Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Bridge™ iPod® Docking Station

Now, The Bridge literally links your iPod and Harman Kardon allowing you to share the favorite tracks and playlists stored on your iPod with anyone in listening range of compatible Harman Kardon AVR - even in a connected second room. Dock your iPod in The Bridge, then sit back and operate it with the AVR's remote control while on-screen and front-panel menus guide your track selections. The Bridge also charges the iPod while you use it.

Features:
Simple Solution for playback and navigation control of your iPod.
Ready AVR Receiver
Single Cable Connection from the Bridge to the AVR
Use AVR's Remote and Front-Panel to navigate and control iPod iPod Navigation displayed on-screen and AVR front panel

Friday, November 18, 2005

SpamBaiting

Mike Wendland (Detroit Free Press): November 4 article looks at SpamBaiting

There's a new way to fight those Nigerian scam e-mails that keep circulating online.

It's called SpamBaiting.

The idea is to pull a reverse sting on the spam scammers, leading them on by pretending to go along with the con through increasingly silly and insulting e-mail replies.

While it's not officially endorsed by law enforcement, the pastime has become so popular that more than 50 Web sites are now devoted to hassling the scammers. The biggest and most imaginative is 419eater.com, which calls the practice a cyber sport and has posted dozens of e-mail exchanges with scammers from all over the world.

Surely, if you've been online for any length of time, you've heard from these electronic con artists who pretend to have fortunes worth millions that they want to invest or move out of the country. They offer you a lucrative cut, supposedly to help them do it.

As the greedy victims get sucked into the scam, the con artists find ingenious ways to get them to send their bank account info or pay up-front fees needed to get the cash out of their country.

The con is called the Nigerian scam, or 419 fraud, after a section of the Nigerian criminal code that makes the practice illegal. Although it originated in Nigeria, it is being used by online criminals all over the world.


Friday, September 16, 2005

iRivier T10 Mp3 Player

I got an iRiver T10 1 GB MP3 Player for my 35th birthday (Yes, please feel free to send me any belated gifts!). I've been extremely satisifed with the player so far. The first thing that impressed me was its size; Barely larger than the double A battery that powers it. Speaking of batteries, you probably forget how to change them because the T10 has an exteremly longer battery life of up to 12 hours.

The user interface is intuitive and its easy to modify audio settings. Overall the play has some nice features such a FM Radio, audio recording (from microphone, and from over the air FM broadcasts), and support for Mp3 and wmv.



Its also fully compatible with Windows Media player 10 (included) so you can drag and drop within the media player UI to upload songs.

You can see all of the components that come with it in this shot:



Let me know what you think. You can find this product on my website at the following link: T10 MP3 Player

Saturday, August 13, 2005

A good rub goes a long way

Hold on, don't get the wrong idea here. I'm talking about a good rub for your bbq. Check out this article from Cook's Illustrated magazine. I tried out the Grill-Roasted Pork Loin recipe from the July issue.

This is what it looked like while it was cooking on my grill. It tasted wonderful and the rub was easy to make!






If you feel brave and have time, try out the receipe below take From Boston Magazine online.

Slow-cook pork barbecue
By Cook's Illustrated founder and America's Test Kitchen host Christopher Kimball
From the June 2004 issue


It's best to have a covered grill with a built-in thermometer so you don't have to lift the cover to check the temperature. Be sure to keep the heat low -- it should never get much above 225 degrees -- and use indirect heat. Weber makes half-moon-shaped charcoal bins for indirect cooking.

1 4- to 5-pound boneless pork butt
1 cup barbecue rub
1/2 cup Vinegar Moppin' Sauce


1. Rub meat with barbecue rub and set aside at room temperature while preparing fire. Start two small piles of charcoal on either side of a covered grill, 15 briquettes each. Place a drip pan half-filled with water in the middle and an oven thermometer on top of the cooking surface. After 20 minutes, place six additional briquettes on each pile of coals, add soaked wood chips on top of the briquettes, and place meat over the drip pan. Cover and cook meat for three hours. Maintain an even 225-degree temperature by checking every hour.

2. When meat is done, wrap tightly in aluminum foil, place in a 225-degree oven, and cook for an additional two hours or until pork is fall-apart tender.

Serves eight to ten

Barbecue rub for beef and pork

2 tablespoons coarse salt
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon cumin
2 teaspoons ground cardamom
2 teaspoons allspice
2 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons black pepper
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons paprika


Mix ingredients and rub over meat before cooking.

