International Space Station infected by a Virus. – That’s just sad. Really, really sad.

Google launches Chrome – I wanted to wait until I had some alone time with this browser before I wrote about it. It’s very sleek and super fast, especially if you use a lot of Google’s services (which I do). There is a darkside however. For you security consciousness people out there, you may want to check out Steve Gibson’s security podcast, aptly named Security Now. I’ll be sticking with Firefox for the time being.

Ubiquity, yet another reason not to ditch Firefox. – As you all know, another reason why Firefox is so near and dear to our hearts is because of all the great extensions available for it. Ubiquity is just another fine example of what a great extension can do for you. It has sped up my surfing by 28.37%, no kidding. Install it, check out the tutorial, and take it for a spin.

Google to Acquire Valve? – Say What? I’ll believe it when I see it. If you don’t know who Valve is, don’t bother clicking the link. If you don’t know who Google is, get off my site.

Amazon buys Shelfari. – Old news, I know, but I’m still excited. One of the reasons I stuck with Shelfari over Goodreads was the fact that Amazon was an investor in the company. Now that they own it, let all the Amazon goodness ooze right down onto it. Oh, and check out my shelf. Sweet stuff there.

I’ve been using runningmap.com – This isn’t new either, but it’s new to me. I thought I’d throw this out there to my fellow runners. This is what I ran today.

But it’s not enough just to be a niche. Flixter.com is a social networking site devoted to movies. The problem with that site is that its design and content attract a younger crowd. It’s sort of like a Myspace for movie lovers. Case in point, Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift averaged 4 stars. — Seriously?

Goodreads is a little more neutral, like Facebook rather than Myspace. And the simple fact that it’s a website devoted to the love of books, helps it attract a much more sophisticated crowd. My only criticism would be with regard to the website’s design and usability. Though it’s not awful, it’s definitely not great. They need to make it a little more intuitive to navigate around the site. The website could also use a Web 2.0 face lift; it looks very 1999ish.

Other than that, I think it’s a really fun site with a ton potential. It was launched in January of 2007, so it’s still young in Internet years. The user reviews (though not quite as good as Amazon’s user reviews) are extremely helpful, and I have to imagine they will become even more helpful over the years. If you’re a bookworm like me, go check it out. I’m going to try shelfari.com as well. Shelfari is another social networking site for book lovers, and is bit more established than Goodreads. Shelfari also seems to have all of the Web 2.0 features that I mentioned were lacking in Goodreads. But I can’t be sure until I try it out for myself.

Speaking of books, I just finished Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. It was fan-freaking-tastic. I would highly recommend it.

Zen Habits is a motivational and, I think, inspirational website dedicated to abolishing bad habits and creating good habits. I think what I like most about this site, is the fact that the author, Leo, is just a regular person like you or me. He writes about the different techniques and philosophies he uses to improve various aspects of his life. Specifically, he writes about productivity, organization, finance, family, simplicity, happiness, and health. His two main philosophies seem to be GTD (get things done) and simplification. I’ve always been a big believer in the latter approach toward life, hence the reason why I think I’m so drawn to his website.

If improving your life is subject that interests you, and it should be, then I would highly, highly recommend checking out Zen Habits. It’s extremely well written and I always leave the site with a renewed sense of confidence.

Since my blogroll is comprised mostly of tech sites, it’s sometimes hard to weed out all the other non-tech blogs that I like to read. Here is a list of some other sites that are also dedicated to improving your life in one way or another.

43 Folders
Lifehack
Lifehacker
Pick The Brain
Get Rich Slowly
Dumb Little Man

I’m happy to see that all of the above websites also made it onto Leo’s blogroll. Of course, Leo has quite a few more self-improvement sites in his list than I do in mine. I’ll have to take a closer look at what he’s reading. If they’re even half as good as Zen Habits, then they would be worth a look.

It’s completely free and it takes only a few minutes to get a new video on your site. I signed up, created a video, and embedded it into my site in under 5 minutes. Sorry for the bad quality. I used the built-in mic and camera on my MacBook. But imagine the possibilities.

Not only can I annoy people with my writing, but now someone has made it easy for me to annoy people with my face too. Thanks bubbleguru! Their slogan should be “We are Web 2.0s version of blinking text”.

