There were a couple 5 hours lines still on Saturday that I could have stood in, but honestly, would it really be worth that much time?

Ordered mine through AT&T; it should be here Friday.

I'm debating switching blog platforms off Windows Live Spaces. Does anyone have suggestions for the best platform to go to? pros? cons?

email me.

I use Del.icio.us for my bookmarks so that I can always access them anywhere. It's always irritated me though that there was no plug-in for Safari. I used Firefox more often simply because of that handy feature.

Well, it turns out someone figured out how to make it work in Safari as a menu item. Check out Delicious Safari.

With Google Street View cars roaming the top cities nationwide, they're bound to catch some funny events. I've seen cranes and vacant lots where houses are now and ghostly cars zooming by. But I've got a new favorite. It's bad enough you're being arrested, but then to have this happen...

If you want some more Street View fun, check out http://streetviewgallery.corank.com/.

Amazon's Kindle forums recently had good instructions on how to convert Microsoft Reader (.lit) files to Kindle's .prc format.

You can also simply email your Kindle a Microsoft Word doc and it'll convert it for you for $0.10 (pays for the Sprint wireless airtime I suspect.) I use this feature whenever I have a long technical document or user manual to read. It's much easier to get through a full document like that when you can do it a little at a time as you have time (and not always have to carry the specific book around with you.)

The one piece of utility software I need to find is a good .PDF to .PRC converter. There's a couple I've seen like PDFRead (Windows) that would probably work, but I'd love something simpler.

I use del.icio.us as my main bookmark store these days so that I can share the the links across machines and tag them. Since I moved to using Safari as my main browser both on the Mac and my work PC, I've been very frustrated by Safari's inability to have plug-in support for del.icio.us.

Fortunately, the "Gooracle" (the Oracle that is Google) was there to help. Here's a real easy trick using the Safari Bookmarks Bar to both post pages to del.icio.us and to easily get access to your bookmarks.

The transformation is complete. WIth the addition of our new Tivo HD, I'm finally able to download the Tivo shows to my Mac for viewing in my office or on the road. With some creative Automator scripting, I've got it converting from .Tivo files to .MPG so that they can be played on other devices.

I have officially retired the last Windows Vista PC in my possession. The Media Center box has been decommissioned thanks to the new Tivo.

I was excited to see a hint on Mac OS X Hints to get your Exchange address book into the Mac's native Address Book application. Unfortunately I struck out trying to get it to work.

I did read somewhere else about AddressX, an address sync engine for Exchange and Mac's Address Book. I tried it out and voila! My first 25 corporate global address list contacts are now in the Address Book under Exchange Contacts. I forked out the $19.95 for the full version and it allowed me to quickly download the full global address list from Exchange into my Address Book.

A quick connect of my Blackberry and sync with Missing Sync, and I am all set. My work contacts, phone numbers and email addresses are all in my Blackberry now. Mission accomplished. Follow-up: Address X and Missing Sync didn't do duplicate detection, so the address I had manually created before had two copies now in my Address Book and Blackberry. Not a huge deal since I only had a view manually created ones. Also, the Company field got strangely filled in with company and city, but again, something I can live it.

Had a rough Mac week a little while ago. OSX would randomly crash or just lock up on me for no apparent reason. After one of the reboots, I was created with a lovely flashing ? icon meaning the Mac couldn't find the startup disk.

After a repair from the Leopard install DVDs, things were back to normal, but a pain in the butt to deal with and cost me at least half a day to get around this issue.

Still no idea on the root cause.

I received one of the new $5 bills in change the other day which prompted myself and a coworker to wonder how they did the rumored anti-counterfitting protection. So I thought I'd try it out. I tossed the new $5 and an old $5 into the scanner we have at work to see what would happen.

The results were surprising. It didn't scan correctly. You can see what I got back here.

Deke McClelland said... "My understanding is that it works like this: In cooperation with governments, security, and software firms, the International Bank has devised an elaborate matrix of recognizable patterns that may be embedded into the design of paper currency. The matrix includes the yellow circles mentioned earlier, as well as a variety of lightly colored waving lines and subtly patterned background images. This matrix has worked its way into the new US bills, as well as all Euros, English pound notes, and who knows how many other currencies. The International Bank petitions tech developers such as Adobe to incorporate its scan detection protocol. Adobe added it to Photoshop, which satisfied all parties, but omitted it from ImageReady and other Adobe apps. Hence the potential for madcap humor in dekePod.

Given the fair-use options, and the many workarounds (the one I show in dekePod is just one of several), I am skeptical of software's ability to limit counterfeiting. Those that have successfully counterfeited money have done much more than scan it, clean it up in Photoshop, and print it two-sided on sheets of 20-pound bond. The real savvy bad boys weave and watermark their own paper and print the ink in layers, frequently using old-school presses. I might recommend spending less effort constraining fair-use activities and more effort looking for guys who are etching lithgraphic plates to resemble real money."

Pretty interesting and cool.