Vinegar Moppin' sauce

1 1/2 cups cider vinegar
2 teaspoons hot red-pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons Tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon peanut oil
salt and freshly groundpepper to taste


Mix ingredients in a small saucepan and heat. Serve hot as an accompaniment to grilled foods. If you serve barbecued foods chopped, this sauce can be mixed in.



Ok, now for a serious list of the best rubs on the webs go to bbq-porch. Drop me a line if you try any of them.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Weber Chill Portable Outdoor Refrigerator

Its hot outside, but you can still enjoy a good cookout. The Weber Chill Portable Indoor/Outdoor Refrigerator saves you from making trips indoors to get a cold drink or to another steak for the grill. No hauling ice chests and no lugging bags of ice. Simply plug the refrigerator into an outdoor outlet and your set.

The Weber Chill features a roomy 15.9 cubic feet of storage, enough for 72 12-ounce beverage cans. Two handy mahogany shelves add serving space. Choose from three hot colors—silver, blue, and burgundy. 110 volts class A rating-UL approved



Love to have a lot of favor with your bbq. Check out the Weber 2820 Smokey Mountain Cooker Smoker. Its great for slow cooking bbq chicken, ribs, or brisquet. If you're adventureous try out this receipe from foodnetwork for Sweet and Smoky Baby Back Ribs

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Boring but made some minor changes

Its 5:00am on saturday morning and I couldn't sleep. I stayed up and made a couple of updates to my website cceshop.com. I reordered by rss feed so that the most recent items are listed first - see it here

Also added a few rss feed just for mp3 players. Give it a try - here

Optimized the loading of the main page by removing call for banners and also tweaked the usefullink.php to include links to my two new blogs. I'm interested to see if it helps with googlerank.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Yahoo 360

Yahoo has a new blog service for users called Yahoo 360. It has some decent features such as linking photos posted to yahoo photos and adding links to friends blogs. You can also search for phone with similiar interested and make friends with them. It has much more of a community feel to it than blogger.com

Check out my page here

Pioneer AirWare XM2Go Portable XM Satellite Radio Receiver

Pretty cool, now you can take XM with you. Pioneer AirWare XM2Go Portable XM Satellite Radio Receiver has a nice form factor with pretty good features.

It also seems like Napster and XM have teamed up. You can buy music that you hear on XM. See this yahoo link for more details.

Harry Potter Mania (Old News)

We stood inline with the huddled masses to get the new Harry Potter book. It was fun, even for an old guy like me (who happens to have not read any of the books).

Check out the images that I took with my Motorola camera.

Friday, April 01, 2005

IBM T42P

You should be jealous. I got a new IBM T42P as my work laptop and it rocks. Its quite an upgrade from the T30 that I've had for the past year.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

New Web site and HostFor2Buck

Well, just to complicate things more I started a second site. Are trying HostFor2Buck and better pretty dissapointed I added a subdomain focusing just on appliances, kitchenandlaundry.cceshop.com

As for hostfor2bucks. How can you be dissapointed after spending $24 bucks for a
domain name and web space? I had the grand delusion that I could run a small business on their site. Check out the tread below where I ask about SSL support.

>
> I need to install SSL cert on my server, but I cannot find it in
> the web server settings as stated in the CP manual. Could you
> please enable SSL for my site.
>
> Thanks,
> Bailey

Dear Customer,

You cannot install SSL on your site, SSL is not an available option.

Sincerely,
Hostfor2bucks.com


Can I do any form of https on the server? From the description on the
website, it appeared available. Is there a shared SSL cert that can be
used?

Thanks,
Bailey

Thank you for contacting us. Please point us to the page on
www.hostfor2bucks.com where SSL appears to be included.

Sincerely,
Hostfor2bucks.com


Great customer service?

Friday, January 14, 2005

On to 2005

Very slow christmas season this year. Last year, I sold $10K in digital alone in digial cameras.

This year, I wasn't able to get needed inventory of the items that people wanted. Sirius Satellite radio was very popular and the products on the site had fairly high page ranking on froggle.

Updated front page http://cceshop.com, to have two category columns and change the coloring. The live help had some initial success but has slowed dramatically.

Update logo to have two colors - need some honest feedback on how it looks.

This year, need to work on local advertising, improving page rank and launch the http://kitchenandlaundry.com web site.