While I don’t really like pimping my pieces here, this one seems to have a universal appeal to everyone out there. 70+ Tools For Job Hunting 2.0. Frankly, I was amazed how specific some of the sites can get! I mean, who would have ever thought there is a job sites JUST for nannies?

I had no clue Dinner For Five was getting a complete DVD set until last night! Best.Birthday.Present.To.Myself.EVER!

If you aren’t familiar with this series, it aired for four seasons on IFC. The premise was simple: Jon Favreau would invite four people from various parts of the entertainment industry to have dinner, and it was filmed. While this sounds odd, it was the most brilliant “talk show” ever.

Everyone has had those dinner conversations where topics just naturally flow one in to the other , you open, you discuss things you might not in any other setting, this just happened to be caught by cameras. Never once did Iget the feeling anyone was overly aware of the cameras, they were just five people having amazing conversations about the things they loved, and sharing anecdotes you would never hear on late night talk shows. (Sarah Silverman and Rod Steiger discussing smoking pot comes to mind.)

If you look through the episode guide, you’ll see that some of the invited guests are people you would never imagine being in the same room together, but food is such a common bonding element, they would all seem like old friends by the end of the episode. The only time you could tell things didn’t go as planned was the numerous appearances of Faizon Love, a close friend of Favreau’s. He was hilarious, and I always enjoyed him, but you could also tell it was an “Oh crap, someone can’t make it… call Faizon!” moment.

Amazon is selling it for $41.99, and it contains 49 episodes. Seriously, I know this sounds like a very odd show, and it was, but if you love movies, if you love dinner with good friends, there is no DVD set more deserving of your money.

And how did I ring in my 36th birthday? Why, by writing blogs abouts WordPress plugins. Good signs for my new year on Earth!

Happy birthday to my birthday buddy, Isabella, too!

Well… this feels odd making another post like this, but…

I got another job.

I know, I just posted yesterday about joining tech.blorge.com, and now, I’ve joined up with Mashable.com, another tech blog, but different in its own ways. Not sure what all this writing will do to my everyday blogging, but we’ll see.

My first post on Mashable is here.

Well, it’s kinda close, but not quite. Head over to Simpsonize Me and upload a picture of yourself to get going.

A little while back I made a post about having joined the website SeeJackShop.com as a writer. Well, I’m still there, but now I can announce I have also joined the staff of Tech.Blorge.com. You can check out my very first post here, it’s about the new BlackBerry 8820 that was just announced. (I want this SO bad)

This is going to be a daily gig, but the pieces are fairly short, so it shouldn’t be much of a strain. I am also in talks with another site that I just sent a sample piece to. If I get that one, I’m going to stop looking around as I think three sites will be enough work on top of my day job!

I have to admit I am a little shocked at how well this has fallen together. I’ve been looking for a little less than a month for professional writing jobs, and I’ve landed two for sure. Color me surprised.

And, by the way, Shari asked me in her comments if these were “real jobs” where I am actually handed money… yes… they are.

Portions of the blogosphere are buzzing with the prospect of a move away from traditional email services, to a more enclosed messaging system like the one Facebook offers.

Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist from the Bay Area, did a recent write-up on the possibility of Facebook messaging being an email replacement. He notes two other bloggers saying the same, and they all sing the praises of the beauty of Facebook being the next killer system of communication.

They are correct on the lack of spam, but that is about where their correctness ends.

It is quite possible that Facebook could replace the one-line emails we all receive from friends, but that is probably where it will end. The corporate world will never embrace such a system, and unless you can get big business behind a technology push, it never has more hope than becoming a niche product.

They all tout the fact it is a closed system, and while tha’s nice, it also has some severe drawbacks. Are you going to tell a potential client or employer, “Yes, you can reach me, but first you need to login to Facebook… oh, you don’t have an account? Okay, well first you need to create one, and then…”. No, this scenario will never happen.

Email, for all its follies and faults, is still going to be around for a long time to come just due to it’s prominence and ease of use. It is far to easy to tell someone to reach me at myname@myemployer.com, then tell them they have to go login to a third party system that they don’t personally have any security control over.

Go, enjoy your Facebook messaging. Remember this though; it isn’t not the second coming, but instead, just another new toy you will grow bored with when the next shiny new thing comes along.

A little while ago I made a post that I would be doing sponsored posts every now and then. Don’t bother looking for it, I deleted it. This is not revisionist history as I am admitting here I did it, but, when the time came to pull the trigger and do my first one… I couldn’t.

Now, let me state, I am not slamming people who do them, more power to you, but I came to the conclusion it was not the right thing for THIS blog. I write many reviews on various forms of media, and if I started selling off such things, it would make all of my content questionable.  When I make a post like the Uniden Cordless Phones commentary, I want you to know I posted that out of a sincere love for the product, and not because someone paid me to do it.

Obviously I have no problem with monetizing a blog, as evidenced by the ads in my right column. They bring in next to no revenue, to be honest, if I get a sale a month, I’m amazed, but I believe in those merchants, so I have their ads up. If I start letting in any old advertisement, especially in the form of a post, it will cheapen my entire blog.

