Masculine and feminine in French

Masculine and feminine in French is driving me nuts – grrrr :(

Having said that Rosetta Stone is a great application to use – it’s actually going far better than I ever thought it would – check it out here on Amazon.com ( Rosetta Stone French Level 1, 2 & 3) if you have ever thought of learning another language.


Cheers,
Dean

Social Distortion - can you believe it they are still touring!!?

I was listening to some Social Distortion on my computer this morning while i worked and it came back how much i really enjoyed their music.

I went online to check how many cd's of theirs i didn't own and noticed on their website it had a section for "tour dates" !!! WTF? I thought these guys were all old and dead. I had no idea they still toured.

Can you imagine how cool it would be to see them in Buenos Aires - apart from the fact that i'm going to France for a month in May i would seriously consider flying there just to see them.

I found this clip on You Tube from June 2009 in Sweden and it looks like they rock and are still as tight as ever.




And in case you've never had the lucky benefit of someone exposing you at an early age to the beat fueled rush of 110 bpm punk i uploaded a few of their tracks to the song music of the day box on the bottom right.

There is a reason that their albums get 95% 5 star votes on Amazon - Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, White Light, White Heat, White Trash, Live at the Roxy

I also uploaded one of my favorite tracks below - no matter how young you are, you can lose someone close to you in an instant and regret things not said forever.





Cheers,
Dean

Peter Fucking Pan

Something hit me tonight, i was in the subway listening to my grunge music on the overpriced klipsch headphones of my cutting edge android phone, wearing my brand new nikes-slightly aged levis with black pure wool jacket and scarf all rugged up against the cold - looking very much the urban middle aged male.

I was thinking to myself - i love this age in my life, I'm young enough to enjoy it, make enough money for any toys i want, old enough to be totally comfortable with myself - basically feeling very swish as i walked through to cold night in New York on my way to a "Web 2.0 Startup" meeting.

I love being Peter fucking Pan. Basically that ageless man-boy who gets to do anything he wants, whenever, and however.

It's one of the reasons i decided a long time ago not to have children. Basically there are lots of people on the earth already/with the singularity fast approaching we dont need more people - but realistically i like getting up on Sundays at 10am, making scrambled eggs for breakfast and just hanging out with no need to run anyone to soccer practise or ballet.

Then it hit me as i was in the subway, there were 6 other guys in the subway that, with slight variation, all looked exactly the same, all over educate-over paid-(over sexed?), middle aged, slightly trendy, man-boys with no real struggle in our lives, none of us have to get up at dawn to draw water from the well, or crush grain to make bread, or worry will my crops fail in the spring.

The biggest issue most of us have in our lives at the moment is do i buy the 120hz or 240hz LCD big screen tv's.

I'm not sure what it means, should i have had kids, should i do more with my life, is building yet another website a big waste of time and i should do more volunteer work in a local shelter or should i throw it all in, volunteeer for the Geekcorps and go to Africa for the ultimate sacrifice?


Cheers,
Dean

Tweet CPM's

Interesting article in Business Week; http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_03/b4163031536324.htm


My comment below;
"Top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views; even remnant inventory, leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks, goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand".

Lol - when you get back to reality let me know.
The current rates are closer to $5 and $0.25 pcm (unless you are counting pages that load up 10 ads to a page).
I think 3c per 1000 tweets is a little overpriced by about a factor of 10.
Randomly read some tweets and scan the 30 or so that appear per browser page, information that can be gleaned from that page is probably worth about that.
 
So what do you think? how much would the information you can glean from tweets be worth to you?

If you could slice and dice data to track interactions/mentions/user sentiment the way you wanted it - what commercial information could you gain?


Cheers,
Dean

Australian newsreaders

Lol i just saw Stan Grant hosting a new 30 minute news show called 'Prism' for cnn international.

It's crazy how many Australian news readers are on here in the USA - Rosemary Church is also on cnn international and about 3-4 aussie reporters globally on the CNN American channel.

They seem to be trialing an aussie host on CNBC in a regular gig weekday mornings (dont know her name).

Is there a certain clarity or neutrality to the Australian accent that is the reason they are being hired?


