Chad Sakonchick

Five years ago I graduated from college and kept a blog for my 5 weeks of travel abroad. I’ve been paying for hosting service at cyberpixels.com since then to store my entries. Since then, I’ve used the domain for something else, but need to retrieve my data from cyberpixels somehow. I’ve been paying the $13 monthly fee for over a year now calling every once in a while for support. I’ve now called over 20 times including every day last week and no one will call me back even though they claim support within 24 hours.

Please help me get some attention by crashing their lines. Please call the following number and tell them to contact me at chad/at sign/posima/dot/com about the domain poseidonimaging.com

Link to the support contact form: http://www.cyberpixels.com/contact.php

Cyberpixels 888 539-1522

Assuming anything happens, I’ll update everyone here.

When I found out about the potential capabilities of Facebook’s new Pages release, I rushed to make a few pages of my favorite college team, restaurant and TV show. Fifteen minutes later, I’m over it. Facebook pages is nothing more than Facebook groups meshed with applications and a desperation to advertise. A huge folly like this is not something I would have normally expected from Facebook as most everything they’ve touched has turned to gold. Sadly, Facebook seems to have inherited the DNA of its advertising partner Microsoft. I was taught since college never to give a negative opinion without suggesting solutions so…

First off, you have to pick what type of entity your page is for right off the bat without the ability to change it later. I began to make a “Texas Longhorns” club only to realize later that “club” refers to a nightclub not an organization club. I then tried to make it a “sports organization,” but spent 10 minutes trying to figure out which area they listed that option in. The problem here is that you shouldn’t have to categorize the page before you make it. You should be asked the title and that’s it. From there you should be able to categorize it with those nifty auto suggestions that Facebook is so good at when I’m searching for a friend in the search bar.

Once you have a page, you are shown a blank slate much like you had with your personal profile when you signed up. I like the standard apps (information, discussion board, wall) they give you as most of them relate to any type of page you create so you can begin filling out information fairly easily. I tried to upload some video highlights of great Longhorn plays but hit a wall when I found out I had to upload the video as a Facebook video instead of being able to simply embed youtube videos. This is yet another example of how Facebook is becoming a proprietary beast like Microsoft.

Moving on, let’s add some upcoming games as events… Wait, can’t do that, it’s too complicated. Making an event is the exact same as making a normal event, I don’t want to spend an hour making 5 events and then inviting people, that doesn’t make sense. There should be a batch create event that allows someone to make recurring events for TV shows or happy hour specials or “a game every saturday with different times on each date excluding the weeks we aren’t playing.”

Alright, so the stock apps they have are lame or don’t work for what I want to do so let’s add some new apps. Searching… searching…searching…

Should I add the horoscope application or the zombies app? ALL OF THESE APPS ARE USELESS AND CHILDISH!!!

In conclusion, Pages had potential but was ill conceived. I don’t foresee this becoming mainstream unless they go back to the drawing board and start over.

I’ve been asked by a lot of people recently “Who is Ron Paul and why do you keep blabbering about him?” While the DVD project is a nice thought, I think that short focused videos are more effective. Creating a directory of all the fantastic supporter-made videos organized by issues and Paul’s background would help me and others convert a lot of people who are naysayers simply because they know nothing of the man or his beliefs. I’d like to create such a place so please comment below with links to the best short videos (3-10 mins) and include some text to help me organize the videos.

This is such a simple and easy to execute solution that it made my head spin. I did this in Gmail but am sure that this can be done in any mail app.

Create a new filter to search for the keyword of a letter that doesn’t exist in the English language but is common in SPAM messages. For example: ‘И’

Have the message skip your inbox and go straight to delete and voila!

Thanks to the 37signals for this tip…

Even though I know the answer to my own question, I keep Googling various keywords to try and find some glimmer of hope that Guitar Hero III fans using any supported platforms can play together.  I don’t know the specifics of the online play, but I’m suspecting that RedOctane is hosting all of them and developed the various incarnations of the game from the same core.  So can anyone tell me why this shouldn’t be possible?  Can the online play be hacked to be hosted elsewhere to support multi-platform online play?

Anybody out there?

I’ve realized recently that planning on doing something and not committing even in the slightest way is a death sentence to any project.  I’ve been meaning to update this blog, finish some projects on my house, sign up for my Private Pilot’s License, clean out my closet, etc.  Making a schedule isn’t the best idea to solve this problem as you just skip over an item and say you’ll come back to it later.  I’ve found that having a to-do list that is in plain sight can work if you don’t overlook it.  The best way to complete projects is to complete one item whenever you have time (even 20 minutes).  Once you’re leaving work, are exhausted and just want to go home and watch your favorite shows, do one thing on your to-do list instead.  Go workout for 20 mins, stop by the grocery store and pick up some staples (I never go shopping and have a bad habit of eating out everyday of my life), complete that one project at home that you’ve been planning.  You’ll come to realize that ticking off items on your to-do list is like a drug, the more you do, the more you want.

When I don’t have that much to do and I lie around, I feel lazy and don’t accomplish much.  If I’ve got work coming out of my ears, I find it easier to take care of other things that need taking care of.  So keep yourself busy and take care of all those things you’ve wanted to accomplish.  If you put them off till later, later will never come.

I remember a lecture back in an Intro to Advertising class that discussed this issue. The story told was about a man who went to a monster truck rally. The trucks ran over a row of cars and the only car whose frame wasn’t crushed was that of a Volvo. The man wrote Volvo about his experience and said he would now seriously consider purchasing on of their vehicles because of this.

