Life has thrown me curve balls, especially when I was expecting a line drive. I was laid off last summer, in August, but I rebounded pretty quickly and got a job at Jimmy John’s sandwiches in Ypsilanti, after deciding to move in with my girlfriend Erin. It was tough at first, a relaxed but fast paced environment, and the people weren’t always pleasent, and I think I got lost at least once. It paid the bills, and I was happy.

Nowadays, most of my week is spent in shop, with marketing 3 days a week. I love the challenges I face everyday. I’ve told my boss that I believe I can handle becoming an assistant manager. One can dream to move that fast up the ladder.

I’ve taken the next step and registered http://opinioncast.tv and set up a godaddy blogcast hosting under that domain name, I’ve configured it a bit, but it needs more work and some audio, maybe a video. I want to make one with my webcam but its almost 7 years old and yeah, 7 years is extinct in the tech world nowadays.

I want to grow my audience as i work toward my goal of creating a very interactive podcast show, maybe network! so i have an offer for my twitterbuds! I want to give out amazon DRM free mp3’s to random followers of my twitter. Sure this isn’t a Macbook air like @JasonCalacanis said he’ll give away, but it’s a start foir a 9-to-5-er like me!
Like i said in the video, for each 100 followers my account has, I will tack on another winner,and if i reach 1000 followers i will double the prize. that means i could potentially have 20k+ friends and that would be 400+ songs i pass out! So help me and spread the word!

• Contest begins immediatly and ends at 5 pm EDT
• each winner will win 1 or 2 mp3s of their choice from Amazon.com
• I’ll buy each song and upload the file on drop.io then DM the drop to you, then delete the file from my computer
• every 100 followers will generate another winner at the end of the contest
• once i reach 1000 followers, teh prize is doubled to 2 songs from amazon’s mp3 store
• if a bot is chosen at random for the winner, another winner will be chosen
• if i tell you that you’ve won, you have 48 hours to contact em back with the song(s) you want
• I am in no way a business and i have no idea how legal this is, to me its just giving my friends a gift for being nice to me!

After a day or so of fiddling around on it, I’m pleasantly surprised and at the same time sadly dissapointed. It functions great and call quality is crisp and loud (at max volume) But i was sad to see that text chat was missing!

Pros:

• works well over wi-fi
• sound comes in loud and clear
• Intuitive interface flows very well
• its still free!

Cons:

• No text chat
• no Background skype, if you want to use something else, you have to close skype.
• I had to buy both the remote kit ($30) and the headset ($20) just to allow people to hear me, thats way too much money to spend for a feature that’s half-implimented
• can’t sleep and have skype wake it up with incoming call.

Overall call: Don’t worry about this new feature unless you already purchased the accessories for other reasons.

Overall rating: 3/5

So I read on engaget yesterday that Update 3.95 for PSP includes Skype as a new feature, so of course, lover of skype that I am, I went out and bought a brand new psp and headset to try this out, as I was giving the old psp to the girlfriend anyways. I’m currently installing the update. more to follow after I play around with it!

Well, after 4 years of varios computer science and information technology classes at the local college, and 4 years of a job that has 0 stability, and that kind of Job security sucks. I want to fully delve into the world of tech blogging and techology news commentating through podcasting, kind of like a TWiT.tv for a younger generation. I’ve been using google docs to help build out my ideas and i generated a googledocs spreadsheed form for people to fill out for becoming a podcast panelist at http://tinyurl.com/5k2e7g and I’m hoping to build a small-meduim list of people of various ages to join me in sharing their opinions on tech news.

If you’re interested in helping me with this idea, please tweet this blog post and the Google docs link to your friends, the more the word spreads, the better . If you know of good hosting and or good advertisement opportunities, that would also be a great help. I’m basically diving at this head on and figuring it out as I go along

I was just invited this afternoon to come along on a trip to Chicago for the ACEN convention, and I’m taking this opportunity to go because I love conventions and this is probably the biggest convention near me thats even reletively techy.  I’ll be hopefully getting pleanty of pictures and video for posting on the internet. so wish me luck!

I try to be techy, try to having things that ease my life, and just make things more fun. I have bluetooth headphones, but wish Apple included bluetooth in their ipods I have a Windows Mobile 5 phone with bluetooth and use that in conjunction with my headphones to do handsfree calls when I’m driving. I still want a GPS bluetooth receiver so i can map out new places in a hurry instaed of looking for a nearby address and writing it down in the phone. I’d love to change out the stereo head unit and air controls in my car for a completely digital control unit that recognised my phone over bluetooth and sets my air controls, radio/ipod play settings, etc to my settings. can use my phone to download the weather and control the air accordingly. to take my calls wirelessly and play them over the car speakers, while a mic sits in my instrument panel for my voice.  I want my laptop to sit in the passenger ceat and record my driving stats, accelerating, braking,  MPG, trip and odometers, and maintenance records.

Then again, maybe I just dream really big

Just an hour ago, I got back to Erin’s with a brand new WD pocket drive, 320GB of protable goodness! I immediately .RARed all the software/crap that came with the drive and started encrypting it with Truecrypt, the whole drive, and of course I used a password of atleast 20 characters and a few keyfiles to shake up that hash, over all i think this will be good. give me a chance to save all my stuff from dissapearing! Now i’m off to 43folders.com to find out what to name my 43 folders!

I LOVE this new gadget from Adobe, PhotoShop Express. It brings a free photoshop-like app to the web, giving users who can’t afford an Alex on more comprehensive software.

Users can create a free account, Upload (seemingly unlimited) amounts of photos and edit them, using tool like red-eye fixing, sharpen, Sketch, etc, to perfect their priceless picture and share them with the world! Using these tool, I took a simple photo of me, and tried to make it more Cartoon-y: