I just finished working on an early-release version of TheBestHumanEver.com, it’s basically a good way to control your own destiny on vanity searches for your name. It’s very simple idea and process (I hope). You create your own profile page (just a couple paragraphs about why you’re the best human ever) and hit submit. Basically, the site is structured in such a way that the profile pages are very SEO friendly (meaning they’ll show up well in search engines, like Google).

The result? People who search for your name (provided it’s not overly-common or shared by someone famous) will find out more about you… and exactly why you are the best human ever.

Enjoy.

TheBestHumanEver.com

So recently I’ve been playing with a couple different hosting options. The two services I’ve tried so far are GoDaddy and Dreamhost. Let me tell you a little about likes and dislikes of each.

GoDaddy Likes

• Quick, 24/7 customer service - I’ve called at 11 PM, I’ve called at 1 PM, I’ve called at 10 AM and the longest wait time I’ve had so far has been about 2 minutes. Very impressive. Only once was I less than impressed on the help, I got, too. Their guys really seem to know what they’re talking about.
• Easy to integrate existing domains registered w/ GoDaddy. - Makes sense that it would be - and it is.
• Affordable Pricing

GoDaddy Dislikes

• One click install feature is cool, but pretty buggy. I’ve fallen in love with Drupal as of late and can’t really imagine building a site without it from here out. I’ll post about that, too. Anyway. GoDaddy has a one-click install. However, it’s weird. It takes some tweaking to get certain modules (like a very important ‘clean urls’ module) to work. Why save trouble with the install when it takes more time to configure later? I wound up doing a clean install by just FTPing the files and using Drupal’s built-in install method.
• Confusing interface at time and excessive windows. Opening hosting manager opens a new window. Opening phpMyAdmin opens a new window. It gets cluttery quick. And you can’t find certain stuff you’re looking for (like the domainhost location for the DBs you set up).
• Limited MySQL databases and domains hosted on basic plan.
• (This was the clincher for switching to DreamHost) Slow. Just slow. I build my Drupal sites live, which means you’re loading a page every time you save a change or navigate the changes you can make. That means a LOT of wasted time spent on the aggregate. It’s not just inefficient, it’s very frustrating.

DreamHost Likes

• Much faster
• Affordable with the right coupon (I got 1 year hosting for about $70)
• Plenty of space - 500 GB and like, 2 TB transfer - way more than I’ll use
• Free domain with purchase ($1.99 w/ Godaddy hosting purchase)
• Smooth interface
• 24/7 Email Support

DreamHost Dislikes

• Right now the only thing I’m not crazy about is that you don’t get the 24/7 phone support. But the email support so far has been pretty quick, so I’m happy.

So, right now, looks like, as my friend gthing says, it’s Dreamhost ftw.

So, for work we put together a pretty sweet (well, I may be biased) video on how to use the USB to DVI I’ve mentioned before. We hosted it on addamonitor.com, my little brainchild. I have to give props to MJI Jackson for the great looking shadowbox effect. Anyway, I’d recommend you check it out.

AddAMonitor.com

Has it been a while? Yes, yes it has. So it should say something that I’m coming out of the woodworks to write again. It should indicate that I’m pretty stoked about something and think it’s worth mentioning.

The big news? Tesla’s regular production on their roadster begins today. The timing is perfect, with oil hitting record-high prices and global warming becoming a greater threat. Tesla represents a fueling force in the paradigm shift that needs to happen for people to progress technologically. It’s what I love to see.

Their full press release on the production can be found here.

Oh, you can get Singles on iTunes. But most of them are songs. I guess there’s an artist or some person named ‘Adele’ - and apparently Apple is out to get her hooked up. The image and text implied to me that this boy-haircutted and poorly-makeuped artist is looking for a date, is completely ‘FREE’, and is iTunes’ “SINGLE OF THE WEEK.” Congrats Adele and good luck on your date!!

