Every year communication seems to get easier. Well maybe not, but it should right? Being a tech geek, I am pretty well connected. I can be reached with: AIM, Yahoo IM, Jabber IM, Skype IM, home phone, cell phone, work phone, SkypeIn phone, and countless email addresses. While that sounds ridiculous to some of you, it’s not as unusual as you think. Applications like Trillian do a good job of combining chat services, but what do you do about phone numbers? Enter my new favorite startup, GrandCentral.

GrandCentral’s tag line is “One Number…For Life”. And that is exactly what you get. When you sign up for an account, you get to pick a traditional phone number. It seems they have expanding coverage based on their blog, and I had no problem getting a number in my local area code. You then record your voicemail message (this will also become your only voicemail btw) and even upload and MP3 for people to listen to as a ringtone when they call your phone. Next you will add entries for each of your current phones. For me, I have my home phone, my cell and SkypeIN which I use (primarily) via my Sony Mylo. That’s it for setup. It took me 10 minutes to do, most of which was searching for the proper ringtone.

Now have someone call your new GrandCentral number. Since this is the first time they are calling from that number, they will be asked to record their name. (And a contact in the address book is automatically created!) Then all of your specified phones will ring (preserving their caller ID). You can pick up any of your phones and will get a message stating: “You have a call from..”, and the person’s recorded name. You can press 1 to answer the call, or send the call to voicemail. One of the premium services available during the beta period allows to you to send them to voicemail, and listen as they leave their message. You can press a key to interrupt the message and jump into the conversation. Awesome - call screening has officially gone high tech.

So let’s say you decide to answer your home phone and 10 minutes into the call you need to leave the house. Normally you would have to call the person back from your cell. With GrandCentral, just tell the caller to hold, press *, and your other phones will ring. Pick up your cell and continue the conversation.

Your voicemail notification comes via email, and the web interface is awesome. After using the beta for 2 days I am sold. I will be a life long customer. When I am at work, I have no cell signal and have to go VoIP with SkypeIN. When I am in the car, no VoIP so cell is the communicator of choice. And when I am at home, incoming calls are free so I might as well pick that phone up. Until now, everyone would call my cell at all times. I can’t expect them to keep my 3 numbers and know when to call which. Thank you GrandCentral. You have really made my life easier.

A couple suggestions for GrandCentral to tackle: (UPDATED based on reading their FAQs)

• Scheduling Options - Right now, all I can find is a checkbox that stops my home phone from ringing from 8a to 6p. What if I don’t work those hours? What if I want my home phone to ring from 5-6a, then my cell and my SkypeIN from 6-7a, etc. I’d bet that a cool little GUI could be made for this.
• Voicemail Notification Options - There seems to be SMS and email notification options. Personally, I’d prefer IMs. I use IM constantly, and have multiple applications notify me of things via IM. I’d imagine others would appreciate IM notifications as well.
• SMS forwarding - I’d hate to have to give out “one phone number” that didn’t forward the SMSs to my IM, cell phone, and/or email. (UPDATE - “We’re not compatible with standard text message services (yet), but it’s definitely on our road map.”)
• Number of rings based on device - I have an answering machine at home and voicemail on my cell. I don’t want them picking up the “You have a call from” calls and recording them. I also don’t want to set them to pickup for 10 rings, as people will still call me on those numbers. If I could specify how many rings for each of my devices I could avoid this entirely. (UPDATE - While I wouldn’t consider this a solution but more of a workaround, GrandCentral says: “GrandCentral will disconnect a call from your forwarding numbers after it is answered if no action (pressing 1, 2, 3 or 4) has been taken within 15 seconds. Therefore, to prevent the GrandCentral message from being recorded by your cell (or other) voicemail systems, all you have to do is record a voicemail greeting that is at least 15 seconds in length, before the beep.”)

An Integrated service for anyone to tackle:

I don’t want another address book. I don’t want to export mine from outlook. I don’t want to import mine into Thunderbird. I don’t want Gmail to try and build one for me. I want one that is easy to use and compatible with multiple devices. Think del.icio.us style. Let my phone automatically pull my contacts down from the internet. Let my computer do that too. And let me provide account info so GrandCentral can do it. Let me right-click any email address and add it as a contact with a contextual menu. Same with a phone number. I now have one app for IM and one phone number. One address book please. I am willing to put work on this project if someone else is willing to be the primary. People will use this. Google do you hear me?

