casa.de.geeks

Archive for the ‘random’ Category

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.

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.

In the almost four years that I have lived in Oklahoma I have yet to see all The Sooner State has to offer! I actually am a bit ashamed of that. I think the idea of traveling to various tourist attractions in my own state seemed daunting at first because I am originally from Texas and travelling all of Texas was simply a daunting endeavor to take on. Once it sunk into my mind that Oklahoma isn’t nearly as large as Texas, traveling the state for attractions didn’t seem so unachievable. From the center of the state you can travel almost anywhere else in OK within a few hours and make it back home in the same day!

So how do you know what’s going on in OK? Two of my favorites – Wimgo and TravelOK.

Did you know this is the first year that the state of OK decided not to print copies of the annual Oklahoma Events Guide? Those in search of the paper guide are now sent to the TravelOK website, which isn’t too bad.

The CasaDeGeeks team is just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit before venturing out to explore OK. Maybe we’ll find a map to Candy Mountain and a Magical Liopleurodon who will tell us the secret of life.

Sorry Netizen Dave, I’m not falling for the FourSquare thing and neither should any of you out there!

I’m not going to check in every moment of my day to let my friends know I’ve:

• arrived at work
• am leaving work
• arrived at home
• eating lunch at kind-of-cafe-so-and-so
• stopped at quickie-mart to poo
• getting groceries
• stopping by Sancho’s house

That may sound ridiculous coming from an active Twitter user, but I don’t send tweets to update my whereabouts on a regular basis everyday. FourSquare is a definite way to get stalked. Go ahead. Tweet your location to your hearts content, but when you can’t get rid of that crazy hippie who follows you everywhere, don’t come crying to me!

“Remember that text you shouldn’t have sent last night? We do”
Under the influence and texting… What has the world come to? Texts From Last Night posts portions of text message conversations sent in which are funny, random, etc. All they ask is that you add the area code in front of the message to label them. They also send their updates to Twitter. I’m following them @TFLN.

Today is Earth Day and while most of me wants to join in on the idea that we humans need to clean up our act a little for a better environment, I am reminded by my hero, George Carlin, that the age of humans on earth has been minuscule in comparison to the rest of the Earth’s life. Earth will live on regardless of what we humans do. The condition in which Earth continues is another story. If it continues without humans, then perhaps it is just what the doctor ordered.

If you don’t already know, many Twitter users often link to friends’ Twitter pages and post something like “help my buddy @so-and-so get to 1,000 followers!”. That’s all fine and dandy, I do, however, find it even more amusing when two Twits decide to battle it out for the most followers. Actor Ashton Kutcher decided to challenge CNN for the most followers claiming he would ding-dong-ditch Ted Turner if he reached 1,000,000 followers. Here is Larry King’s video response:

I love King’s last words, “CNN will bury you! We will defeat you, we will”.