• Ashton Kutcher reached over 1 million followers [link]
• Oprah has featured twitter on her show [link]

I don’t follow these new world celebs for a couple reasons. One is they are not interesting or don’t really have anything of real interest to say. I’ve heard and can reasonably guess that some PR assistants are managing these folks’ social networking sites like facebook or myspace. My guess is that most celebs are interfacing with twitter more directly than traditional mediums. Sure, celebs are real persons too, but for some reason, their twitter feeds do not seem anymore interesting than the next person’s. The idea that a million strangers want in on this stream-of-randomness is a bizarre concept. Maybe the same driving force behind the tabloid sales drive flocks of followers to these celebs. They want whatever they can get straight from the source.

Twitter really is the delicate art and science of microblogging.  You following someone is like subscribing to their RSS feed. It’s personal.

Reason two is I believe they have hijacked a service that was once personal and have pimped it out myspace-style. I don’t even think businesses joining twitter was a disservice. In fact it proved to make some companies add a personal touch to their customer service. I feel like we have sacrificed something here when the news-media’s perception of twitter has become a followers-race. Although Ev Williams has not sold twitter to Google yet (like he did with blogger), one cannot help but feel like twitter has already sold out.

I am glad that that such a business can thrive in these times. Web 2.0, nonetheless. I guess I feel that twitter was one of those web applications that brought you closer to people and not farther away. With the twittersphere expanding out to the stars, so to speak, maybe that cozy pond feeling has been lost in an ocean.

Rest assured that we are taking this outage very seriously. Discussions have already started on how to make the service resilient to a similar event in the future. ooma currently has one data center located in west coast. We have planned to light up a second data center in the midwest or east coast this year, and this outage has served as a stark reminder for us to get moving on that. This has also served as a good opportunity for us to re-evaluate our contingency and business continuity plans.

This makes me a little happy as I have not heard much press about my phone company. If they are, indeed, planning to add an additional data center then it would seem that the company is doing okay. You never know with these tech start-ups.

T-Mobile® cameo™ frame
The T-Mobile cameo frame is an exciting new way to share photos with family and friends. With the T-Mobile cameo, you can:

-Take photos using your picture message-capable camera phone and send them to your frame’s phone number. They’ll show up right on the frame!
-Receive picture messages from any capable phone, on any carrier.
-Send photos to your frame via e-mail. Just e-mail them to your frame’s phone number @tmomail.net (for example, 2062221111@tmomail.net).
-Transfer photos from the memory card in your phone or camera to your frame (card and adapter not included).
-Transfer photos from your computer to your frame.

Hello! For anyone who has a kid(s) whose grandparents or even great-grandparents live elsewhere, I believe this would be an ideal gift: The gift of updated and current digital photos that automatically show up in a digital photo frame. Supposedly, the device would cost $99.99 up front plus $9.99 per month for the connected services. Yikes -that’s $120/yr cost of connectivity. With flash memory so cheap (I mean affordable) now, I could send a new filled 2GB SD card every other month, including postage and still have money to spare compared to that subscription price. I believe they should have subsidized the cost of data access by:

• maybe inserting an ad every 50 photos in a slideshow
• by building a remote web management tool that would be ad-driven or possibly integrated with photo partners for ordering print products (aka Walgreens, flickr, etc)
• something similar to what the Kindle has accomplished with Sprint

This doesn’t look that desirable a deal, but at least it is a step in the right direction. Let’s get conected!