Volvo decided to turn this story into a commercial. During filming an extra witnessed some men reinforcing the Volvo’s frame by welding some heavy duty pieces of metal to the interior of the car, not to be seen by the camera’s. The man called the local news station to report what was going on and naturally the news station showed up and interrogated everyone involved with the commercial. Volvo shut production down and the commercial or any variant was ever aired.

This is a fantastic story of keeping advertisers in check. Unfortunately, we are now bombarded with ads that are totally unrealistic. Dodge Nitro’s can blow up cars, Toyota Tacoma’s are Meteor-Proof, and this stuff can make a 60 year old look like a 20 year old. When did advertising agencies lose their credibility of educating us about a product? Instead, our heads are bashed against the concrete until we give in or simply decide to skip over the commercials with our DVR’s.

I was thinking about Steve Rubel’s post about TV being “The great new platform” to develop on. He was of course referring to Television programming (shows), but what about just normal everyday things we already do? I want to be able to interface with my music via my TV instead of my computer. Let’s say I want to have a party and allow people to add to the playlist (everyone loves to play 30 second DJ). How can I do this? Well, I have an MP3 tunes Oboe locker and a Wii. Why not make a Wii friendly web service that taps into the MP3 Tunes API to do that? People could find songs and drag them to the playlist via the wiimote.

Why stop there? SXSW had Flat panels displaying Twitter messages that flew by live, you could do the same by just browsing to Twittermaps on your Wii. Someone could create a Facebook service that did the same. A screensaver of sorts that pulls data from Facebook and showed you your friends new picts, status updates, wall posts, etc. What I’m getting at is that we all know the Wii is capable of cool interaction like this (wiitube.com), so why hasn’t anyone started to make services like this yet?

I was reading the blogosphere today and stumbled upon a great article from NewTeeVee. Their article discussed how Apple may change the TV industry as the iPod did for the Music industry. It got me thinking about the numbers behind TV shows which I’ve decided to share here.

Disclaimer: These numbers are all that I could scrounge off the net, if anyone has more accurate numbers contact me and I’ll update the post.

I watch a lot of TV. Enough TV that my Cable bill minus High Speed Internet comes out to about $110 a month. Which means I’m spending $1320 a year on television…WOW. To break it down for you, the shows I keep up with regularly include:

Lost, Rome, Family Guy, The Riches, Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (cancelled), Entourage, Nip/Tuck, The Office, The OC (cancelled), Curb your Enthusiasm, The L Word, Carnivale (cancelled), Weeds and Dexter. This comes to 15 shows a year that I watch. This doesn’t include random flipping through the channels watching the Discovery Channel or the History Channel when they have interesting stuff on. This also doesn’t include any sports of any kind (I try to keep up with my Longhorns).

Assuming I buy an AppleTV, cut my cable subscription, and can get all of these 15 shows via iTunes, what will I save? A season pass on iTunes costs $35, I watch 15 shows which brings us to $525. That’s a savings of $795 a year. I wouldn’t be able to watch my Longhorns on ESPN, but I can go to a bar and spend some of my savings on that. I also wouldn’t have mindless entertainment like infomercials and those occasional cool shows like “Battleground: The Art of War” on the Discovery Channel. But I can buy these types of shows one by one if I choose once iTunes broadens its reach. I can also surf the limitless Video Podcasts that spring up day after day.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a great deal to me. Even better, I get to keep these shows once I’ve seen them and bypass purchasing a season I like on DVD for an extra $60.

What about the cash flow for the industry? From the shows I could find, Rome’s first episode pulled in 3.8 million viewers. Let’s pretend they kept all their viewers and sold all of them $35 subscriptions to the show instead. That’s $133 million on a show that cost roughly $100 million to make. Not a bad profit on a high budget series. Heroes brought in 14.7 million viewers last week. Cut those viewers in half and sell them each a $35 subscription…$257 million.

I’m not in the industry, but that is a lot of dough. If they can figure out how to squeeze a few extra dollars with product placement, we have ourselves a nice little business. Knowing that this kind of money can be made through iTunes in the next five years, will we begin to see companies popping up that create great shows but never release them on any network other than iTunes? I don’t see why not. We as the viewer will get the best of both worlds, more quality programming at a cheaper cost.

AAPL is a major buy in my book…

AppleTV began shipping from Cupertino this morning.  I’ll be purchasing mine from Amazon Prime or the local Apple Store as soon as I can get my hands on one.  The question I have is, what are the limitations of this device?

From reading reviews of AppleTV, it seems I can auto sync one computer and have as many computers as I’d like(Mac and PC) stream to the device.  The problem with all of this is storage.  My current laptop has 60 gigs of storage, 28 gigs of which have music, tv shows or movies downloaded from iTunes.  A major reason for purchasing the AppleTV for me was to clear up a lot of that space on my laptop.  I’m certain if I sync to AppleTV then remove the items from my library, AppleTV and iTunes will be upset with me.

Another solution I had thought about was purchasing a Mac mini solely to store data, but what’s the point of purchasing a machine if all you need is storage?  I should be able to hook an external hard drive up to the Apple TV, which brought me to my next solution.

Now this is a big “is it possible?” that I need help with and hopefully someone out there will be able to test this out.  What if I purchase a new Airport Extreme Base Station and hook up an external hard drive to it (the new airport base stations can provide an external drive with sharing capability over the network).  Can I store all of my media on the external hard drive connected to the Base Station and stream media without a computer?

If this last solution will work, I’ll be able to rip all of my dvd’s through Handbrake, store them on the external hard drive and stream them whenever I want to AppleTV.  If that’s possible, I can’t think of a better set up with today’s current offerings.   Can anyone tell me if this will work?