Cheers,
Dean

Nexus QR code

So the Google Nexus has a QR code on the back ....and what does it lead to....?  http://2d-code.co.uk/google-phone-qr-code

A stupid Google game - lol what a waste you think it could link to something interesting. I was hoping that they finally built webservers into the android platform and the qr code lead to an on handset webserver for that particular handset (eg all the qr codes were customised to a unique identifier which lead to a no-ip.com style dynamic dns platform which lead to the handset).

.....if you know anyone at google in the android division please feel free to pass my idea along and send them my address for a demo unit.

Lets face it - it's almost been 5 years since the Savage gsm handset was deployed with on handset webserver capability.

(but hey google if a memory game is the best you could come up with feel free to hire me to help you out next time).


Cheers,
Dean

Build companies for profit

I like the comments around the 30 minute mark about building a company for profit.


http://mixergy.com/jason-cohen-smart-bear/
In this interview, you'll hear why he wanted to sell his business, and how he prepared for a sale as he built up his business. You'll learn how he founded it from scratch, with no venture funding and no debt. And you'll get his advice for how you can build your business.

The Road

Went to see "The Road" last night at the Sunshine Cinema on Houston;
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/

It was amazingly shot with great cinematography, you didn't feel that there was any post processing in the visuals to make the scenes so grey (but there had to have been). Some of the canabilism scenes were a little gruesome and it was really interesting hearing people talking about the differences in the book.

I'm not sure everyone will like it, but if you are a fan of movies with long 60 second pans and closeup window to the soul of the actors kind of moviews you'll love it. Currently has an 8.1 on IMDB.


Cheers,
Dean
P.S. my experience was slightly ruined by the woman who sat next to me, obviously bored with the movie but her date was enjoying it so she proceeded to eat an entire supersized bag of popcorn (crunch crunch crunch, rustle rustle) lol including tipping the bag up over her head to sweep out the last crumbs from the bottom - then sat there for 5 minutes fidgeting before getting up to go and buy another supersize bag of popcorn again lifting the bag for the last vestiges of cancer causing butter flavor enhancement. She was this super skinny waif chick and it would have been funny if it wasn't such a serious movie.

I gave her date the look of death as we were leaving and the response from his eyes was "yeh i know"......lol.

Android Business Card Recognition camera software

I just came across this Android business card recognition software software company called Intsig recently and was sent a trial beta version about two months ago. They have just launched the full version for $14.99


Try the trial download first as they email you a %15 discount.


Hi Dean,


We've published BCR for Droid on http://www.mobihand.com/ProductPreview.asp?hide=true&id=42568&gnContentType=1

Thanks
Samuel


The business card recognition is great and exactly what i was looking for, there seems to be a small problem with it inserting 0 in front of the telephone numbers on the version i tried but that hopefully will be fixed with an update.

Their UI for editing is perfect in that it shows you the portion of text when you go to edit the field.

Great price for a one off service unlike the monthly off handset processing charges some of these apps are looking to charge you for.

Not sure about how we are supposed to download updates seeing it's not being offered through the android app store.
 
 
Cheers,
Dean

Re-Targeting ads

It's amazing to see the takeoff of banner ad "re-targeting", currently at Live Chat Concepts we dont use re-targeting but in my own personal browsing etc i see it's use everywhere.

In case you haven't noticed "banner re-targeting" is where you might browse Amazon or Best Buy for a particular item, then at a later date when you are browsing the NY Times you might see a Best Buy banner advertising that exact same item you were just browsing for 3 days ago.

It's no fluke that this particular ad was displayed to you. Through the use of cookies and other methods you were personally selected to see that ad.

For example i'm about to replace my computers keyboard. For a particular reason I'm after a keyboard from Logitech called the G11 that hasn't been made by them for the last 2 years. It took a while to find a retailer who had a new one in stock (hong kong) so i had to visit a lot of companies with Logitech keyboards (current model is G15 and G19) so about 1/20 banner ads i see at the moment is an ad for Logitech keyboards due to re-targeting.

Whats really interesting is that they aren't necessarily ads from the same websites i visited - makes me wonder what else they are sharing between each other.


Cheers,
Dean