I decided to mess around a little bit with Dapper.net which can basically take any page that has dynamic content and turn it into a feed. It was actually pretty east to use and it guides you through a step by step process for whatever you want to do. Dapper can even easily create an embeddable widget to put on your Myspace or Blog Sidebar.
I like to see Musician’s Friend Stupid Deal of the Day because they sometimes have very good deals on mics or mixers or various other audio equipment that could be used to podcast and such. I don’t like having to visit the website everyday just to see what the new deal is so I decided to try Dapper.net’s RSS functionality.
You can see the Feed by going to the Stupid Deal of the Day service that I created on dapper. If you like the Stupid Deals of the Day, then subscribe to the service with your favorite News Aggregator. If you have any tips or other uses for Dapper please let me know in the comments.
I was looking at the Blogger Choice Awards today and I noticed something very wrong. Rosie O’Donnell has the most votes for best celebrity blogger. If anyone out there can hear me, please vote for someone else, like Wil Wheaton. I really don’t like Rosie O’Donnell, obviously, but she is entitled to her opinion. I really don’t see how she could have over 1000 votes and the closest celebrity blogger to her has less than half. I think more people just need to go there and vote.
Update: Ah the power of the nerd force. Wil has now taken a commanding lead thanks to Fark picking up the vote. I knew I wouldn’t be alone in my efforts.
I just wanted to wish two very good friends of mine congratulations on their wedding. I wish them many years of happiness. Here is a link to the pictures a friend and I took as well as a video.
Pictures from the Wedding of Antone and Sarah Dobrovolny
Antone and Sarah Wedding on Vimeo
For some reason I always seem to like and support the underdog more than the popular. And there are always new services and software being released. One of the services will usually end up being popular and the one to beat while the others will fall by the wayside even if they are eventually better. Here are a list of the services/software that I use and prefer next to their popular counterparts.
I will add more to the list as I think of them. If you can offer any suggestions where the underdog is better than the more popular competition, please leave them in the comments. I would love to check them out.
I’ve seen many of the blogs that I read talking about a new social network called Virb. Seems like they aim to combine MySpace, YouTube and Flickr all in one place. It is very Web 2.0′y from what I can see so far. That isn’t really good or bad, but at least it’s keeping up with web style unlike MySpace. I will be messing around with it as much as I can in the next few days and will try to offer a more complete review. The thing that makes a social network good though are it’s users. At least their invites for the beta are pretty viral right now which could be good to build the network. Who knows, maybe they can pull a Gmail and keep it in private beta long enough to get an amazing user base. Speaking of the invites, I got mine from a blog and in that spirit I have 10 invites for people who leave a comment with a valid e-mail address.
If you are already a member feel free to add me as your friend when you check out my profile. I look forward to learning more about this site and seeing it develop.
Iw as just reading Guy Kawasaki’s Post about his first year of blogging and it had a link to a post that he wrote about a woman named Aziza Mohmmand. He mentioned that not many people had linked to that post even though it was his “purest story of entrepreneurship” that he covered. Well obviously I decided to read the linked post and it was quite amazing. She is an entrepreneur in Afghanistan and her company makes soccer balls. She talked about her visit to America and some of the things she has gone through as an entrepreneur in Afghanistan. She has 220 employees, all are widows and the main money earners for their families. Her main goal was to make a difference in the life of Afghani women while providing them with income and an active role in building the new infrastructure in Afganistan.
I got an interesting e-mail from a friend that contained a link to a video. It brings into question the legality of Income Tax. The thing is, this only affects people who don’t know how the tax laws work anyway. If you properly use the tax laws you can avoid paying the majority of taxes as it is. All that is required is educating yourself some on how they work. There are plenty of books and forums and help out there to learn how to get around paying taxes perfectly legally. I am worried this is going to become a Michael Moore type video. Anyone interested in watching it, the whole thing can be found at Google Video. It is about 1 hour and 45 minutes long. I also don’t like what it is called… America: Freedom to Fascism. They do present a very good argument, but there is one flaw. How many millions of people would be out of jobs if income taxes suddenly went away?
Update: I actually e-mailed the director of this movie, Aaron Russo and he brought up a good point. My argument almost makes it sound like I mean to say that Americans pay income tax just to employ accountants. I didn’t mean that. If America is doing something wrong, then by all means fix it. But a sudden change would be bad. I am just trying to point out that such a sudden and significant change could cause more upheaval and problems than the potential benefits of that change is worth. In the richest country in the world with the richest people in the world, we have to be doing something right. Anyone can become wealthy in this country, it is just up to the person as to whether or not it would be worth the effort. I also want to thank Mr. Russo for e-mailing me back so swiftly.
I have seen a lot of controversy about MacHeist, MacAppADay and other free Mac software. Some people say it is great, while many others say it is really hurting the shareware community. Personally I think it is a great boon to the entire Mac community as a whole. That is based on my experience though. I had been planning on purchasing a Mac for about the past 6 months. Then when I learned about MacHeist and started participating it pushed me over the edge and I finally bought one. I can’t be the only person that was on the fence and ended up buying one because of all of these events. Yes, maybe the shareware developers weren’t getting as much money as they could, but I think it helped create a larger market for them in the long run.
Well there are many free software things like MacHeist and MacAppADay popping up all over the internet it seems. The process of getting the software is as fun as actually getting it free. A new one that I am starting to see a little bit of info about is called WasteAWeekend.com from the creators of MacAppADay. I don’t know much about it, but they have some interesting ads they have created and a neat little video below.