It looks like Google Calendar has gone live. I've only played around with it for a few moments, but it really looks great. Lots of customization options, and a clean interface. If you have a GMail account, you can sign up with Google Calendar to try it out (registering with them is merely a matter of specifying what time zone you live in). This new tool should make lots of folks happy, although I personally don't have a use for it. We use the Worst Program Ever Written at work, and outside of work I don't have any need for scheduling events. It should be interesting to see how this ties in to GMail. There is some really interesting potential there. More information on the whole tool can be found over at Matt Cutts' blog (my dad was his graduate school advisor!).

I surf Digg.com nearly every day. And the more I use the site, the more problems I see with it. Granted, the experience has improved over time, but we're still a long way from perfection. One side effect of the democratic approach to news posting is the introduction of stories not worthy to be labeled news. Sensationalist stories show up there all the time, undoubtedly posted by people who know absolutely nothing about the topic. Recent headlines to this effect include "Autistic or just a geek? Take the test!" and "40+ suggestions for better desktop" (yes, that headline is grammatically incorrect). Do you see where we're headed?

An internet "test" isn't news, nor is it a scientific way of determining whether or not you have Asperger's Syndrome. Likewise, a collection of suggestions for improving desktop software is purely opinion, not news. "So vote against the story," you say. "It is, after all, a democratic process."

Well, not exactly.

To "digg" a story, a user need only click once (after logging in) on the associated "digg it" button. But to vote against a story, a user has to click three times: once to open the "problem?" drop-down menu, once to select the problem, and then once on the JavaScript alert that pops up, indicating that the story has been "reported." Reported? To whom? I thought this was a democratic process!

So, voting against a story requires three times the effort. No wonder so much crap makes the front page. If Digg would make it easier to vote against a story, using only a 1-click process, I predict things would get much better.

It's official: I'm an Amazon junkie. Perhaps their Prime service has spoiled me. Or perhaps it's their incredible product selection. Regardless, last night I did something I've never done before online: I made an impulse purchase.

The latest Cingular Wireless ad was on television (I was watching Boston Legal with my mom), and I wondered who sang the song that they were playing. I knew it sounded a lot like Genesis, but I wasn't sure. A quick Google search for the lyrics and a subsequent trip to Wikipedia answered my question and pointed me to the first Peter Gabriel album (the song is Solsbury Hill). So I went to Amazon, took one look, and bought the album (along with a few other items I've had my eye on). Is that crazy or what?

My daily web surfing routine offered up quite a surprise today: Jeffrey Zeldman has switched to using WordPress. Yes ... you read that right.

Over 11 years of hand-coding are done. Finished. Kaput. Jeffrey is the guy who turned me on to web standards (something I now swear by), thanks to that tome of enlightenment that he so lovingly authored: Designing With Web Standards. I read his advice; hung on his every word. And now I practice what the book preaches.

Dare I now convert Born Geek? For you see, I too still code by hand. It delights me, just as it delighted Mr. Zeldman. Being able to wield the elements of HTML, and then commanding them to do your bidding through CSS, is empowering to say the least. But that empowerment doesn't come cheap.

What great food for thought.

Can Google be losing it? Not only have they signed a deal with the devil (by buying a stake in AOL), but now their folding under pressure to China. What happened to Do No Evil? Apparently that mantra has been thrown out the window.

Agreeing to censor search results is cowardice; there's no other way to put it. Excuses like "well, it's the law in China" or "it's all about the money we're making" are weak. You aren't a Chinese company (hence you don't need to bow to their laws) and there's plenty of money to be made in all of the other countries of the world.

I once had a great faith in Google. I was certain that they would be the ones to bring down Microsoft. And they still may. But the course they're on now appears to be leading towards bad things. Now that Google has fallen, who's left to look up to?

Since its inception, the Amazon Prime service has been quite intriguing to me. My disdain for actual store shopping has only grown in recent years: I dislike standing in line to check out of a store, said establishment never has what I want, and if they do have it, the price is far more than it should be. So online shopping provides me a means of escaping these hassles.

While browsing Amazon recently, I noticed that I had been selected for a free 3-month trial of their Prime service (though I suspect that this "selection" process applies to nearly everyone who visits the Amazon website). So I eagerly signed up and purchased a few items that I had my eye on. Wow! Two-day shipping has never been better. I can get what I want, when I want, and have it shipped to me in two days for no charge (no shipping charge that is ... they aren't giving away merchandise). And I can do it from the comfort of my own home. How great is that?