I also came to some conclusions about my feelings on blogging as of late, mainly due to my involvement in the Blog Project:Three contest; I need to take this more seriously. After four years of doing this, floundering for a direction, I have come to a point I need to add a more serious tone. Does this mean no more humor? Please, it’s me, do you think I can go more than a day without cracking wise? No, I can’t. I will, however, strive to sprinkle more posts of relevance here and there.

Another deciding factor for me was adding my Feedburner RSS Feed, showing me just how many people are subscribing to my feed. While the number is low currently, is it fair to them to fill their RSS inbox with what amounts to spam? No, it’s not. We all hate spam in the various forms it takes, and this would have been no better.

So, in short, it was silly of me to have even considered it, and it will not be happening on this blog at any point in the future.

Could someone please explain to me why people give a rat’s hiney what is pictured on their stamps? I mean, seriously, unless you’re a collector, you’re going to lick it, place it on an envelope, and never see the damned thing again!

Why do I rant about this? I despise going to the post office in the first place (see Luis? I did understand your pain!), but when the line is out to the lobby, and the person at one of the windows is going through every stamp… I want to kill them. “Well, what else ya got back there? Oh, that’s nice… well… I don’t know, let me see that first one again…” PICK A FREAKIN’ STAMP YOU IDIOT!

The ultimate insult? When they settle for the basic stamps… you know… the ones they could have bought from the machine in the lobby? Yeah… I love those people the most. They have a special place in my heart.

Luckily the postal service now offers free pickup service, and my trips to the post office have been reduced to once a month or so, but damned do those visits kill me.

Over the years, I have had more cordless phones for my landlines than I care to remember. A few years ago I got all excited by the idea of cordless phone bases with an expandable number of handsets. The first one I purchased was an AT&T system that left a lot to be desired. Difficult to register handsets, batteries that shook loose during normal usage, and generally uncomfortable to hold.

As with all technologies, things got better with time, and when it came time that I could no longer stand the AT&Ts, I was hearing good things about the Uniden TRU8866 system. Seeing as it was getting good reviews, operated in the 5.8GHz range, so as not to interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi, it seemed worth a try.

I love it. Not only do I have the system at work, I now also have it at home. Registering handsets doesn’t use some arcane system of entering a 12-digit number, you just drop the new handset (a TCX805 expansion handset) in the base, wait three seconds, it beeps at you, it’s registered. You can have up to ten handsets on each base, transfer phone books between them, give different ring tones to different numbers, and use it as an excellent intercom system.

The batteries are connected by wires inside the handsets as opposed to floating loose like the AT&T one’s did; so, no more battery slide while on the phone and losing my call! And the batteries are great, I had a 4-hour phone call the other night on one handset before it even started to act up, and at that point I just transfered the call to another handset.

I was also surprised to learn that it even works with my MCI Voicemail to blink and let me know I have a message waiting. Nice to know as I hated always picking up the phone to hear the beep tell me.

Now, the feature I have no way to test, but the mere concept interests me; supposedly this whole system is backwards AND forwards compatible with other Uniden phones.

I’m normally not one for saying glowing things about a product, just the opposite actually, but if you are still using a landline, or a VoIP system that allows you to use your own phones, I can’t recommend this system enough.

Roy recently wrote a piece about cleaning up his RSS feeds that got me to finally add Feedburner to run my own RSS feed. When you add in what I wrote in my blog contest entry about sparsely updated blogs, it got me to finally get off my butt and start adding the blogs I read to Google Reader.

I’m not entirely sure I like this.

I always understood the concept of RSS, and how it works, and, in theory, it’s a great idea. I do have a few nitpicks though:

1. Most bloggers work very hard on the look and feel of their blogs, this really minimizes the importance of the actual blog. So is all that work for naught? Does how your site looks even matter anymore? I *like* going to a blog and appreciating the work that has gone in to them.
2. Yes, it is nice to go just one place and see everything at a glance, but part of the fun of blogs for me is the surprise. Did they update? What magical treat is waiting for me when I click on those familiar links? Now it’s all just in one place and that doesn’t feel natural to me for some reason.

I know I am always singing the praises of technology, but I just don’t know if RSS is for me or not.

Anyone have thoughts to add on this?

You know, there are a lot of things I can do in this world.  I can assemble a brand new computer and have it on the network about ten minutes after UPS delivers it.  I can run two companies from the same desk.  I do a fair job at being a writer.  There is one place I fall flat on my face though.

Cars.

I’m lucky if I can remember where the gas goes, let alone doing anything technical.  So imagine my fun filled week when my main car, a 1999 Chevy Tahoe, had it’s battery die on me.

Now, I am sure you are saying, “Duh, Sean!  Just get some jumper cables and jump it!”  I tried that.  I suck at jumping a car and I never got it started.

Next up was the battery charger.  A-ha!  After two hours of running it on the charger, I got it started!

Now, two days later, it is sitting at work… dead again.  I have NO clue what’s wrong with it, and no clue why the battery died again.  And to make life more fun, it has to make a run to the east coast starting on Tuesday.

I hate cars.