All kidding aside though, this looks like pretty cool technology. You might see me pop in from time to time. Prepare yourself.

Twitter is sort of a cross between a blog and an away message. Unlike a blog, you can only post 140 characters at a time. You have the ability to post entries, or tweets as they are so affectionately called, via the web, a cell phone (sms), an IM client, or from a variety of desktop applications. Twitter asks the very simple question, “What are you doing?”. All you have to do is answer that question. It’s strange, I know. It’s even more strange that people are doing it. Not a few people mind you, but thousands. People use it to keep tabs on their friends. Organizations may use it to keep interested parties up to date. Some people even use Twitter to campaign for the Presidency.

I know, still a little strange. In fact, be sure to bookmark this page, because you’re probably going to dismiss Twitter pretty quickly. I know I did. It’s the natural Twitter cycle — a couple of weeks will pass and every time you hear the word twitter your ears will perk up. You’ll start hearing about it more and more, until finally, curiosity gets the best of you. You’ll sign up, you’ll post your first tweet, and you’ll be hooked. It’s usually around a 2 to 4 week process. At that time make sure to come back here for a list of some pretty handy Twitter resources.

Ah good, you’re back.

Let’s start with twittervision. This site pretty much sums up the Twitter experience. It grabs tweets from the public Twitter timeline and places them on Google maps in real-time. It’s addicting all by itself.

Remember those desktop apps I referred to up above? They allow you to post tweets and receive updates right on your desktop. You can choose to receive updates from the public timeline or limit it to people in your friends list. There are a few different applications to choose from, depending on what operating system you are running. Let me make it easy for you:

Twitter Desktop Applications

• Twitterific - for Mac users
• Twitteroo - for Windows users.
• gTwitter - for Linux users.

Recommended reading:

I really enjoyed the Twitter write-up over at Kottke.org. Check it out if you get a chance. While you’re it, another good article to read is Hacking Twitter for Fun and Profit. Good stuff there.

Some extra tidbits:

The founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, was also the co-founder of Blogger.com and more recently Odeo.com. Blogger.com was eventually acquired by Google and Odeo.com has since been put up for sale. From what I understand, Evan’s company Obvious Corp wants to focus all it’s time and energy on Twitter. That’s good for you Twitterholics.

And there you have it. Now go give it a try. You can look me up at twitter.com/skyecade. Just in case you want to know what I had for breakfast,… or what movie I’m watching,… or what pants I decided to wear,… or what project I’m working on,…or what I’m thinking about at any given moment, etc…

The JenniCam has since gone dark, but not before firmly cementing itself into Internet lore. There is a new phenomenon sweeping through the net now. This phenomenon is called justin.tv. Who’s, Justin? Justin is a guy who strapped a video camera to his head 11 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes ago, and has not shut it off since. It streams live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He claims he will wear it until the day he dies. That would be interesting to see. :0

I watch it on and off while I’m at my computer and I have to tell you, it’s pretty cool (in a weird sort of way) and surprisingly addictive. I reminds me of the Truman Show with Jim Carey where anyone could turn on their televisions at any given time and see what Truman was doing, even if he was just sleeping. In fact, Justin is sleeping right now. It’s soooo wierd! Don’t worry, he’s not lazy — he’s just on west coast time.

This week’s Website of the Week choice is musicovery.com. Like Last.fm and Pandora, musicovery is a music discovery site which helps to match listeners with music that they might be interested in based on their musical tastes.

The first thing you see when you go to the site is a control panel of sorts on the left hand side of website. From here you can choose what you want to listen to, and there are multiple ways of doing this. The first set of options include LoFi and HiFi. To listen to HiFi you need a paid subscription. I don’t have a paid subscription, so LoFi it is. The next set of options include Hit, non Hit, and Discovery. You can choose any combination of the these three options, but at least one must be checked. Hit and non Hit are pretty obvious as to what they are, the Discovery option isn’t so clear though. I assume it grabs independent or otherwise lesser known artists and adds them to the play list. I can’t find any documentation to confirm this though, so I could be wrong.

Up next is an interactive time line. If you leave it as is, it will simply tell you the era in which the song being played originates from. For a little more control, you can use the time line to narrow down your music discovery session to a specific decade, or even year.