If you are like me, you have a “million dollar idea” every day. Leave it to Google to allow you to quickly and easily find out that all of those ideas have already been patented, and send you back to the drawing board. Once again you rain on my parade Google! I demand that you develop Google Psychatrist Beta to help me deal with the pain!

Note - While there are many entries about implanting RFID tags into food, I don’t see any plans that use sensors in the sewers allowing customers to track their poop via website. Time to start looking at domain names…..

I have been following a startup auto company called Tesla Motors for almost a year now. Most of you who come here likely know this already, because there was a period of a couple months where I would talk about this company to anyone who would listen. Anyway, I made a mental note to put something on my blog about Tesla when I had a minute. I have a minute.

How can you start up a competitive car company in the U.S. market? Many would say you can’t, but I think Tesla Motors has found just the right mix to pull it off. How they are doing it:

New Blood - Tesla was founded by Silicon Valley veterans Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. Sure many people are innovative, so what’s different here? No industry ties. Big auto and big oil have a great relationship. The automakers produce inefficient, oil-bound cars, and the oil industry keeps pumping out the black gold. These guys don’t have that 100 year friendship lurking over them. They can be truly innovative.

Style - They started out by manufacturing a roadster. I can’t think of a better way to get your picture in the paper and into the office watercooler conversations. The car is slick. Unlike many of it’s electric predecessors, It doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Technology - The Tesla roadster runs on an electric motor. This may turn off a lot of people, but for the new generation of car buyers, a car that is both at the forefront of technology and takes up a smaller environmental footprint brings it to the top of their list. And by the way, it goes 0-60 in about 4 seconds, fast enough to toast almost every gasoline engine auto. 130 mph top speed and 250 miles to the charge too.

Electricity - Tesla is making the ultimate “flex fuel” vehicle. It seems like everyday there is a new “fuel of the future” (biomass, ethanol, hydrogen, etc.). Look at the clamor that is created when someone mentions “peak oil”. Let’s face it; We are dependent on cheap, reliable energy. Why not electricity? The means to create and deploy it already exists. The infrastructure is already there. Take the billions of dollars it would cost to develop, produce, and and promulgate a new fuel like hydrogen and put it into the electrical grid. The best part? Electricity can be created from any fuel, and quite efficiently (comparatively) as well. Let’s say hydrogen becomes the best option in the future. Why replace the millions of cars on the road, when we can produce new generators at the power stations? Solar and wind energy can be used as well. I don’t know what energy sources we will be using in 50 years. Maybe fission reactors will become a reality. What I do know is that they will generate electricity. And if you can keep the rust off your Tesla roadster, you will still be driving it.

Batteries - There was a quote from one of the founders that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording but it went something like this: “Let Sony and Dell make better batteries. Then we’ll put them in our cars.” Battery life has been one of the biggest downfalls with the electric car. Electric cars are have a minuscule market (for now). This means R&D funding is minimal. Small electronics, cell phones and portable computers however have a huge market. These guys would kill for a better battery. Lots of R&D money. Tesla can capture that benefit without the investment, and their timing couldn’t be more perfect.

Downsides - They are always there. Usually at the bottom of the article. Luckily, these downsides are pretty manageable. The Tesla roadster charges in “as little as 3.5 hours.” With the 250 mile range, plugging it in at night will work just fine almost always. However, If you wanted to take a cross country drive, it would be handy to get a full charge while you stopped for a meal. Technological innovation should take care of this. That portable electronic market is no doubt funding this technology as well. The car costs $100,000. As much as I want one, I won’t be buying one anytime soon. The good news is that it would cost almost that much to make a Toyota Camry if they were only building 100 units a year. With mass production comes affordability. Tesla just needs to get through to that stage, and the cost woes will disappear.

In Conclusion - I sure hope they do. They seem to have all their ducks in a row as far as I can tell. They are selling out their limited numbers like hotcakes, and have a more affordable sedan that should be launching next year. If these guys go public, buy some stock. Not only will you help bring the price point down, you just might make enough money to buy a Tesla Roadster. After all, two of their main investors are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and I hear they know a thing or two about making good decisions.

Hey Tesla motors, when you are ready to open the doors at the Chicago sales office and need an enthusiastic salesman, or if you just want to take me for a ride in the roadster let me know. A guy can hope can’t he?

Spam sucks. Canned meat, email, all of it. What is it? Why do we get it? What can I do about it? Read on.

What is spam?

The definition of spam is argued regularly. Because I will be specifically speaking on the subject of email, we can at least narrow down the definition a little. Three categories come to mind In regard to email spam.

