for melding form and function.  My 02 cents: Avoid LaCie. 

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