From Cracked.com…

“The Amazon.com Kindle is basically a big ugly iPod that allows you to carry 200 books with you at all times. Which raises the important question: who the hell reads that much? This fake ad introduces you to the terrifying target audience.”

As the days inch towards Christmas people around the nation will be frantically finishing up their shopping and wrapping gifts. I’m not a big fan of wrapping gifts. For one, it is an extra step before hoisting the gift off to it’s recipient. All the work and energy, physical as well as creative, that goes into the presentation is quickly shredded to a pulp as it is ripped off and tossed aside for the main attraction below the surface. That precious wrapping paper, tape, and pretty bow will make their way to the trash where they will rot away in a landfill.

But my biggest gripe is the price for all of that frilly paper, which only provides only a moment of glee. And while I would like to see the 2007 Christmas season be the one that ditches the idea of wrapping up gifts (after all, being green is in vogue) there is a snowflake’s chance in hell that is going to happen. Companies that make wrapping paper and related products must be raking it in as the busiest shopping season heads into full insane-o-mode. I couldn’t find any statistics about wrapping paper revenue, but I am sure that it is such a large chunk of company profits that the last thing they would want to do is stop the frivolous holiday tradition.

How could I get out of wrapping gifts without disappointing my family and friends while not spending a dime? Why not turn to the one thing that has helped give consumers the things they want without charging them a thing, advertising-supported goods! I would gladly accept gift-wrapping materials that have been plastered in logos if it were free and saved me time. It seems to make sense in helping companies spread brand awareness as the giftee would be exposed with a happy and joyous moment of opening a gift which creates a positive psychological effect and brand association. Companies could ship it to people for free or give it out at stores with every purchase. Boxes already pre-wrapped and decorated using a Christmas variation of the corporate colors and branded tissue paper inside would be the perfect ad vehicle to their next potential customer. And with the cost of buying everything in bulk, the company wouldn’t be spending more than the usual barrage of printed material such as full-page magazine ads, billboards, or direct mailing fliers. Wrapping paper would be unusual in the fact that it is actually useful! That’s a valuable exchange in my book.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this idea more widespread. Lots of stores offer gift wrapping though it is usually offered as an extra service for a price. Why not offset that cost with advertising? Everything else seems to work that way. And it’s not like Christmas isn’t already over-marketed, over-hyped, and over-crowded with the consumerism mentality of BUY, BUY, BUY! Why not just a little bit more with free wrapping paper?

I recently spent a weekend ripping all of my old CDs to my music hard drive and got me thinking about all of the great MP3 freeware that is out there. Here are my five must have freeware apps for MP3 nirvana.

Audiograbber – This CD ripper is the easiest way to convert your CDs to MP3s. While it may look like any other CD rippers, Audiograbber has lots of tweakable options to make your ripping session more flexible. Features worth noting are per track checksums to ensure each file was duplicated exactly, normalizing to prevent jarring sound levels from track to track, delete silence from the end and/or start of a track, encode to a variety of formats including WAV, MP3, or WMA (other encoders can be set up in the Settings menu), and automatically load track information from the freedb CD database.

Picard (from MusicBrainz) – Gigabytes upon gigabytes of MP3 files collected from various sources can lead to some wacky, hodgepodge ID3 tags. ID3 tags are MP3 metadata that describe things like the album title, artist, track, and genre. The MusicBrainz service aggregates metadata from various community members in an attempt to house the largest music information database in the world. Songs can be uniquely identified by their sonic pattern which is used to match up the MP3 file with the correct metadata. Picard is a piece of software which lets you easily drag a bunch of files to batch process all at once. When the program is done you can overwrite the ID3 tags and live in MP3 organization utopia for the time being.

MediaMonkey – Lots of people rave about the brilliance of iTunes but I just don’t see it. Winamp was my player of choice for years until it became too system resource greedy. Then I found MediaMonkey which is fast, flexible, and incredibly organized. Remember all that talk about properly tagging MP3 files with MusicBrainz? MediaMonkey uses that information for searching. In addition you can edit the ID3 tags right in the interface as well as download album covers from Amazon. A bunch of Internet radio stations can be streamed from the player when your days of MP3s become repetitive. If that is not enough you can also batch rename the filenames of your music files matching their ID3 tags, connect and sync with a variety of MP3 players, and generate reports and statistics based on your listening habits. The MediaMonkey system also supports an open plugin architecture as well as scripting support to extend the functionality. All of this from a lightweight music player that won’t bog your system down without skimping out on features.