• Bulk – the copy of the message you received was sent out en masse to many people at once.
• Unsolicited – You never agreed to receive the message.
• Automated – There isn’t someone frantically typing all of these messages; They are automatically created by a computer.

To say that any email fulfilling one of those categories is always spam is an overstatement. I receive automated emails every day that help me do my job. To say that any email fulfilling two of those categories is somewhat accurate, but what about those messages you get from your favorite retailers informing you of a new sale. Those messages are both bulk and automated, but not spam. However, if an email fulfills all three of these categories (bulk, unsolicited, automated) you can be almost certain it is spam. What is the purpose of spam? It has many faces, but the root intent of most spam is to separate the recipients with their hard earned money.

Why is it so bad lately?

I recently heard an estimate that 9 out of 10 emails are spam. How can this be? I send out approximately 20 emails a day. That means that there are 180 equivalent spam emails going out? It used to be a few messages here and there – what happened?

Costs went down. In the beginning, spammers were using remedial programs to generate text-based messages from their own computers. All of these messages required a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth is costly. In addition, these messages weren’t too hard to block. Nowadays, spammers use botnets. A botnet is a network of computers. These computers can be scattered all over the world. They have a backdoor maliciously inserted by a virus or worm that spammers can use to send these computers instructions. The spammer sends out one message to the botnet, and those computers (and their bandwidth) do the dirty work of replicating and redistributing. Now spammers can send out millions of emails with the cost of sending just one. With a cost that low, even if one in a million emails completes it goal, a return on the investment is made. With those kind of odds, it is too good of an opportunity to pass up. So you have accepted the fact that the emails are floating around out there. But….

Why is all this spam making it to my inbox?

Aside from adjusting your own habits, you have only two lines of defense: A spam blocking service and a junk mail filter. On the pre-delivery side, your mail provider (yahoo, Gmail, your company) usually will have some sort of frontline defense system for spam. These systems inspect email, look for emails that are suspicious, and quarantine them. In addition, you (hopefully) have a post-delivery junk mail filter enabled. This filter will perform a similar function to the pre-delivery service. Essentially, these are the same things. By using multiple filters that are updated and managed by different sources, your chances of catching and quarantining spam are significantly higher. So with all this protection in place why do you still get spam?

Filtering is essentially an uphill, losing battle. Spammers can generate emails that the filters don’t catch faster that the filter can be programmed to catch them. This is the reason they get to your inbox. When filters were able to pick up words and phrases in emails, spammers would obfuscate words to bypass the filters. Viagra became \/1agra. Those messages would bypass the filters for a while until the filters were updated to block them. Then V1agra became Viagr@. And so on so forth.

Eventually the filters became sophisticated enough to pick up almost all the patterns that spammers would send out. It seemed we would be free of this nuisance. Then the image based spam came. Spammers would display their text-based message within a graphic file. The anti-spam companies then scrambled to create scanners to inspect the attached graphics for these messages. By the time these changes were implemented, spammers had developed and implemented methods to continually change visual patterns in the graphics so the filters had no consistencies to detect. You have no doubt seen these messages, usually offering stock tips with some random images contained in the message or in the background.

By the time our filters can detect these messages, you will be looking at a message using a newer filter bypass technique. Basically we are spending millions of dollars to continually stay behind in a losing battle.

Why Stock Tips?

What happened to good ol’ Viagra ads? Viagra ads require web links, at least the ones that come from spammers who want to get paid for their work. This gives the filters an easier time to detect and quarantine the message. The stock scam is much simpler. No links required. For example, lets say I find some garbage stock selling for $0.50 a share. I buy 1000 shares of it for just $500. I then send 2 million spam messages through my botnet telling people that some up and coming company (the one I bought stock in) has some amazing advancement or just acquired some essential patent to making iPods. I am positive the stock will be worth $5 a share by the end of the week.

At first glance you think to yourself, “Who cares? No one actually clicks on that.” Wrong. You don’t; and for every one of you there are a thousand more like you. You are just an innocent bystander in this game. The spammer has no intention of trying to get you to buy into the scam. It is the 0.0001% of people who do buy into these scams that are the audience. Unfortunately, the only way to find these people is to email all of us.