This convenience has prompted me to do more business with Amazon, fulfilling the company's precise goal ("give them free, two-day shipping for $79 a year, and they'll do more business with us"). Amazon often has the lowest prices around, and they stock nearly everything. Finding that rare CD I've been wanting is now a pleasure, rather than a burden. Too many times I have been disappointed with Best Buy, Target, et al. in regards to their music and movie selections. I guess my tastes aren't "mainstream" enough. Oh well ... I guess it's too bad for them. My new shopping outlet is Amazon.com; and I couldn't be happier.

My web host, DreamHost, has apparently gone nuts. They recently quadrupled my disk space, and octupled my bandwidth ... all free of charge! I now have over 21 GB of disk space available (growing monthly) and over 1061 GB (yes ... gigabytes) of bandwidth. Is that totally insane, or what? And this is all in addition to an unlimited number of MySQL databases, 600 email accounts, unlimited domains hosted, and more! All for as little as $7.95 a month.

My one year anniversary with DreamHost passed last month (December 24) and to celebrate, I'm offering a new discount code for folks who'd like to sign up with any DreamHost hosting plan. When you sign up with DreamHost, simply use the discount code borngeektwo to save money. This discount code will save you $65.00 on any plan you choose, excepting the monthly L1, monthly L2, and monthly L3 plans (on which you will save $35, $45, and $55 respectively). I can only say good things about DreamHost (as I mentioned once before). As such, it's my pleasure to share this discount with you. Just make sure you use the discount code borngeektwo when you sign up!

I just recently obtained my 100th feedback rating at eBay, entitling me to the turquoise star! The next star color change won't happen until my 500th positive feedback rating, and that will likely be a long time from now; especially seeing as I registered in 1999 and have now only hit 100.

Surprisingly, I've only recently had my first truly negative experience on eBay. I listed an old hard drive in early December and a person with no feedback won the auction. But I have still not received payment! I plan on placing the drive up for auction again tomorrow night, and will leave the user negative feedback. I'm thinking about adding a requirement that users with less than 10 positive feedback ratings must use PayPal as the payment method. This would prevent situations like I'm in now (where the person wanted to pay via a money order).

Tonight I bid on 4 hard to find volumes in the Fantagraphics Prince Valiant book series: volumes 34, 35, 38, and 40. And I lost every single auction. What's interesting is that, if I had won all of the auctions at the prices I was willing to pay, I would have spent $958.50 … for four books! That's an average of nearly $240 per book; books which cost a mere $16.95 when they were published. It's hard for me to justify paying such a hefty sum for a single volume, but I am simply smitten with the Prince Valiant comic. And to have come this far in completing my collection dictates that I go all the way. Perhaps I just need to become bolder in my bidding. There are clearly people out there who want them more than I. And at these prices, they must want them pretty bad.

It's an extremely rare day that I don't take a look at Slashdot, and recently it's been the same with Digg. And I've recently noticed an interesting trend between the two sites. For the past several days, a number of the stories that made the front page of Slashdot were previously reported on at Digg (in some cases, several days earlier). I find it interesting that the democratic approach of Digg results in faster story publishing than the moderated format of Slashdot. But this process comes at a price. A larger number of duplicate and "junk" stories appear at Digg than at Slashdot (although the latter isn't without its share of problems). And Slashdot seems to carry more technical articles than Digg (it is, afterall, a techy news site).

I have seen some discussion recently about whether or not Digg will replace Slashdot. Personally, I don't see that happening. Too much is broken at Digg. You can't set many personal options, duplicate and "junk" stories are too plentiful, and new content seems to take longer to rotate through the system. I enjoy both sites (although I read them with a grain of salt), and I think both will be around for a long time. Fortunately, they complement one another nicely, and that couldn't by any nicer for the geeky crowd.

I gave Movable Type a brief try this weekend, and it doesn't look like it's what I need for Born Geek. MT is too "post driven" and doesn't seem to handle static pages very well. I think the main problem is that Born Geek isn't a blog, and MT was made especially for the blogging paradigm. As such, I am continuing my quest for a decent CMS.

After doing some brief research, I have found two solutions that might work well: Drupal and Typo3. Both are open source CMS's (which is appealing), and both have relatively nice looking interfaces. The Drupal website is a little cleaner than Typo3, and I found Drupal first, so I think I'll give it the initial try. I am somewhat tempted to just use WordPress (the system that powers this blog), although I dislike the fact that it builds pages on the fly (something I'd like to avoid with Born Geek's static content).

