Geek test asistance requested :

Telephone me via Google Voice at no cost

Sure, I know, you actually have to be in the mood to say a few words.  It’ll come to ya

To email me please use this form and don’t forget to select “John” in the pulldown menu. Thanks!

Feeling hungry this evening?  From the ACLU : Pizza of the future?

Primary social thing == FaceBook : 

Honorable mentions : FriendFeed and Twitter

Besides Dilbert, this was pretty good :

And for the MMO game playing folks : A repost from friend Jim – pretty funny.

Don’t hesitate to add your favorites; hadn’t listed to this in some time. Primal. Early. Energy.

Xmarks Blog » Xmarks for Chrome! from the folks at https://www.xmarks.com/

This is some awesome sauce. Since I really don’t have any links that I don’t care to share with the world, not too worried about storing them “out there” on the cloud, so to speak.

I’ve been using this since early in the days of “Foxmarks” and found the sync to work well; it’ll be even better now that they’ve added yet another browser.

Backup your browser data! Good recommendation from their Beta page.  my.xmarks.com I’ve used this on occasion to check something outside of a browser.

We’ve been swamped with requests to create a version of Xmarks for the Google Chrome browser. We’re hard at work on that and, thanks to some new APIs from Google, are pleased to report that we have Xmarks synchronization working in the Windows developer channel for Chrome. The Chrome extension platform is still far from complete and our initial alpha release has many rough edges, but for you brave (and very vocal) early adopters, we wanted to get this into your hands sooner rather than later.

We’re happy to invite you to test our early alpha release of Xmarks for Chrome. The extension will synchronize your Chrome bookmarks across computers running Firefox, IE, Safari and/or Chrome. Just like our other versions, Xmarks for Chrome works quietly in the background to keep all your bookmarks the same on all of your browsers.

If you’re interested in participating in the alpha test please sign up.  This is a closed alpha, which means that you won’t be able to install the extension immediately. After signing up we’ll email you when you’ve been accepted into the program – we do this for scaling and stability reasons.

Sign up to alpha test Xmarks for Chrome

Please remember that this is an alpha release only:  it does not include support for your own server, sync profiles, or our discovery features. A full list of recent changes and known issues can be found on the Xmarks for Chrome news page.

After giving it a try, please visit our GetSatisfaction forum for feedback and feature requests. We’d love to know what you think!

You can also keep tabs on our Chrome progress by following Xmarks on Twitter: twitter.com/xmarks.

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen spoke at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference on Thursday May 31, 2007. All speakers have a video that plays before they take the stage. Chad and Steve decided this would be the perfect time to tell “The Real Story” of how the company was founded. Hope you enjoy.

YouTube founders – intro to Wall Street speech

If anyone has any great links to any detailed comparisons / reviews of online backup packages, I’d appreciate any comments / links to those.  Heck, I’ll take direct recommendations.

While there are a bajillion articles / comparisons between the following (and more) :

• Mozy
• Carbonite
• Backblaze
• SugarSync
• IDrive
• SpiderOak
• IBackup
• Elephant Drive
• Box.net
• SafeCopyBackup
• MemoPal
• HP Upline [defunct]

I am looking for something that dives into the tech specs. http://www.onlinebackupsreview.com/compare.php is an awesome start, but it is geared towards folks like my mom (bless her, she just isn’t ready to do command line craziness; she’s one of possibly the smarter users who just wants her computer to simply work, hah!)

I have tested a few of these, but am looking for no cost per GB, understanding that backups will be relatively slow across an ADSL upload link.

Other desired features : you get to keep your own encryption key, at the risk of losing it, and thus losing access to your remote backup data.

I really wish there were an option between the ≈ $5 per month, and the “you’re about to pay fifty cents per gig” paths.  Ahem.  Thinking that one of these bright companies could sell a package along the lines of “more technical interface, less painful file selection, slightly faster speeds either way, $10 per month”.  No idea how much market is here, but I’d buy that for sure, as I dreamily consider myself a “power user”.  And Stuff™.

I’m perfectly willing to consider options other than those companies listed above.  I’m one of those users that believes backups need to be done redundantly, even at home.  Once you’ve been through the loss of family photos, etc. you usually end up on the “better safe than sorry” end of the equation.

J.

P.S.  Random added value – for a ton of cool WordPress things, have a look at this site : http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/04/26/import-and-display-rss-feeds-in-wordpress/

Expect a good bit more here.

OpenDNS system status

SEO Tools and Software – SEO Site Checkup

Pretty good stuff.  ShareWare, via Chai donation.  Gotta love it!