I guess their has been a recent underground art movement called “secret Wall Tattooing“. Artist have been going to Hotels and removing the pictures on the wall and then painting their own picture on that spot and then putting the Hotel picture back on the wall. So, the next you stay in a Hotel make sure you check behind the picture, you never know what you might find. Check out secretwalltattoos.com for more info.

Tags: secretwalltattoos.com, art, graffiti, hotel art, photos

A friend of mine clued me in on this product. This is probably not the most appropriate place to post this but I thought it was funny and interesting at the same time. If you have an iPod shuffle and would like to let the world know you’re down with the Cross, then check out the iBelieve

Tags: ipod, ipod shuffle, ibelieve

I started out yesterday looking for some sort of calendar solution that worked the way I wanted it to. The only requirements I have are the following:

• I can access it anywhere (via web)
• have a task view and a calendar view
• can receive reminders via email
• can sink it with Mozilla somehow
• the UI should be easy to use and make sense
• the solution needs to be free
• a address book would be a bonus
Oh yeah, it would be nice if the calendar solution is still around a year from now. If it’s a great product it’ll be around.

So, I’ve checked out many different solutions; maybe all of them. Here’s a run down on the ones I’ve played with and my opinion on them.

Kiko- Offers a smart and functional design but looks like their focus is more on team use as oppose to individual. I didn’t see anyway to export for keeping my Mozilla calendar synced. It would also be nice if you could import your contacts without having to email the person and invite them to sign-up to Kiko. Overall, I think Kiko could benefit from adding some functionality for the individual user and an import/export option. They should keep the whole collaborative thing going but don’t forget about the individual. According to the Kiko homepage they’re working on adding some of the functionality that I’m looking for.

MyTicklerFile- Bottom line, they want to charge a monthly fee for a pretty basic concept. The free account will only allow you to have 15 “Ticklers” or appointments at any given time. Nothing I’m interested in.

RememberTheMilk- Seems to have most everything I’m looking for. RememberTheMilk is definitely a task oriented application and not a “calendar” but could easily be used for what I’m looking for. If it only had a actual visual calendar and a way to store my contacts it would be a great app. I might end up using RememberTheMilk anyway because I can’t find anything better.

Goowy- Is a real “cool” app. It offers email (which I don’t need), calendar, contacts and other stuff. The only problem is that I can’t figure a way to sync my calendar and contacts and get email reminders. If anyone reading this knows how to import/export and get email reminders with Goowy then please leave me a comment.

CalendarHub- Hopefully this will be what I’m looking for. Not live yet, but sounds real cool.

Tilika- Has some cool features like being able to create tasks and appointments via email or from a cell phone. Tilika has tasks, calendaring, contacts and sharing options. As far as I can tell though, you can’t get reminders via email and their aren’t enough fields for contacts. Additionally, Tilika has the worst graphical UI of any of the products that I looked at so far. They seem to have most of the “guts” but are still lacking the functionality that I’m looking for.

So, I guess to sum this all up. I still haven’t found the perfect solution. But I’ll continue to look and keep my fingers crossed for apps coming in the future. If you know of an app that I didn’t discuss that you think I would be interested in, please let me know. Additionally, if you work for or are familiar with the apps that I’ve discussed and think I missed something, feel free to leave me feedback.

Tags:
calendar, web2.0, Kiko, Mozilla Sunbird, MyTicklerFile, social browser, RememberTheMilk, Goowy, ajax, CalendarHub, Tilika, firefox

Miller has a fun little Shockwave game that you can play online or download. The premise of the game is to run to the store during half time to pick-up more Miller Lite, while dogging obstacles all the way. I played Miller Run a couple of times already, and had fun. I would guess that I’ll be bored with it in about 20 min though.

If you would like a few minutes of shockwave fun then check out Miller Run by clicking here.

Tags: shockwave, miller lite, games, blogging

For those of you out there that remembers Cassette Tapes. This site has a huge collection of them. I’m not exactly sure what the point is and the site takes quit a while to download all of the images. But, this collection makes for a pretty cool art installation. This is a Japanese site so if you can read the language then you’ll probably be able to understand what it’s all about. Maybe leave a comment to let me know as well.

Check out the cassette tape collection here.

Tags: cassette tapes, art, del.icio.us, blogging

The guys over at Techcrunch are having their third party/meetup today in Atherton (SF Bay Area). It looks like its open to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, bloggers and beer drinkers. They will have a bunch of hot new companies there to demo their products. You can expect to see demos from companies like:
Sphere
Flock
Simplyhired
goowy

If you don’t live in the Bay Area you can also participate via Skype and Festoon. You can get instruction here.

This whole idea sounds like a lot of fun. Back in the late 90’s we use to have something like this once a month in Seattle called The Demo Club. Now that I’m in Austin it would be cool to get something like that going here.

I look forward to hearing the outcome.

Tags: techcrunch, flock.com, flock browser, flockstars, skype, social browser, web browser, web2.0, blogging, goowy, beta

Incase you haven’t heard of FLOCK before. Flock is a new “social” browser that’s got a lot of people very excited. Today they released their developer preview and I was lucky enough to get a invite to check it out. So far I’m very impressed. It’s basically Firefox on steroids. Some of the highlights are “create a Blog post” button that allows you to write a blog post and publish it directly to your blogsite. This is what I’m doing now. Other highlights are your Favorites which combines local Favorites with your del.icio.us favorites. If you have a del.icio.us account then all you have to do is add the log-in info to FLOCK and then every time you add a site to you favorites it will automatically add to both places. As I check FLOCK out more I will report on my thoughts.

tags: flock, social browsing, del.icio.us, firefox, social networking

I recently got a new computer because my old computers mother board was fried. I noticed today that I don’t have Power Point on my new computer and couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere. So, instead of trying top get a pirated copy(not that I’m against that) I checked out ThinkFree, which is a online suite of products that mirror the capabilities of MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint. Their version is called ThinkFree Write, Show and Calc. I’m actually writing this post using the Write product. I’m pretty impressed . I can see the future of online computing starting to come together with a product like ThinkFree. Just imagine the potential for this when someone actually comes up with that $100 laptop.

Try ThinkFree out for yourself. It’s free:

tags: thinkfree, AJAX, word, web2.0, wordprocessing

Droogle is a “search engine” for drink recipes. They also received a cease and desist from Google that states the Droogle name is too similar to Google. I doubt anyone would confuse the two. Anyway, Droogle is a fun site to find drink recipes.

Check it out: Droogle.ca

tags: droogle, drinking, search, liquor, google

After checking out Coastr.com this weekend. I discovered a lot of beers I would like to try. Coastr.com is a place for Beer people to meet other beer people based on their likes. You can set-up your home page and then add your favorite beers and favorite places to drink them. It’s kinda fun to look around the site at all the different beers and see what other users like.

This is how Coastr.com explains their site:

“Coastr is an experiment in social networking for beer snobs (meant as a compliment, of course!). The basic idea is for you to create a list of your favorite beers, and to connect you with other people with similar tastes. And those connections will help you discover interesting new brews that you might have not known about before. “Social beermarking”, if you will.”

Check out Coastr.com

technorati tags: coastr, social networking, beermaking, beer snobs, pubs