Below the time line is the matrix. There are four points on the matrix: calm, energetic, dark, and positive. By clicking on the matrix, you are telling musicovery what kind of mood you want the music to reflect. Experimenting with this is half the fun of musicovery. Once you click a spot on the matrix, a variety of songs will appear to the right. These songs are all color coded by genre, but all share the same characteristics of the matrix, i.e. calm, energetic, dark, positive. So, if you clicked somewhere in between energetic and positive, all the songs that are displayed will have these specific traits in common, whether they be reggae, blues, funk or disco.

What if you want to listen to something energetic, but you’re only interested in one specific musical genre such as rock? No problem. Below the matrix are color coded buttons which list specific genres. When you click on one of these buttons, a mini-matrix is displayed for that particular genre. This mini-matrix works the same way as the main matrix, but only the results of that specific musical genre will be displayed. You may have noticed that the songs displayed to the right of the control panel are now all of one color, in this case dark blue. Dark blue represents the musical genre rock. Pretty cool, huh? They do seem to be missing some popular genres though, but we’ll chalk that up to them being new. All in all this is a very fun website to play around with.

Another great feature is the ease in which musicovery lets you purchase the songs you are currently listening too. Each song has an iTunes and Amazon link associated with it that will take you directly to that product for an easy check out. Actually, it’s probably not a great feature for impulse buyers, but for everyone else it’s great.

I could write more, but I don’t think I’d do the site any justice. It’s one of those things that you just have to try out for yourself, but if you love music, you’ll most likely love musicovery.

http://musicovery.com

How much cooler is that?

The website isn’t the most pleasing website to look at, but don’t let that deter you from trying it out. It’s well worth a look.

There’s tagging, tracking reports, logs, all sorts of goodies.

Installation is a breeze. When you sign up with Tracksy (or Google for that matter), they will generate a little javascript snippet that you place in the html of your website. It’s literally cut, paste, done. I’m currently running both on all my sites.

Here is a list of some of tracky’s user generated reports and features that they offer:

• Exclusion Cookies
• Exclude Selective I.P. Addresses
• Invisible or Visible Counter
• Detailed, Real-Time Reports
• Recent Visitor List
• Traffic Reports
• Traffic Per URL
• Traffic Per Year
• Traffic Per Month
• Traffic Per Weekday
• Traffic Per Day
• Traffic Per Hour
• New vs. Returning
• Referrers
• Referring Sites
• Search Engines
• Search Engine Keywords
• Visitor Computers
• Browser
• Operating System
• Language
• Screen Size
• Screen Color Depth
• Internet Service Provider
• Connection Speed
• Visitor Locations
• Country
• Region
• City
• Visits
• Pages Viewed
• Visits Per Month

Not bad for a free service. Give it a try and if you don’t like it, it’s as simple as deleting the javascript from your website. It can’t get much easier than that.

Speaking of upcoming.org, I almost forgot all about this site. That would have been tragic since it’s such a great concept. The last time I was there though, the site was only a few months old and there really weren’t any entrees for the Boston area. Well, it seems like that has all changed. There’s all kinds of great events listed on the website now. I even joined the Boston Tech Events group. It’s wicked cool.

Phrostbyte holds a certain amount of sentimental value to me. It was an ugly site when it was up, but it was completely original. I wrote the site entirely by hand in html, which I learned as I went along. Later, I added things like javascript and CGI, skills that I had also picked up along the way. I added chat rooms via IRC, integrated into the site with javascript. I embedded multiple search engines within the site. I had reference pages, shout boxes, arcade games, you name it. I wanted to try everything I could. I even had my first taste of SQL, PHP, and CSS with Phrostbyte. It has been a great experience.

I also had a pseudo-blog on my site. This was long before I even new what a blog was. Blogs have been around since the mid 90′s, just not on my side of the net. I was a member of the forumsphere, so to speak, not the blogosphere. On the front page of my site, however, I had a column where I would write on a variety of topics. The mechanism even worked the same way as a traditional blog. Every time I made an entry, the previous entry would be pushed down and replaced with the new one, complete with a time & date stamp. Very blog like, huh? I guess you could say that Phrostbyte was my first real blog.