So I just got back from an exhausting trip to CES. CES is always fun, but my feet will be mad at me for a week. A lot of what you see is kind of the same old same old and some stuff has a high propensity of becoming vaporware (stuff that’s cool to talk about but never really comes to fruition) (like a charging device that doesn’t use wires, but who knows…).

Somewhere in between, though, there are products that are both very cool and very practical. I’d classify Polaroid’s new Freescape Digital Media Exchange as one of these. Polaroid probably doesn’t see the same attention as one of the big exhibitors (like Panasonic, who was highlighting a 150″ flat screen TV - just gaudy), but I think they had a product that, if word gets out, should be a hot seller.

The Freescape system is a DVR that records TV shows in high def. It stands out from similar products, though, in three main ways.

First, it will do near-instant synchronization to an iPod or your PC (via WiFi). The iPod conversion idea is amazingly clever. In under 1 minute, it can encode and transfer a 1 hour TV show to your iPod through a built-in iPod dock. That means you can watch *any* of your shows you record and are no longer at the mercy of whether or not Apple has your favorite show. Plus, you’re not paying $2/episode for shows you get for free. Genius.

Second, remote access via the Internet. The unit gives you the ability to connect to it from anywhere you have an Internet connection. It also does a fast MPEG4 compression at VGA resolutions (which still looks like a standard TV signal) that lets you download your recorded TV shows from anywhere in the World. It’s kind of like TiVo and Slingbox hooked up and had a kid.

Third, no monthly fees. At an MSRP of about $500, it’ll take a while to pay for itself, but it’s still neat. The Freescape system uses an open directory of show listings that is 100% free. That means you never pay that $5 to $20/month subscription fee like with other DVRs.

Pictures below courtesy of Polaroid:

Now, I don’t agree with the advertising to get people to visit Vegas, but I do make the occasional trip for work. I just got back last Friday after a very informative PubCon 2007. As part of the trip, Joe Morin, a Pubcon evangelist and president of Boost Search Marketing, put together a “Bloggers’ night out” - tempting us with some tickets to great shows in reply for an honest review of the night. What a great idea!

The Show
Some friends and I who were attending the show were able to get in to see Blue Man Group, a quirky hard-rock meets silent film era entertainment show (you can’t well call it a play). I had a great evening - it was really something of a sensory overload at times, but was just a great show. Blue Man Group, if you’re not familiar with them, is a hybrid percussion-comedy troupe. The three men with silicone wraps on their heads don’t say a single word during the performance (or when you meet them afterwards, for that matter). But even without words, you’ll laugh and smile until your jaw just hurts.

Worth Seeing
With the flood of advertising for myriad shows in Vegas (and there are PLENTY of shows in Vegas), I probably never would have picked Blue Man out of the deluge of other options. I’m glad I got the tickets though, because it’s taken its place as a show that I will now recommend to friends and family who might be looking for something to do in Sin City.

Family Friendly?
Speaking of Sin City, there are plenty of shows I would never feel comfortable taking my family to. Blue Man Group doesn’t fall in that category. The noise from the band (it does get pretty loud) might bother smaller children at times, but that’s about the only offense of the show. The comedy is slapstick and very three stooges (sans the ‘yuk yuk yuk’) in nature, just as innocent and possibly more funny.

Thanks
A special thanks goes out to Joe Morin for hooking us up with the evening (just being a nice guy - the world needs more of that). Also, as a note, I did get the tickets for free by writing the review so if Matty Cutts is out there keeping note, it’s been officially disclaimed.

A company in Massachusetts has thrown in their 2 cents on the future of online shopping. Kinset, founded in 2006, has built a very basic 3D platform custom fit to the needs of online retailers. Basically, they’ll take a product feed and throw them into a 3D store that each retailer gets to design.

