th@talldude

50 Bloggers in 50 States

I'm finally posting this, which is long overdue.  When you bookmark something, it's important to go back to it again, but things came up, and I got distracted.  Better late than never I suppose!

Fellow Tweeter Patrick Curl is planning a road trip to all 50 states.  He is currently in fund raising mode, and is taking donations in the form of cash and hardware.  He wants to interview a blogger in all 50 states, which can be a great traffic boost for your blog.  The interview will be in the form of text/audio/video, and will be spread throughout the internet through whatever means he can.  I hope you all swing over to his American Bloggers page and give him some support.  This will surely be a fun trip to keep our eyes on, and we'll all be certain to learn something new, as well as find some great new blogs to read!

Take Pictures of Models With Taco Bell and Sports Illustrated

Taco Bell has created a gold mine for viral marketing.  Combine two of the typical American male's favorite things, food and a hot girl, and put them together online.  Voila!  An online photo shoot.  I am sure they are going to get tons of traffic off of this.

Is Small Town USA Ready For Expensive Gas?

I wasn't on Twitter long today, when TWalk posed this question.

I immediately thought of Small Town, USA (see recent post, Would You Live There?), and my own shopping habits.  There is no shortage of talk about our country's economic conditions.  Watch CNN, search Google, or read a newspaper, and somebody will be either proclaiming a recession, or that it's not so bad.  In the big city, while you use gas, everything is nearby, even though it may take you a bit to get through town.  Outside of the city, however, you often must travel long distances.  When agriculture is your economy, when everything in town, be it the hospital, school, or cafe, is made possible by the number of farmers in the area, every dollar counts.  When you must often drive long distances to get that ONE thing that your local town businesses don't provide, the fuel expenses quickly add up.

My TweetWheel

I finally got TweetWheel to load for me today.  I haven been hearing interesting things about it, but their server has always been so busy, and even today, I had to refresh several times before it got all the way through.  TweetWheel is very similar to the Facebook app, FriendWheel.  It collects the data about you and your friends and who you're following, then gives you a visual display to show you how you are all connected.  You can find my original TweetWheel here, but I also took a screenshot of it, so you can glance at it on the blog before reading my other posts (wink wink). It obviously doesn't have all of my Tweeps on it, there's far too many for TweetWheel's current capabilities, but it still gives a nice representation.  You can follow me on Twitter @thattalldude.

Small Town USA, Would You Live There?

I've had a lot of thinking time this week, as I had to spend a large amount of time away from the internet and my friends on Twitter.  As I pondered many topics, I kept circling back to a passion of mine, my hometown.

I understand completely why people move away, and leave North Dakota (my home state) completely for that matter.  But as much as it may benefit me to move away, and be around more people with the same mindset as me, technology wise, I would rather be the guy who turns things around, and gets people to move here.

On Twitter, Age Doesn't Matter

Tonight, while tweeting with @jordikell, @GeekMommy made an interesting observation.

The more I think about it, the more I realize just how spot on she is.

Does Google Heart Skype? GrandCentral Hopes So

This has already had a ton of discussion in the blogosphere, but it's come up again.  Rumor has it that eBay is again thinking over the possibility of selling Skype, and it seems to me this is the most seriously they have ever thought about it.  Despite languishing under eBay, Skype is still an attractive piece, especially if Wall Street knows you as GOOG.

Bravo Microsoft, Brilliant Marketing Here

Microsoft, the bungling behemoth that can't quite seem to catch Apple in anything these days, has pulled off a brilliant marketing opportunity.  Knowing all too well that Apple's iPhone sucks people into AT&T stores, they have placed the new 'Microsoft Surface' in these AT&T stores.  The iPhone took the world by storm, quickly running up the the ranks of the smart phone market.  Microsoft hasn't been able to compete with this, and was about to be left completely in the dust.  Now, however, people will be flowing steadily into these stores to look at the iPhone, and they'll see this nifty screen that interacts with these phones, and they'll say, 'Hey, that's cool!  Let's check it out.'  Yes, Microsoft has figured out how to show off their new toy by taking attention away from the very product bringing people to the store, the AT&T Store.

Why Can't I Find Anything?

I am a geek, living in a world of social media, where EVERYTHING gets tagged, archived, and indexed.  EVERYTHING.  So why is it, that I can never seem to find what I'm looking for?  This morning I was looking for an address, which I still haven't found, which made me start thinking about blogging this, which brought even more looking.  I don't have a digital camera, so I had to use my phone to take the picture of my 'desk.'  I haven't figured out how to send files from my phone to computer via bluetooth yet, so I popped the MicroSD card out to copy the pic to the computer, but then I couldn't find my SD adapter card.  All the more frustrating, is that it wasn't but a month ago that I 'organized' and cleaned up around here!  So why is this so hard for me?

Rule #5: No Pink Shirts

The latest from the BFT Patrol, here to Protect and Serve Tough.

Also check out Fancy Coffee Infraction.