I’d have to say that my favorite part of Phrostbyte were the discussion boards. I used a great software package called Ikonboard. I later switched to phpBB and then to SMF. As far as free software goes, I still like Ikonboard the best.

It wasn’t the software that made the forums great though. The forums were tiny, with only a hand full of close friends that used it regularly, but it was always active and we always new where to find each other.

The site has been dead for quite some time now and it’s the right time to shut her down. I still have skyecade.net and I’m also working on a new community site which will, in a sense, be replacing Phrostbyte. I hope to officially launch it within the next 2 months.

I would like to bring Phrostbyte back sometime in the future. What form she’ll take I can’t say. I’ll probably use her for some other educational endeavor. Perhaps Python or Ruby. Or maybe even a little Ajax. Time will surely tell.

Here is a list of what I’m looking for:

• Reasonable amount of disk space (5GB to 20GB)
• Reasonable amount of bandwidth (15GB to 50GB)
• POP3/POP3 Secure Email Support
• IMAP/Secure IMAP Email Support
• Aliased Domains
• Subdomains
• MySQL Databases
• CGI-BIN
• Server Side Includes
• FTP Access
• Shell Access (SSH)
• Cron Jobs
• PHP Version 4 or 5
• Perl 5
• Python
• Ruby / Ruby On Rails
• MySQL 4.1
• SSL Secure Server (maybe)
• Half way decent support
• And it must be on a Linux box

Price isn’t too much of a factor and I really don’t need everything on that list, but I would like room to grow if I need it. GoDaddy doesn’t offer cron jobs on their shared hosting accounts. I really could have used that feature a couple of months back. Oh well, you live, you learn

I’ve narrowed it down to 7 companies. They all come pretty close to what I’m looking for and they all have a pretty good reputation. Some better than others.

And the final contestants are:

• Site5
• Liquid Web
• Dot5
• Bluehost
• Hostgator
• asmallorange
• Servage

Here’s where it gets tricky. Some companies have every feature that I’m looking for, but receive mediocre reviews from its users (Bluehost), whilst other companies receive stellar reviews, but lack certain features I would really prefer to have (Hostgator & asmallorange). When will this madness end!

After months of reading reviews and talking to admins, I’m going to buckle down and pick a hosting company tonight. Or maybe tomorrow night. Let me just read one more review. Just kidding, I’ll let you know who I choose and why.

robertsinclaire.com

I figured I should scoop this up before some other Robert Sinclaire snatched it. Luckily, the spelling of my name is pretty rare. Take notice of the e at the end of Sinclaire. That little baby sets us apart from the rest.

Sinclair, on the other hand, is a very popular name. In fact, both robertsinclair.com and robertsinclair.net are already taken. One of the Robert Sinclairs is web designer, and a pretty good one at that. Neat, huh? The other is a hair dresser. Umm, that’s neat too, right?

Sorry, I’m babbling.

This brings my domain name count to 8, with about another 5 I have my eye on. One project at a time though.

It’s called the Google Page Creator and it is yet another incredible piece of software that has been released by Google. If you read my last post, I mentioned that I was a bit disappointed with the release of the Google Pack. Well, needless to say, they’ve completely redeemed themselves (as I suspected they would).

Google’s Page Creator is a site that allows you to create your own web pages and host them on Google’s servers. It’s free, it’s simple, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of like Blogger meets Geocities, but better and a lot better. The interface is extremely easy to use and you don’t need to know html to make a great website. You can host files and have multiple pages, all for the low, low price of nothing. This is going to make web hosting companies like GoDaddy very unhappy This is what the internet is morphing into. A true example of Web 2.0.

Experts are now saying that people, my generation and younger, will most likely accomplish the following in their lifetime:

1. Write a novel
2. Write a poem
3. Write a song
4. Create a website
5. Learn a new language
6. Write some kind of computer code
7. Make a movie/video of some kind

This isn’t because we are smarter than our parents and grandparents, but because the tools to accomplish these things are more easily accessible to us. The Google Page Creator is just another great example of this. It’s something anyone can use, and should.

I’ve always said that everyone should own a website of some kind. This will make it easier for people to do just that. I created this website in under ten minutes. No kidding. Now imagine if I actually put some effort into it. You could do some pretty incredible and useful things with this software.

Ahh Google, how I love thee.