Their first major partner is Brookstone, which now advertises the ability to shop in a 3D world on their site. This seems like a pretty lofty achievement for the young Kinset, especially after you experience the Kinset interface for the first time. Let me give you a rundown:

The Good

Potential, potential, potential. I think the idea is great. No matter how easy online shopping can be, it’s still almost always a pull market, meaning that the customer goes knowing what they want and then hunting it down and price shopping. Kinset opens the door to push marketing online - where you have users who just plan on shopping as a leisurely experience and don’t necessarily have their purchase in mind. In some regards, it reminds me of the StumbleUpon vs Google argument. People go to Google looking for something in particular (and it’s great for that), but when you don’t know what you want, you hit Stumble! and not Google.

The Bad

A few biggies here for me:

1) The UI needs some aesthetic touchups before it’s really ready for mass-market appeal. People get so much out of a shopping experience with regards to pleasing the senses when in the real world - colors, easy-to-navigate stores, smells, sounds, touch, etc. When all you really have to work with is sight and sound, you better make it darn good. Kinset falls short here.

2) Learning a new UI for people who don’t know it. Having played my fair share of 1st person games, I adapted pretty quickly to the movements and view changes (although I kept wanting right mouse click to jump when it just brings up a menu). But to someone who doesn’t have the same background, I could imagine this would be a frustrating experience.

3) Long download/setup/update times. Kinda speaks for itself. I’m on a few T1s here at work and had a long download time. After initial setup it’s not too bad, provided you don’t have a required software update. I can’t imagine dialup users realistically accessing this, though.

4) No social interaction (yet?). Don’t know if these guys have heard - but it turns out the Internet is a very social medium. I don’t want people’s avatar’s standing in my way when I want to see the newest movies out on DVD, but it’d be nice to know I’m doing something other people are doing. I’d like to know I can ask them if they’ve ever seen The Prestige and what they thought of it. Add people interaction, limiting the number of people in a given store/server.

The Ugly

1) Client crashing issues. I think most of these have been resolved, but I did have the client just sporadically kapoot on me. Kind of frustrating when just playing around, but probably really irritating when you’ve just finished 2 hours of online virtual shopping.

2) Uncomfortable load times walking into a store for the first time (or the second, or third). Plus, no matter how many times you walk into that store or how recently you did, shelves are all empty until you stand near them for a significant amount of time.

I hope the guys over at Kinset are listening since I think that their technology could be the start of something beautiful. It needs some serious work, but it’s got lots of potential.

The Jawbone: a Bluetooth headset strong enough for the military but pH balanced for humans. Seriously though - this is the next big innovation in mobile phone technology in my mind. One of the biggest drawbacks of Bluetooth headsets is that they pick up everything around you just as well as they pick up your voice. The Jawbone changes the rules on that.

The Jawbone has a little nub that sticks to your cheek (right near your jawbone - coincident? I think not.) that detects what is actually being generated by your person. It then takes anything that’s not you and silences it out. What’s the result? Well, as much as I hate throwing YouTube videos down here, this one is really pretty necessary.

Video and image below. As always the Jawbone Bluetooth Headset is available at Sewell Direct.

Note: The video did some funky distortion-action on my front page - so here’s a link for you instead.

Jawbone video on YouTube

Some recent developments led me to a whole new level of “wow that’s a cool product” regarding the USB to DVI High Res adapter. We got the latest model in today - the one capable of resolutions up to 1600×1200 (so it can drive a 20 in. display).

That’s neat. But what’s really cool is that, when coupled with some recently updated drivers, you can actually use more than one with a computer. I just finished playing with 5 displays at once - one on my laptop, one off its DVI port, one off my docking station’s port and two off of the USB to DVI adapters. The performance was great. I opened some sample business documents (as well as a YouTube video) and they all loaded fine on any of the displays. There is a minimal lag time when dragging a window from one display to another, but virtually none while working on a single screen.

While I couldn’t get it to show the 1600×1200 resolution as an option while driving two screens, I’m assuming it was because of the multiplication of the screens. So, maybe I’ll figure that out for another day. Maybe not. Either way, it’s way cooler than the low res version for the ability to drive multiple screens regardless.

It’s also a slick graphite color, which I really enjoy. Pic below.

The USB to DVI High Resolution Adapter retails at Sewell Direct for $150.