MY AFTER-HOLIDAY QUICK UPDATE (1/5/09)

Happy (belated) Festivus, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year to you all!

Back in Gainesville after spending the last 2 weeks back home in Miami. Did not get to see any new movies to cross off my pending 2008 list while I was there.

Did not receive anything from my family for Christmas. I did, however, get my father the special edition set of one of his favorite films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and bought my sister two t-shirts that she loved from Threadless. The word from both of them: "I will get you a gift later." I'll believe it when I see it.
Luckily, I did receive $250 cash from 4 of my various aunts and uncles.

The day after Christmas, I decided that I would buy myself a brand new cellular phone to replace the now archaic one that I had had for over 2 ½ years, the Sony Ericsson W600. So, I went to Wal-Mart, which had the best prices for upgrades. For me, the choice was between the Samsung Blackjack II, which was FREE, and the LG Vu, for $48.88. When I had gone the week earlier, the Blackjack II was $18.88. So, when I went to Wal-Mart to buy the LG Vu, the decision became harder on whether or not I should get it.
But, it won. The new cell is the LG Vu (CU920). I LOVE this phone! Full HTML browser, 3G-enabled, one of the first phones to support AT&T TV and CV video-play, TOUCHSCREEN! Since I can afford neither the iPhone nor the plan that I would have to get along with it, this phone is a welcome substitute to it. My only complaints are its battery life - but I knew about that going in - and that, unlike the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone that I previously had, I cannot set an mp3 as my ringtone. Hopefully, there is a hack for the latter.
But it is very sexy...
Another fine Wal-Mart tale occured last Thursday night:
I read a tweet from @todd1985 (the internet's Todd Jurgess) telling of the Martin Scorsese Collection DVD set being $13 at Wal-Mart. At first, I did not believe him. After all, this set is usually $50+ at most retail stores. I had gone to Best Buy a couple days earlier and it was there for $57.99! But, I was sitting at home all day watching the SciFi Channel marathon of "The Twilight Zone" with no breaks. So, I set out to Wal-Mart to call his bluff. And, low and behold, there it was: the last Martin Scorsese Collection box set for $13! I grabbed it, sent a tweet to @todd1985 thanking him for this glorious bit of information, and continued to walk about the Electronics section of my local Wal-Mart.
So, I walk over to the $5 DVD bin to see if anything was in there that I wanted. And there was! In there lay the Zodiac 2-Disc Director's Cut DVD. I picked it up and laughed. There was only one in there. It must have been a mistake. After all, the single-disc version of Zodiac was in the $7.50 rack. I figured that someone must have picked it up from the regular DVD rack and, when they realized that they didn't want it anymore, dropped it in the $5 bin. But, I take it over to the price scanner to see how much Wal-Mart was charging fr it. Everywhere else, the DVD is $25. But, Wal-Mart usually is the first place to lower DVD prices. I was hoping it was around the $13-range as well. But the reading on the scanner displays, "DVD $5.00". I immediately ran to the cash register in the Electronics section and paid for both the Martin Scorsese Collection and the Zodiac 2-Disc Director's Cut, before Wal-Mart realized that they were grossly undercharging me.


The last bit of news is that my father got a call from the mechanic that has my car saying that even if we did get the money to pay for the replacement transmission, the car was also discovered to have a damaged frame. The $1100 that we were going to give to get the car fixed would have been more than what the car was worth. To fix the frame damage would have more than doubled that price. So, I am, for the first time ever, without a vehicle. This week, I will be taking out all of the things in my car before they deliver it to a junkyard.
2008 sucked, but 2009 ain't looking too pretty so far either...

The Death of Pownce

So, yesterday (12/15/08), Pownce shut down. Pownce was a micro-blogging site, like Twitter. But, Pownce was a much better service.
First off, there was no 140 character limit to your posts. Your posts could be as lengthy as they needed to be. The idea was not to make a long blog post, but you could if you liked.
Second, the site was more built around sharing things with your followers and friends. You could upload an mp3 that you wanted everyone to hear, or upload a picture, or a video. Actually, you could upload any file up to 100mb with the free service (250mb for the $20/month service). And when you shared a YouTube link (or various other video sites), the video would automatically embed into your message.
It was a huge upgrade to the Twitter service created by Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka (all part of either the Digg or Revision3 crew). With the economy being what it was, Pownce wasn't able to remain open and free. Now, the technology is part of the SixApart system - which handles famous blogging tools like Vox and TypePad.
I was using the site from the beginning and had a Pownce way before I had a Twitter. It was a brilliant service that never got the word out too well and Twitter already had the crowd with them. Pownce was to Twitter what Facebook is to MySpace: a more technologically advanced and more Web 2.0 service that does what it predecessor/rival does, but does it much better and with more flair.
I will miss Pownce and I hope that someone else comes along and takes Twitter's userbase with them to a much better place of more usability and a much more stable environment. I like using Twitter, but I feel that I liked Pownce much more. But, again, Twitter just has all the users.