It seems everywhere I go today, I see people showing off their iPhones. Of course, I know it is because of where I live, but they seem to be lying out on restaurant tables everywhere in the valley. At Mashup Camp 4 which I am attending this week, of course, there are a bunch of people with them.

I finally got to play with one yesterday for about 10 minutes. Honestly, I was not blown away. The screen is beautiful. The device is thin. And yet it is just huge compared to my Blackberry Pearl. I would really worry about dropping an iphone and damaging the screen. I wasn’t excited about the onscreen keyboard. I tried the safari browser. It is cool. I tried out the phone, calendar, camera and other features. They are nice but I didn’t see anything so revolutionary that inspires me to run out and spend $500 to $600 for one. Maybe if you never had a smart phone this would be amazing breakthrough, but otherwise for me I think it is just a fashion statement.

I just think there is an amazing amount of good educational video now available on the web. I was talking with a friend a few months back who is starting a business to sell videos online to teach simple tasks like tying a man’s tie, and other common tasks. I am not sure if you could really sell something like that with all the videos on YouTube but anyway…I can see where he was coming from. Here are some videos I found interesting.

Google Tech Talks (Google engEDU) The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less and The Graphing Calculator Story both of which are non technical but fascinating. Other good ones IMO include An Introduction to SQLite and Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

I also like Peepcode has good software engineering videos on Ruby on Rails programming. These are not free however.

I was talking with my friend Ellen today who just launched a new website this March called “Bits du Jour.� This is a one day discount site where you can get incredible deals on software. It is similar to the popular woot.com, except that Bits du Jour is focused on software. Bits du Jour got mentioned last week in the Wall Street Journal. Ellen has done a great job on bringing up this site. I love the look of it. If you want some great deals, or have downloadable products to sell, check it out!

Several people who have come to my new office have admired this product I found while surfing OfficeDepot.com. I think it is great. I love whiteboards, and I needed a couple, but I didn’t want to put holes in the wall of the office that I am subleasing. Voila with 3M Post-it Super Sticky Whiteboard Sheets you can create an instant whiteboard! Just unroll them and post on the wall wherever you want a whiteboard. Available in sizes up to 48″ x 30″. The only downside is that they are not magnetic and they don’t have trays where you can leaves the pens at the boards.

I think this is just weird but delicious so I am passing it on. I ate pork rinds as a kid, and I still enjoy them. If you like pork rinds too, then you will love microwave pork rinds. Yes, that’s right, there are microwave versions just like microwave popcorn. I had no idea anyone made such a thing! I happened to discover this snack a few months ago when I was at a client’s office. And while I haven’t seen these for sale in supermarkets, you can find them online from many vendors. They come out really good.

I am so done shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. The last few days I just had too many frustrating experiences. What a waste of time! I got a copy of the movie Sahara from Peerflix, which is a pretty cool service by the way, but it wouldn’t play and I really want to see the movie so I was a Target and checked to see if they had a copy in the video section. I would’ve bought it even at full price, which really doesn’t make a lot of sense, but they were sold out. Then on my way home I stopped at a store called The Learning Center to pick up some addition flash cards for my son. Of course, they had every flash card imaginable, but were sold out of addition. Finally today, I needed a four foot card table, so I went Office Depot and, of course, they were sold out of four foot card tables. What a nightmare for them because instead of coming back later or buying something else, I’m just going to buy these items directly on the Internet and most likely from someone else with cheap or free delivery, no sales tax, and a lower price.

Recently, I’ve even been shopping for groceries on the Internet. I happen to have a computer in my kitchen and it’s super convenient order food from Safeway.com right there in my kitchen where I can see exactly what I have and what I don’t have. They also remember what you purchased before. And they don’t charge by weight so if you want to order 10 heavy cases of water just go for it. Finally, last month, I signed up for Amazon Prime. This is the new service you pay Amazon like $80 a year and get free two-day shipping on everything you buy. At first I thought this didn’t make a lot of sense. Actually now I think this is a great program, because I buy a lot of things on Amazon and I don’t know about you, but I at least often fall into the trap of buying extra items to bring my shopping cart total over $25 to get the “freeâ€? shipping. A lot of these extra items I’d buy just get the “freeâ€? shipping I really don’t need to buy at that time so it’s a waste of money and then anyway the free shipping usually takes a week or more to get to me which is very frustrating.

I don’t have time to write a review of this product, but I attended a talk about Yahoo! APIs on Monday and the speaker featured the Yahoo! Widgets. The widgets add helpful floating tools on your Mac or Windows desktop. Previously, this product was called Konfabulator and sold for $20 before it was acquired. Now they are free which is very nice of Yahoo!. These widgets are part of Yahoo!’s plans to start getting stuff onto your desktop, but that is the subject of another post. There is also a whole gallery of free add-on widgets. I am going to mention them here before I totally forget about them. These widgets are cool, and they look great.

This weekend I attended Webzine 2005 a 2 day conference in San Francisco about independent online publishing. I was totally blown away by this conference. I felt like I was back in college (I think the average age at the event was less than 25), and I realized that while I have been sleeping the past few years, the world of online publishing and the Internet has been transformed. The energy at this conference was great and the people were all very cool. The conference only cost $22 (!) which I think was an unbelievable value for the level of information provided. I highly recommend this conference to anyone next year.

There were sessions, workshops, and panels on podcasting, video blogging, building communities, etc. One speaker had just come back from Iraq and New Orleans and showed some incredible raw pictures. I got to meet a lot of bloggers and learn about their projects and websites. I posted some photos from the event here, and you can also find more under tag "webzine2005" on flickr, or technorati "Webzine 2005". By the end of the conference, I got really excited about video blogging, and so I am going to transform this website in a video blog going forward. Text is so 90s. I will be working on that this week.

I installed this also. Seems extremely simplistic. Of course, I wasn’t blown away by gmail at first, and now I really like it. If any of you are on GoogleTalk connect to me so we can try it. I only got a couple of you early adopters on it so far… You should have my @gmail.com address. If not, email me for it.

Installed Skype a few days ago. Maybe I am too late on this trend…. I was impressed with how it went through my Outlook looking for other Skype members. I was surprised however that it found only 4 other users out of all my tech saavy, earlier adopter friends. Hmm. If you are on Skype, let me know. Once I get some more people to talk to, I will post something about the experience of using it and whether it is worth using IMHO.

Flickr rocks and you can find my Flickr photos here http://www.flickr.com/photos/vgraupera/

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Test post from email!

Vidal,