casa.de.geeks

The following pictures were taken at a Walmart in Oklahoma City. The first depicts two American Indians on horseback with spears raised overlooking their land and grazing buffalo. The next picture is a large panoramic view of early American settlers wearing cowboy hats with their covered wagon stampeding onto the land. The last picture shows a more modern Caucasian woman with a cowboy hat riding a horse in the foreground and a city skyline in the background. The last picture is captioned “Oklahoma City”.

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Great history lesson, Walmart! Really. The natives were just chillin out, tending to their buffalo when a stampede of immigrants came along, pillaged their lands, and built a concrete jungle on it. I hope all those people who want to deport all illegal immigrants take a long hard look at this and think about how their own ancestors came to call this country their home.

Don’t you ever just feel like the last few weeks in technology were full of bad news and let downs? All you’re looking for is the light at the end of the tunnel. I always ask myself why the general population seems to hold people in tech related professions to a higher standard when it comes to service. I’m not saying we’re not excellent… but we’re not perfect. We make mistakes and truth be told there is not a giant magic easy button tucked away at the back of our desk drawer collecting dust waiting for the day when your priority #1, mission critical, last-minute-I-need-this-done-now, project comes along. Sometimes users request the impossible… or just the plain ridiculous, like the lady who wanted to remove the Pac Man from her Google.

Seriously though, why do other people/companies/entities get to screw up so bad and still skate on like nothing happened?

BP is still taking a big dump in the Gulf of Mexico. Progress with cleanup efforts and fixing the spewing oil leak is dragging on as if they think time itself will solve the problem.

It seems that Apple and AT&T screwed people over big time with what looks like an obvious bait and switch to me. One of Apple’s major selling points for the iPad was the ability to get an unlimited data plan through AT&T for $30 a month without a contract! Now shortly after the 3G versions are released, AT&T says they’re no longer offering unlimited data plans for the iPad or the iPhone. Even those who already signed up and will be grandfathered into an unlimited plan are forced into never skipping a payment – kind of like being on a contract, because I’m sure if you missed a month AT&T would just make you sign up for their new plans.

One final frustration of mine: T-Mobile should be ashamed of themselves! Verizon and Sprint are offering up all the awesome Android phones like they’re the ones that started this whole thing! C’Mon TMo – you offered up the first Android phone to the masses with the G1 and now your best offering is the MyTouch Slide? Where are the top-end handsets to compete with the HTC EVO 4G and the HTC Incredible or the Motorola Droid? TMo isn’t even directly selling the Nexus One but they should! They need to!

But hey, a little bird has been chirping about a big event coming soon for T-Mobile: Free phones on June 19th. If this is true, TMo could win over a lot of new customers and maybe that’s just what they need for the phone makers to consider giving TMo better handsets. I took the time to check out plans for two Android phones on Verizon’s network with unlimited data and T-Mobile still has the best priced plans. Here’s to more waiting for my dream phone.

My opinion of natural health supplements has always been that they might actually help and are natural so if they don’t they’re probably harmless. The most harm I could imagine them doing was for people to delay treatment taking useless stuff and having their condition get much worse. You know kind of like the nutters that have cancer, but instead of going to the doctor they try homeopathy, weird berries, and or praying. Then they die from something that probably could have been treated. You’re never going to get away from that kind of stupid even if they didn’t have health supplement stores people would just wonder into the woods to munch on mandrake root to cure their cancer or whatever. Read the rest of this entry »

Another example of users making me angry because they don’t bother to understand the technology they use. Apparently people are all up in arms over Google accidentally collecting data about Wi-Fi networks with their Street View cars. If you research the issue, you’ll find that payload data was only collected from unsecured networks. If you know anything at all about Wi-Fi, you know that these days securing your wireless router is so easy a caveman could do it. There’s no excuse for not doing it! In fact, if you wanted to, you could prevent your router from even broadcasting an SSID in the first place! You can’t sue somebody for invading your privacy if you are willingly broadcasting it unsecured for your whole neighborhood to see.

Do these people not see the irony? They’re suing Google for collecting data that they’re knowingly broadcasting out into open air but not a word about the fact that Google took pictures of their house! I bet these are the same kind of people that put their last names on their mail boxes for all to see.

I hope Google squashes these people. SQUASH.

All four of us have now upgraded from the factory battery to an extended battery for our T-Mobile G1s. Fox claims he’s able to get about 3 days of battery life from his phone now even while running multiple apps and receiving regular notifications from each. Trust me, I don’t need to know about tweets at 3am, so I’m hoping to exceed his time without a charge. Here are some pictures of the phone with its original battery and then with the extended. My G1 is the bronze phone and there were no matching bronze back covers for the extended battery. To be honest, I don’t mind the 3-tone look. Enjoy.

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Hey there T-Mobile! As a TMO customer for a few years now, I was super proud when TMO was the first carrier in the US to launch an Android handset. We were early adopters! Casadegeeks bought three of them and now all four of us have a G1. I think we’ve all reached that point now where the G1 is no longer fast enough. Time to upgrade… wait – where is the next generation of TMO’s Andoid handsets? Verizon has two awesome Android offerings now: Motorola Droid and HTC Incredible… Sprint just got the HTC Evo and even AT&T – exclusive iPhone carrier has some Android offerings. What do you have TMO? The original Android phone – G1, Motorola Cliq, HTC MyTouch – is that all? Even the upcoming HTC MyTouch2 (codename Espresso) is still lacking the new Snapdragon processor. My only real option for a next-gen Android phone on T-Mobile’s network is going to be the Nexus One. Why the complaining then, you ask. Who doesn’t want more choices?

It’s gotten so bad that people are resorting to starting rumors about T-Mobile getting the HTC Incredible – why? C’Mon T-Mobile! Bring it! You took a big step in bringing Android to the market, you should be the leading provider for the best, newest Android handsets! I want to be proud of Magenta again!

That said, unless there are more options soon on T-Mobile, I guess I’ll fork over my arm and leg to buy a Nexus One. In the meantime, go watch some of these vids about the Nexus One:

http://chatroulette.com/

Anyone who has been online for long enough can remember the early days of the Web. The days of plain text HTML web pages, dial-up, the recently deceased Geocities, and meeting random people in chat rooms. There was no social networking like Facebook & Twitter! You got to talk to whoever else joined chat with you and only a rare few had voice or even video.

These days you meet somebody new in the real world and the first thing they want to know is “Can I add you on Facebook?” or “What’s your Twitter name?”. People you never wanted to see again from high school can find you online after all these years and pick up where they left off – picking on you! Or not… maybe they are good friends and you laugh about them getting paper cuts while opening a bag of cookies.

So what’s so cool about this new-fangled ChatRoulette? It’s old school, baby! Kids these days never knew what it was like to experience the web so randomly. These days when the search engine is king and you can be sent directly to the content you want, you hardly ever find yourself just wandering the vast unknown of the Web. ChatRoulette brings that randomness back with a little bit of anonymity – yes you can see the person’s webcam, but don’t see a username, no address, no contact info!

So I say Happy Random Chatting to you all. Watch out for penis cams or old guys dressed in full body cat suits or Elmo and lets hope ChatRoulette doesn’t get turned into another social networking site.

When Jenny McCarthy set out on her foolish and unholy crusade to stop people from vaccinating they’re kids most people could understand where she was coming from. After all her son was diagnosed with autism shortly after he got his vaccines. Read the rest of this entry »