Think of it this way. 90% of the people who are sent this message don’t receive it because they were able to filter it out. 90% of the people who actually get it shake their fist in the air, say “Curse these spam messages!”, and immediately delete it. 90% of the people who actually read it dismiss it as a hoax and delete it. 90% of the people who read it and don’t dismiss it don’t have the resources to buy it. And the remaining people fall for the scam. Even though 99.9999% of my emails returned no results, 200 people bought the stock. Because of the trading volume, the stock triples in price to $1.50 the next day. The people who fell for the scam are delighted! This is actually working for them. They decide to hold onto the stock until it gets to the $5.00 mark, as promised it would. Meanwhile, I sell all my shares for $1.50. By the time I have made my $1000 profit, it is discovered that it was all a hoax, and the stock has tanked. Those people are out their money and vow to never fall for this again. That’s fine, next time I’ll send out 4 million emails. Now you can see how easy this really is, why so many people do it, and thus why you have so many spam messages in your inbox.

What can I do to be part of the solution?

• Don’t believe everything you read – How true this adage holds. People you don’t know are not out to help you make money. If you believe that, I know a great place to buy Viagra….
• Get two email addresses – The more your email address floats around, the more spam you are going to get. Everyone should have two. Give one out to family, friends, and co-workers. Use the other to sign up for downloads, receive free newsletters, and “keep you up to date with news and special offers”. You can get a secondary email for free from many providers – I suggest using google or yahoo. All it will take is a few minutes of setup. I have recently discovered 10 minute mail. This is perfect for those situations when you have to give a valid email address to access a download. You can setup a temporary address, submit that address as your own, access it to get the download link, and it will cease to work after 10 minutes. It can come in quite handy.
• Don’t ever “click here to stop receiving these messages” – Finally a simple end to your misery! Not likely. All you are doing is informing the spammer that you are actually reading their emails. Now they can put you on their preferred recipient list!
• Keep your antivirus up to date – For all you know, you are sending yourself spam. It is entirely possible that your computer is part of a botnet that is causing your own frustration! Not all of the spammer programs that add you to their botnets are delivered as viruses or worms, but most are. By keeping an up-to-date firewall and virus program, you can reduce your chances of being part of the problem.

Check it out here. Inquisitor tries to guess what you are searching for, and loads results as you type. You can search multiple engines really fast!

Firefox is a great browser. It is fast, has lots of plugins, and a great interface. It has everything a browser should have. If you don’t use it yet, get it here and try it out.

Anyway, I came across this video on gorillamask.net. I think it sums up the situation pretty well. Click below to view the video.

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It must have been 6 months ago when I moved into my “new” house. Of course there are tons of loose ends to tie up….still. I dedicated some time Sunday and Monday to take care of a couple of them.

All of our movies were still in boxes on Sunday morning. I got some drywall screws and some stock shelving and went to work. I bought some sawhorses, and finally had a chance to use the circular saw I got from Kelly’s parents for Christmas. It has a laser guide, which I’m not sure how I lived without. The shelves turned out well and we alphabetized our movies, from “Air Force One” to “Who’s Harry Crumb“. We’ll see how long that lasts.

(click to enlarge)

Monday night was the entertainment center night. Behind it was a hideous mess of cables. With the computer, cable box, PS2, TV, receiver, etc., there was at least 2 or 3 cords. I finally fed them all through the proper channels in the TV stand and velcro’ed up all the extra. I also added some new speaker stands I bought and got my Harmony remote working properly (with the help of Logitech level 2 tech support). Tim recommended this remote to me and it works great. It uses macros so that all of your equipment will power up and go to the proper settings with the touch of one button. I haven’t had to use another remote since.

And as you can see, Lucy kept he eye on the neighborhood punks outside to make sure they weren’t up to any hijinks. Those crazy kids with their rap music and their crystal meth.

(click to enlarge)

I thought I had seen it all, but alas I had not. Let us read from the Book of Dumbass, Chapter 3, Verse 22.

“And a dumbass shall come forth and combine thine iPod and thine divinity for profit.”

I wonder who long it will take someone to paint this red, invert it, fill it with heavy metal music and sell it as the “iSatan”. (patent pending)

Unless you have been holed up in a bunker, you have heard about myspace. It is a free service that allows the user to post info about themself and search for others with similar interests to become friends with/stalk/kill. It has been mentioned in the news a lot lately because dumbass high school students post pictures of themselves drinking, smoking, and/or sleeping with R. Kelly. Then their parents search for them, see the pictures, and bust them.

I finally made a page. It is basically just a plug for blatti.net. Anyone who has an account send me a friend request and I will add you. If you don’t, get prepared to waste at least 8 hours, and sign up here. And Jen, I know you are a minimalist, but you need some content. At least a picture. How about that one where you are wearing your favorite denim skirt and have that pink bow in your hair? You look so cute in that picture!