Over the New Year holiday, some friends and I were talking about iPhone apps while we prowled around the Mission. It seems a lot of people see the app store as brimming with opportunity…just come up with a unique idea, code it up and chuck it over the fence and poof a nice little revenue stream. Honestly, I’ve never been all that interested in iPhone apps…sure, I have my utility apps, waiting in line apps, WTF is this apps and such but to date I think I’ve only paid for …

All the buzz about Google Buzz got my mind buzzing… Who’s to say that someone doesn’t register The_Real_Shawn_Cheatham@gmail or some such nonsense. Here’s how I got a nifty ‘verified’ flag on my profile. Click my profile image below see my Google Profile.

Head over to www.Knol.Google.com
Sign-in with your Gmail username/password
Go to Preferences in the top-right corner
Select the Name Verification tab to verify your account

After a few failed attempts at verifying via credit card I resorted to using my social security number. You can check out the Name Verification FAQ here.

A couple years ago I was bitten by the Ruby on Rails bug. For those of you who don’t know (probably most people reading this), Ruby is a coding language and Rails is a framework (think template). My interest in Rails grew at first out of curiosity and interest in how comparatively easy it was to pickup in comparison to other technology I’ve worked with. Before long I grasped the basic ‘theory’ and ‘concepts’ of Rails to the extent that I could hold my own in general Rails conversations.
Similar to …

If you’re one of the lucky few that have a Google Voice account, you might want to check out Chad Smith’s Google Voice Add-on for Firefox. The add-on gives you the ability to dial an outgoing number directly from a web page and then connects to whatever phone you specified in your Google Voice settings. Despite being in beta, I’ve been using it for a month or two with no major complaints. After installing and configuring the add-on, just go to a web page that has telephone number listed in …

(Un)fortunately, I’ve been having the same discussion since I was called nigger for the first time – I was 6 years old, his name was Paul and I had no idea what it meant.