Google Personalized Homepage gone!!!!

This is pretty major setback for google, I've come to trust them and maybe too much. I've spent months getting my personalized homepage to the state I wanted... I had some custom ToDo Lists and note modules that I've written and now all the data is gone... I'm not sure what's going on but from a quick search on google tons of people are having the same issue. So I'm still crossing my fingers that it will come back... I wish there was some backup option to save all my data to email once a day... I've emailed Google, hopefully they'll have a general response... stay tuned for an update..

My Roadmap to Freedom – Do you have one?

I find myself often asking this question... when will I quit my fulltime job and work for myself... And by working for myself I don't mean find projects to work on for other people (at least not entirely). The problem is we spend the most amount of our time working for someone else. It's a vicious cycle that I hope when broken will reap major benefits.

I've been working for seven years right out of school and only for the past year I've really started looking at how to make money online, by using your own projects.

The TV Revolution Is Here

For those of you who have been living under the rock, there is a TV revolution going on. Let me get this out of they way first... yes I do "borrow" TV shows off the net. Let me tell you what... I'm really not sorry... the amount of money corporations are making off us is insane... and there are no limits every year it's more and more and it will never end, unless we do something about it. I agree people need to get paid, but in my opinion entertainers get paid way too much, yes they do entertain millions of people but that's just because the way the system is setup. There is plenty actors out there who would be happy to work for much less money. I feel like I'm getting off topic here, all I'm trying to say is that we pay way too much for entertainment.

I recently moved and just got cable installed today, it's costing me $50 a month... what am I paying for? well basically 20 minutes of commercials per hour and other promotions within the actual shows.

Why did I get cable?

Well, I love basketball and need to watch it live and shows like HGTV (my GF ;) )haven't fully made it torrents yet. Ahh, Torrents... one of the most amazing inventions since probably the internet revolution. See pirating has always been there... it's been there in the early 90s when you could download games off BBSs and it's been there when you could download tiny files called MP3s through MIRC way before Napster. It's just now though that the general public is getting their hands on the nice and easy to use tools to let them "borrow" content off the net.

The future Now?

In a way the future is here... here is a perfect example.. couple of weeks ago when I still had analog cable the new Heroes episode stared airing but I couldn't watch it right then. So I turned on my Windows Media Center in Vista to record the show right off cable... about an hour and a half later I came back and started watching it... picture quality wasn't great (analog cable) plus all the commercials were kind of annoying... meanwhile uTorrent blip appeared which stated that the new episode of Heroes just started downloading... so I stopped watching the crappy cable copy... waited about 20 mins and I had the same episode on my computer. Here is a little comparison.

Cable

Bad Quality

Would have taken 1 hour to watch and would have wasted 33% of the time watching commercials

Torrent

Took about ( 1 hour for the show to appear on Torrent networks after airing )

Took 20 mins to download

There was no commercials to skip

It was HD Quality

See, most people aren't at this level yet but it's easy enough to setup that all the shows you watch you have uTorrent watch for in the RSS feeds and you've got great quality content without wasting time on commercials or being glued to the tv. Now yes there are other solutions like PVRs but you still have to pay the big bucks for content you mostly don't watch... and what you do you have to be inconvenienced by commercials.

Movie are another big area where most of the bandwidth is being used up by... do you know why? Shitty Hollywood movies. Coming from a semi-film education I have an idea what goes on behind the scenes with script writing. Hollywood has this very child like behavior of banging it head against a wall until after they've totally killed any given genre and then they move on to the next one. In the 80s it was the Horrors, now it's the comic book heroes... just think of how many truly great movies have come out in the past few years... not many... why was The Matrix so popular? It was different... there are so many great stories out there waiting to be told but nobody gives those stories a chance...instead they go and make American Pie 4... this is why I among thousands of other people on the net will not go and spend tons of money on cookie cutter movies for $15 a movie.

Anyway that's one big rant off to bed now. Have a great night.

Apple iPhone - 7 Killer Downfalls

Yesterday was a great day for Apple, by far the best keynote speech to date. Apple TV looked amazing and well the iPhone, what can I say WOW.... it really put my eTen PDA/phone device to shame. I want to go on record and say that I'm buying the iPhone the first day it comes out, it's a very exciting time and I can't wait to see what people will start coming up for it once it gets released, widgets galore ;) .

Anyway since the iPhone is still a couple months away I thought I would play a little devil’s advocate and look at some of the problems that Apple might be facing with the iPhone, I'm sure everyone wants them to succeed, as you can see none of the smart phones have yet but if anyone can Apple will. So here we go:

Complexity of the phone

Fedex, UPS, eBay Shipping Who need em…

What am I talking about you ask eh? :) Well I'm talking online purchasing, specifically eBay and their lack of shipping price control. It's absolutely sick that you have pay $60 for shipping of a memory card from China or Hong Kong. I'm sure everyone one of you have gone through this at least once in your life... you order some tiny product on the web, it gets shipped to you for twice the cost to purchase it and then UPS slaps a 29.99 price tag for breakage fee, plus taxes on top and you're paying 3x the amount you purchased the item for.

So I was thinking would it be great to try to get rid of this process? Well I think for certain purchases it's possible to do. For example: Lets say you buy a brand new ipod for $100 on the web. It's NIB (New In Box) and it's located in Australia. Now lets say someone else buys the same product but it's in Canada and they're located in Australia. Instead of shipping the items cross continents you ship the same item but locally between the two people. When you find people like this you connect them together, so you have two buyers and two sellers involved in each transaction

You're basically taking purchases which would normally get shipped across the world and try to find the same item locally that's being sold by someone else. You still pay the same person but the item comes from someone else. Now you save on all those shipping and import charges. I think there is potential in this type of idea if someone can figure out how to do it. There obviously would be problems with DOA products but again if we can over come those we could save tons of money and the environment (fuel).

Thought I would throw this out there.