Well, we’ve made it another year. So long 2009, bring on 2010. As we get set to close out this year, I want to wish everyone good health and good fortune for this upcoming year. Please be careful if you plan to celebrate with friends tonight, no matter where you live.
This year for the holidays, my wife got me one large present instead of a bunch of little presents. She got me a Dynex 22″ flatscreen TV with a built in DVD player for the bedroom. Don’t ask me why, but I have an easier time falling asleep when there’s a DVD playing in the background. She also got a mounting kit for the wall facing our bed. I do have to say I was a little nervous mounting the TV since working with drill and making holes in walls usually doesn’t end well for me, but everything fell perfectly into place. The TV is on the wall and we’ve used it every night since.
Thanks for the great gift, babe!
This is a cautionary tale that happened to my wife. I have to pass this along so everyone can be prepared.
My wife was coming home from work one day when she saw a car in the ditch along side the road. She pulled off and found an older lady that had spun her car and skidded into the ditch. The older lady did have a cell phone and had called someone in her family, but unfortunately, that person didn’t answer the call. My wife decided that the next step was to call the police, but she knew that this was not an emergency, so calling 911 was not the right number. The non-emergency numebr was not in my wife’s phone nor did she know it from memory. My wife actually called me to ask for the number, but I didn’t have it stored in my phone either. I had to look the number up in the phone book and give it to her. Despite those minor setbacks, the story does have a happy ending. The local police sent someone out, and the older lady’s relative arrived and to get her out of the ditch.
So, what’s the moral of the story? Find your local police department’s non-emergency number and store it in your cell phone as a new contact. Rest assured that both my wife and I now have that number stored in our cell phones. Cause we just never know when we’ll need it.
Even though this is a little late, I do hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday weekend. My wife and I spent the day with her side of the family, and both my wife’s mom and aunt got charging stations for their iPhone. And what made it funnier was that it was a present each gave the other. We laughed about the for a few minutes. Well, onto New Year’s, and be safe while ringing in the new year.
This is another story from Cnet, and it concerns 15 websites that shutdown during the year. As you might expect, there are a lot of sub-site from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, but there was one that was from a smaller company called Splashcast that was initially a way for people to share, legally, multiple media types. What sunk them was a lack of funds as they got into publishing content and allowing users to chat during hosted TV shows. It’s almost like they were trying to provide live video casting solutions. Guess they should have waited until they had more solid sponsorship or customer base before expanding.
This list comes from Cnet.com and is the top 10 downloads from the past decade.
While most of these are choices that I would not argue with, I do have to take issue with Napster being #3. Considering the backlash from the music community and the subsequent lawsuits, Napster is a bit of a black mark. In my opinion, to be on this list, the download should be one that introduced something new to the internet and had enough staying power to be useful and popular to the present day. Napster’s concept was improved by iTunes.
So what’s to come? What’s the next big thing for the internet? What will become world wide necessities during the next decade? Will live video streaming services be the next big thing we think of as not that uncommon in the year 2020? Time will tell.
Keeping with the top 10 theme, here’s the top 10 gadgets that were introduced during this decade according to ABC news.
Now, the story didn’t put numbers next to the gadgets, so I listed them in the order they were listed in the story and added the numbers myself. And if there is one gadget that revolutionized our lives, it has to be the iPod. Think about this for a second, before the iPod, we had to carry a portable CD player and a case of CDs. Now, depending on how much you liked music determined how many CDs you took with you. With the iPod, you could very well take your entire album collection wherever you went. And I have close to 200 CDs, so I was stoked by the idea of not having to worry about bringing certain CDs. What a great decade!
So what is the biggest news story in the realm of science for this past decade? CosmicLog listed some highs and lows in the realm of science and I’m curious if anyone has na opinion on which story is the biggest.
In my opinion, the water on the moon story is the biggest and here’s why. If we want to establish a more permanent foothold in space, we need to be able to go to nearby moons and planets that have some of the necessary elements for us to live, water being top on the list. If the moon has reserves of water, sustained colonies on the moon seem more feasible.
I was doing some more looking and found this webcam for $99. 
This camera captures images and broadcasts them in high definition. So, if you want to use Skype in high definition, this is probably right up your alley, but if you’re looking for technology that will help you with live video streaming services for large events, you might want to think bigger.
This is what I need. Some genius compiled a list of tech items that would make great Christmas gifts. And the best part? Each item is under $200. Now, I don’t know about you, but that makes a world of difference for me. And the one thing I’m looking at most? The Wireless Battery Charging Pad The greates thing about this is that you don’t need to plug in your wireless device, just place it on this mat. I love that!