iPhone ... outside of the US

While Apple's iPhone will work in other countries, if you use it on non-ATT network for two months in a row your account can get cancelled. It's in the AT&T terms of service document.

I know of at least one pair of iPhones destined for use in other countries. In about 60 days a few people are going to be very disappointed.

Microsoft Surface: Multi-touch technology for only $10,000

With all the hype surrounding Apple's new iPhone and it's multi-touch technology, it's easy to forget that multi-touch is not a technology strictly owned by Apple. According to Wikipedia.org, multi-touch has at least a 25-year history beginning back at the University of Toronto.

I was recently sent a link to a video that talks about Microsoft's Surface technology. (Microsoft Surface website)

The video was really impressive and I wondered if it has made it to YouTube yet. What I found at YouTube was a really, really good parody.

Microsoft's Surface Technology video

Parody of Microsoft Surface Video

What's really interesting to me is that this technology is definitely on the way to being common place in the near future ... well, I guess on the 29th, right?

First the iPhone, then the coffee table.

Create new passwords, as a rule

If you're anything like I am, you have dozens and dozens of user names and passwords. Right now, I have over 80 different accounts. I've got Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, Google Mail, AOL mail, Time Warner mail and various other web services, as well as traditional services, like online banking or credit card company accounts.

With so many different accounts, there is a big temptation to use the same password for every time you set up a new one. When you use the same user name and password everywhere you sign in online, if someone figures out your password they instantly have access to everywhere else you go online.

I recommend you use a different password on every site for which you have an account. Of course, you may be saying, "There's no way I can remember over 80 different passwords." I totally understand how you feel, but it can be done.

Would you believe me if I told you that I have a different password for practically every account I have online? I do.

Instead of making an arbitrary decision about what my password is going to be, I use a "password rule" that I made up myself to help me generate unique passwords for every place I have an account. In my case (now I'm not going to share my exact rule, because if I did, then you'd be able to generate all my passwords), I use a multi-part rule.

1. Something unique about the site I'm visiting (maybe reverse the letters of the site name, "Yahoo" might be "oohaY")
   
   
2. Something unique about me, like "browneyes" (this might stay the same across many sites)
   
   
3. Some other unique factor (maybe a color that starts with the first letter of the URL, in this case that would be "yellow.")
   

When you add up Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, you'll get a password that is fairly long, in this case we would get, "oohaYbrowneyesyellow," a 19-character password. Many of my passwords are more than 22 characters, but because I know my rule, I can quickly recreate my password without having to carry around a piece of paper.

Note: There's also a temptation to use the same user name for each account, though it's less dangerous if your passwords are different. You could use a similar strategy to create unique user names for each site.

Finding a winning blog toolset

Hello, reader, and welcome to ramblings from my stream of consciousness. Of course, at the moment I am only rambling to myself. And in my mind, you are merely fictitious.

So, I'm not a big blogger. As a matter of fact, I intentionally did not start blogging when blogging became the big thing to do. More accurately, blogging became the big thing to do, I found out about it a year or so later, and then I decided that I didn't have time or anything worth saying.

Table of contents

Enter the MacBook Pro
Enter iWeb
Enter Vox
Enter Flickr
My Requirements
My Solution

This post has turned out much larger than I expected, so I've added a handy table of contents just above this paragraph, in the event you want to skip all the ramblings and get down to the good stuff.

Enter the MacBook Pro
About a year ago I got a MacBook Pro, the 15" model. With my MacBook Pro I got a copy of iWeb. Thus began my first foray into the world of blogging. This lasted all of about 2 hours. I made a single post with the many photos I took of my MacBook Pro. (Truth be told, I was kind of excited and took way too many pictures of my Mac.)

Enter iWeb
What I liked about iWeb was that the interface was pretty. What I didn't like was that everything was too manual. iWeb is, essentially, a WYSIWYG editor. So, even though manipulating the page was simple, the underlying code iWeb generated was a bit on the coarse side. After two posts, I quickly lost interest.

Enter Vox
On December 14, 2006, I made my first post with Vox, created by the folks at Six Apart that have all the other cool web blogging services: Typepad, Live Journal, and Movable Type. At the time, Vox seemed to fit the bill. It was simple, yet robust. You could upload up to 2GB of photos directly to Vox each month. Included in the upload limit was the ability to also upload video. This solution seemed ideal.

The main focus for my Vox blog was to be a locus of family information, where I could direct people, family and friends, to visit and get caught up on our familial adventures. Now, there was always something happening, but after the honeymoon period with Vox my posts dwindled. Six weeks and 9 posts later the site lay dormant.

As luck -- or bad luck, my wife might say -- would have it, I had to go on a trip for work. Vox seemed an ideal choice for posting photos and keeping up with happenings on the trip, but I ran into some problems.

1. Vox does not currently have a photo uploader program for OS X to allow for easy uploading of lots of pictures
2. The web uploader is limited to just a few pictures per batch.
3. Though you can do group tagging, naming each photo must happen after the photos are posted.

So, after taking about 4 hours to upload, rename, and tag about 80 photos, I was ready for a different solution.

It important to note that whenever I think about using another web service I get a bit nervous. I have well over 60 accounts across various web sites and I don't want to have another password and user name to remember.

I decided that a photo-organizing site might work well for me. This would give me the advantage of being able to post without using any of my bandwidth limits for Vox. So, I'd be able to upload more video. As I saw it, my choices were Flickr, Google's Picasa Web Album, or Photo Bucket. I decided Flickr had the best UI.

Enter flickr.
In my opinion, Flickr is amazing. It is pretty intuitive, but more importantly, it just works.

As I began to explore Flickr, I realized I wanted more functionality and compatibility with Vox. There were a few things I wanted to do that Vox did not let me do:

1. I was limited to inserting links to individual photos and not sets of photos.
2. I could not insert either the Flash or HTML widgets on my Vox blog. The interface seemed to allow it, but the inserted widgets didn't work.
3. I didn't have enough control.
   

I love the Vox blog. It has many great features.

1. There are many professional templates to choose from.
2. The UI is very intuitive.
3. The 2GB upload limit renews each month, so there is virtually limitless storage.
4. You can upload all kinds of media.
   
5. There is a great community.

Vox is a place where I would send my mom to host her blog, no doubt about it. However, I do have some experience with web design; I used to develop sites in the early '90s. I simply outgrew Vox.

There was just one other thing that pushed me away from Vox. Search engines index all of their sites. There was no way to stop Google from indexing my Vox blog, so apart from never using any real names on the site. I was stuck.

My Requirements
After making the decision to move to another blog, I had to decide what was important to me. And, with very little poking around on the Web I realized I was going to need a multi-pronged approach to blogging on the web.

• Prong 1: Free.
  The services should be free, if possible. (This is generally a guiding principle for me.)
  
  
• Prong 2: Blogging software.
  The software should have a robust feature set, yet allow for behind the scene coding.
  
  
• Prong 3: Photo hosting. Flickr has that covered.
  
  
• Prong 4: Occasionally I want to upload video and a free video uploading service.
  
  
• Prong 5: Privacy, or at least the option to not be indexed on search engines.
  
  
• Prong 6: Interoperability. Each of the services should allow me to embed references to media at the least. On the other end of the spectrum, being able to blog directly from any one service to the others would be a huge plus.

My Solution
I have adopted the following solution, which happens to be free and meets all my criteria. The only exception is Flickr. Of course, you have the option to be free with Flickr, but there is a paid service also.

1. Blogger
2. Flickr
3. Google Video

I looked at WordPress, which was a free solution, but the uploading limits appear to be designed to drive users to their paid solutions. And, while Blogger has upload limits also, for photo hosting those limits are significantly bigger.

Note: With Blogger, you can maintain multiple blogs, something that Vox did not have as a feature. I never could have vocalized it before transitioning to Blogger, but I did always feel torn about what content could go on my Vox blog because it was a dedicated "family" blog. And, by definition, none of my ramblings had any place on that site. I did want to blog about other things outside of family, though there was no appropriate forum for that with my one Vox account. Multiple blogs is a big plus for Blogger. And, in all fairness, WordPress seems to have a similar feature.

Of course, having a Google account already meant I didn't have to set up yet another user name and password.

Upon further review, I could have used an entirely Google solution for my blogging strategy, Blogger, Picasa Web Album, and Google Video, but I couldn't resist the lure of Flickr.