raleighnet.org

Haven’t really looked at this site yet, but the title on their home page certainly speaks to my pain point. So I’m bookmarking Discover Which Marketing Programs Really Work for later consideration.

The day is June 3rd, and one mad genius decides he’s going to photographically document every door or drawer that he touches. Surprisingly interesting. I think I need to get myself one of them new-fangled digital cameras - and an imagination. link

Kartoo is an interesting new search engine. The interface elements are built in flash, and it presents results as a highly visual map of interconnections. I don’t really understand all of the elements. It’s an interesting experiment. Some of the connections seem pretty random though.

Excellent suggestions to ensure copy hits the benefits of an offer. This is specifically geared towards a particular e-mail, but the suggestions here can easily be generalized to any copy needs.

Email Copy for the Next Economy

BookCrossing is a really neat idea. 1. You read a book. 2. You register the book on the site and record your comments. 3. You lable the book and leave it for somebody else to find. 4. You track the progress of the book as it is passed from person to person.

I will have to try this.

Now this is funny. Go to www.monstor.com.

I don’t know. The suggestions in Direct Response Email 101 seem designed as a step by step checklist to make sure your messages look like Spam. Since the prevailing wisdom is that nobody opens Spam anymore, I’m not sure why you’d what to do that.

This is the problem. There are so many “experts” out there, and none of them seem to agree on what works. Of course this is why you have to test, but I want a roadmap to ensure success - at least a hint as to the right way to go. I’m afraid that my marketing brothers and sisters have already poisoned the well on this stuff.

There’s nothing like geeking it up at the movies on a lazy Saturday afternoon. No, I didn’t see this one. I don’t plan to see that for at least a couple of weeks. I didn’t even see this one since I saw it a few weeks ago. Nope, I saw this quiet little gem.

Actually, the geek factor was pretty subdued given the subject matter, English code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. But then, Bletchley Park was really more the setting than the subject matter. The movie mostly centers around a classic spy story. This was very much the movie I was hoping A Beautiful Mind would turn out to be. Beautiful Mind was something of a let down, but this one had me itching to race home and re-read Cryptonomicon. And, I would re-read it if I had a spare couple of months to kill and I didn’t have a back-log of books I’ve been meaning to get to stacked as high as my waist.

Boy I tell you. If it’s not one thing it’s another. A few weeks ago the hard drive on my TiBook decided to develop some weird unrecoverable sector problem. So of course I immediately go off to purchase a new drive. On the plus side, I now have 40 beautiful Gigs of storage which means I can finally fit all of my songs on my lap top. On the down side, it took over a week for the drive to come in.

Well, Tuesday the drive came in, and I go to install it, but of course it requires a Torx screw driver, and of course I don’t have a torx screw driver. I drive around for a few hours: Radio Shack would have this right - No, Maybe K-mark - No. Do you believe I finally found them at Home Depot? (slight diversion - as long as I was in Home Depot, I figured I’d pick up new sink fixtures since mine have been corroded and leaking from the base since … well since I bought my place a few years ago — not even close to being up to trying to install that one yet).

So, I finally get the drive installed and the software restored, and I’m all ready for a session of wireless surfing from my couch. I’ve grown so used to watching TV and surfing wirelessly that it is almost unbearable to have to go into my office in the next room to get on the Internet.

Sadly, my night of blissful surfing was not to be as with my new hard drive ready to go, my Airport Base station (the antenna that lets me surf wirelessly) decided to crap out.

So, off I trundle to the local best buy to pick up a new router/802.11 b access point - a D-link this time. Of course, then I have to call my cable provider to have them provision the MAC address.

And finally, all is right with the world. I am now laying on my couch blogging my week of digital misery.

Now if I could just figure out why my VCR refuses to send audio to my receiver. I finally broke down and picked up one of the Direct TV Tivo boxes (still waiting for the antenna thugs, that my home owners association hired to enforce their special brand of a protection racket, to come cable me up, so it’s as good as useless still). Anyway, some how unplugging my old satellite receiver and plugging in the new one to the exact same wires seems to have crapped out the VCR audio connection, and no amount of jiggling or recabling can seem to bring my sound back.

Tim O’Reilly’s keynote from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference explores how you can see the shape of emerging technologies by watching hackers and other alpha geeks. Of course I like to think of myself as a bleeding edge alpha geek, but compared to the people O’Reilly is talking about, I’m somebody’s grandma. Interesting Read all the same.