Jeebuz. I just lost my second paragraph. Thanks massive select and random delete coupled with unique non-recovery Command-Z. Super ironic due to the context of what it was about. Here is a re-enactment of that aforementioned paragraph:

So I’m afraid of losing my memory. There I said it. I’ve lost computers and important data before, but not in a while *knock on wood*. Whole libraries of data can be lost before you are reminded of the ingenious idea to backup your data. So I am trying to be diligent in backing up my precious memories as they have been spread out between flash memory cards and my laptop. I’ve been looking into some Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions from such companies as Netgear, D-Link, Thecus and Drobo. I’ve asked my colleagues and they recommend Netgear ReadyNAS solution (originally Infrant) as it is reliable and its ease of setup. The only problem is their line of products are very pricey – the 2-disk array named the Duo is within my budget, but I fear that I’ll exceed its storage capacity in a couple years. Whereas the cheaper 4-disk arrays are more appealing but they have their cons too. Drobo looks really user friendly, but has its network-ability sold separately. D-Link and Thecus are valid NAS solutions, but I’m not confident in their RAID offerings. It would seem that taking the approach of adding drives slowly to expand and have redundancy are better performed in the ReadyNAS and Drobo, but that said, I haven’t thoroughly done my homework yet.

I have to say, it will be hard to sleep until I know that I’ve got a solid method/system to keeping my family jewels safe (haha). Until then, I have bought myself a little bday present. It is a RIDATA 16GB compact flash card. It is 233X speed which is great for writing to RAW format. I figured, that until I get my NAS solution, I will just have to keep my photos on memory cards until I can offload them securely. It’s a great deal at an equally great price point. Don’t let that Fry’s associate con you into buying a “faster” 4 or 8 GB card that is $20 cheaper. They still don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t blame them completely as speeds aren’t always listed or even printed on the card itself, as there exists cards like “Sandisk Ultra II” to make sense of. This CF card is the fastest one I’ve ever owned. The other 1GB CF cards I have are 80X and 133X. They pale in comparison. I can shoot in RAW + Basic (both *.nef and *.jpg simultaneously) mode without delay.

Overall, a good birthday. I guess it’s one of those times where I get to see a lot of old friends. The perfect time to create more memories to save and protect. Let’s hope by at least next birthday, I have a kickass NAS to ensure all these moments are backed up and last forever.

What made me decide to make the jump this time? The App Store. Endless potential extendability. The reason I say potential is that I do not know what it takes for an app to be approved for distribution at the store. Thus, some great app may not make it to those pages due to rules Apple and AT&T have made due to hardware or network constraints, respectively.

Here are some of my favorite free apps so far:

• Twitterific – ability to post photo links in twitter entries from the iPhone
• Shozu – ability to post photos taken by the phone to multiple sites (flickr, facebook, picasa, twitter, wordpress, etc)
• AP Mobile News / NYTimes – I guess this is what it feels like for Kindle users to have news RSS feeds at their fingertips
• BoxOffice – who wants to go see a movie? Here are the times for this theater
• Pandora – amazing customized streaming radio stations that is powered by the Music Genome Project (hello parties and streaming radio to make great use of that AUX port in your savvy ride) How is this even legal?
• Save Benjis – here’s a great tool for the intelligent shopper in us all

Your application has been approved. Based on your application approval date of 02/28/2008, your coupon(s) are/were scheduled to mail on 04/25/2008.

I can’t wait to hook up to the projector with a DTV signal. Then we’ll get CBS and ABC on our temporary “big screen.”

Update (4/26): Woohoo! They’ve arrived.

So in the past week, I finally decided to put together the parts I had provisioned for my digital television (DTV) over-the-air (OTA) antenna using these schematics [you will need to register to view that forum post] for direction. It’s turns out to have a striking resemblance to this Channel Master which I’ve seen at Frys. It’s mounted in my coat closet right above the door out of the way of people who shit on coats for attention. However, I’m thinking about putting an extended arm in the mix since the turn radius was somthing that’s rather lacking due to those shapely dollar cooling racks. However, in its current state, this does achieve 4 DTV stations including ABC and CBS. So I’m sure the Oscars would have looked great in 720p.

My next attempt will be better as the design is proven and I will be able to just use wire hangers in copper’s place (yay-cheap). And with some luck, I’ll get it done soon as I am refusing to pay for cable/satellite subscription to save some pesos. That way, my brother-in-law will stop asking me if I now have cable everytime he visits.