Music IP Mixer – Do you find it hard to come up with a good play list to listen to? Does the random shuffle option not do a good enough job satisfying your musical pallets? Music IP has a free download that lets you make play lists based on their acoustic fingerprints. When you first start the program up it scans your music directory and analyzes each and every MP3 file. Then using a specialized algorithm based on a variety of factors, the program can create a sophisticated mix based on a selected “seed” song. The MusicIP Mixer lets you tweak the mix by selecting songs and selecting “More like this”, “Less like this”, or “Replace this song”, “Replace this artist”. After specifying the number of songs you can save the play list for later use of send it directly to your audio player of choice.

SoundControl – Controlling your media player by clicking on the software interface is for people with too much time on their hands; Real power users set up hot keys to do their important music tasks. I originally stumbled on Sound Control while looking for a program to visually display the volume level when I turn it up or down like an on screen TV display. But it turns out there are a lot of hidden features in this puppy. For one, I set up hot keys to play, pause, play the previous track, or play the next track all without bringing up the program. Another hot key lets me mute, increase, or decrease my sound volume just like those keyboards with dedicated keys.

So as you can see, it is important to have a properly tagged and organized MP3 collection, that you ripped from your old CDs, that can be easily made into play lists based on moods, that you play on your light-weight music software, where the volume is controlled via customizable hotkeys all for the price of zilch.

People at work egged me on to moblog this mound of cake that we got for a co-worker.

It has been nearly a month and I thought I would update everyone about the last Zune in the DC area. I managed to sell the digital media player on the Amazon Marketplace for $329.99, a 32% markup over the original price. I still needed an MP3 player for my daily commute and with the profit I decided to buy another Zune 80 online via Amazon.com instead of in person at Target. In this situation buying online was a much better deal for the following reasons:

1. Buying the player in person results in sales tax being tacked on. Here in Maryland, the sales tax is 5% so that would add an additional $12.50. Amazon.com doesn’t charge sales tax for Maryland residents.
2. Amazon.com offers a 30 day price match on it’s own products. If the price drops within 30 days of a purchase, Amazon will refund the difference. When I ordered the player on December 2nd, it was $249.00. Today it is being sold for $239.99, a difference of $9.00. Claiming a refund is easy. Just go to Amazon.com/refunds and send customer service an e-mail. If you don’t want to keep track of the price differences yourself, check out PriceProtectr.com which will send you an e-mail if there is any drop.
3. Both Amazon.com and any local store are sold out of the device, so I would have to wait either way. I don’t mind waiting which is why I decided to sell my first one when the demand was high.

Here is a final breakdown of the math:

1st Zune Bought at Target
$249.99
+$12.50 Sales Tax
= $262.49 Total

Sold on Amazon.com Marketplace
$329.99 Price Sold
+$7.48 Shipping Credit from Amazon.com
– $10.35 Actual Shipping Cost (Added insurance to the cost)
-$28.14 Amazon Fee
– $262.49 Cost to Acquire
= $36.49 Profit

2nd Zune Bought on Amazon.com
$248.99
+$5.58 Shipping and Handling
-$5.58 Free Super Saver Shipping
-$9.00 Price Difference Refund
= $239.99

Final price for my Zune
$239.99 for 2nd Zune
-$36.49 Profit From 1st Zune
= $203.50

Not bad for waiting a little bit longer and taking advantage of a unique situation.

Kristina is building center pieces for a Filipino semi-formal event tommorrow night at the University of Maryland. The theme is ‘masqurade’ hence all of the masks.

Nope. Just the remnants of an all night college crafts party.

Google has impressive, interactive charts incorporated into many of their products. The best place to see them in action is Google Finance where stock prices are graphed over time allowing the user to zoom in or out, stretch or expand the selected view, and other fancy interactions. The result is a rich experience for viewing and manipulating data.

Today Google unveiled the public application programming interface to interact with their chart engine. While not as rich as Google Finance charts, this public charting tool is extremely flexible in
creating line charts, scatter plots, bar graphs, Venn diagrams, and even pie charts. Charts are generated by constructing a URL with various parameters, or options, to customize a chart dynamically. Making a URL request returns a PNG image which can be saved to disk or embedded on any web page. Some examples of the charts are shown below.

Documentation for charts can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ which provides a smattering of examples.

I am very excited by this release as there are a ton of different applications these could be used in. Using some simple JavaScript, you could take these charts a step further and create animated charts using various URLS with one incrementing data parameter. Kind of like this (JavaScript code borrowed from Chip Chapin).

I would like to see a user-friendly interface built on top of the API so those who are less developer inclined can make charts and graphs easily. It wouldn’t be too hard to make a simple JavaScript program to construct the URLs. I will try to crank something out tomorrow at work, because this is simply too cool to pass up.

We got about 3″ – 4.5″ here in Glenmont. It was really serene and pretty until people had to dig out their cars. Heading in to work a bit late this morning thanks to a slow metro ride.

I woke up to snowfall this morning which will make getting to work a bit slippery. Hopefully it will be a snowy winter so snowboarding season can get underway.