Do you know of an inexpensive, reliable, CMS system that would work well with a static, page-based website (i.e. Born Geek)? If so, your comments would be greatly appreciated!

I recently stated that I was looking at adding site search capability to Born Geek. And I have indeed been looking, but the solutions I have been able to find are (at least on the surface) somewhat lacking. As such, I have been giving a great deal of thought to moving Born Geek to a more automated content management system.

This blog is powered by WordPress (a great piece of software by the way), which is geared more towards dynamic web content. Seeing as the majority of Born Geek's web content is static, I don't think WordPress is the best fit. I have spent some time looking at potential solutions, but it's so hard to decide what would best fit my needs. I definitely want something that produces well structured XHTML markup, using CSS for the presentation (web-standards are a must). Perhaps Movable Type is a decent solution, but it's not free (although a free-version is available). Does anyone have any suggestions?

I occasionally watch any number of items up for auction at eBay (most recently, they've all been auctions for Prince Valiant books). And, almost as frequently, I forget to actually bid on the items I'm watching. This happened just today as I was watching five separate auctions, all of which ended this evening. When I left work, I reminded myself to check the items once I got home. Several hours after I actually got home, and well after the items had closed, I remembered my reminder to myself.

I would eventually like to write some sort of Perl script that would do the bidding for me. But, unfortunately, this would involve HTML scraping (the eBay API doesn't support bidding, for obvious reasons). Such a script would involve a little more work than I'm willing to put into it at the moment, although it would be a neat project to work on. If you know of any (preferably free) services that automatically bid, let me know.

Nearly one year ago, after a substantial amount of research on the subject, I chose the nice folks at DreamHost to fulfill my web-hosting needs. Having never previously paid for web hosting service (my sites were always hosted for free at various places), I had no idea what to expect. Most everything I read was positive, and they had all the features I needed to bring Born Geek to life. Plus, their prices were (and still are) very reasonable - as low as $7.95 a month!

Now, nearly one year in, I can say with confidence that I am glad I chose to go with DreamHost. Since I signed up with them, they have increased the offerings on my hosting plan, at no cost to me. The changes include:

• A gigantic increase in disk quota (I started out with between 1 and 2 GB, and I now have 5.7 GB of available space)
• An increase in my monthly bandwidth allotment (it started at 40 GB/month and is now 162 GB/month)
• Nearly double the number of available user accounts and email accounts
• The number of sub-domains and domains I can host has become unlimited

To celebrate this (nearly) one year anniversary, I have created a promotional code which allows me to share my rewards with you. If you sign up with DreamHost, use the promotional code borngeek to get a discounted price. With it, you will save a total of $47.00 on whatever plan you choose, with the exception of the monthly L1, L2, and L3 plans (on which you will save $25.00, $30.00, and $40.00 respectively). A new promotional code has been activated as of January 11, 2006, allowing you to save even more! Be sure to check it out.

This little promotion is just one way I can say thank you to everyone who visits this site. If you are looking for a great web host, look no further than DreamHost. I have been incredibly impressed with their service, and I'm sure you will be as well.

I frequently get lost in Wikipedia. Not because the site is difficult to navigate, but rather because the stuff I learn there is so interesting. I routinely find myself clicking from one article to another. This is without a doubt the second best (?) time waster ever invented (the Internet in general being #1). Must ... stop ... surfing ...

Jeffrey Zeldman, author of the incredibly eye-opening book Designing With Web Standards, has recently redesigned announced the redesign of the excellent web magazine A List Apart. This website has provided a wealth of knowledge for me as far as web design goes, so I highly recommend checking it out if you have not already. And bookmark it while you're there: you won't regret it.

Edit: After reading the article discussing the new design of A List Apart, I realized that Jason Santa Maria is the actual site designer, not Zeldman. My apologies.

I went over to the local Best Buy today, looking for a small, optical mouse to use with my notebook computer at work. As is often the case with things I am particularly interested in buying, they were sold out. They had a few wireless optical mice, but those were more than I wanted to pay (and they need a battery).

Why is it that stores never have what you are looking for? Or, if they have it, it's way more than you want to pay? This is the exact reason I love shopping online. I can get what I want, for a resonable price, and have it shipped directly to my door. No travelling, waiting in line, or any of the other annoyances associated with shopping in a brick-and-mortar store.

I'm planning on buying a Creative Zen Micro MP3 Player, something I have wanted for some time now. ZipZoomFly, a retailer I have used before for computer hardware, has an awesome price on it, plus free 2-day shipping. Score!