Dave Mancuso dot Com

McCain said that an offer was highly unlikely, but yes, he’d certainly consider an offer to become Kerry’s vice presidential running mate.

Wow. It’s a long shot, but a Kerry/McCain ticket would be an amazing sight. The integrity and political clout that McCain would bring to the table would be a force to reckon with.

Here’s the story at WGAL’s website.

Sunday was torture–Monday was almost as bad.

Something snapped Monday night (like my mild fever) and Tuesday was worlds better. Today was almost back to normal.

I was the last at work to get it, so hopefully we’re all done with it.

Especially in a 35 mile per hour zone.

But that’s what the state trooper said when he stopped me. I swear I was going 45 tops, but I could have been wrong. Hey, I was driving back from Philly to Etown in a haze of illness, so I could have not noticed my speed. He said his radar clocked me at 59 and then he followed me for a half mile to make sure.

Luckily, the trooper just told me to slow it down. Someone must be smiling down on me.

You know, every time my sister comes up to visit, I tend to have an interaction with the police. Not that I’m saying there’s a connection, but–hm.

[updated–corrected hasty typos after reading helpful comment. 🙂 ]

Check it out at Wired News. Assuming that you’d want to use this (I wouldn’t, believe it or not), I can’t imagine that this would be anything other than expensively priced; $25-$30 per flight is pretty exorbitant.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the Spam McGriddle!

This sounds as good as our old tongue-in-cheek Denny’s menu proposals: The Danish Italiano (with it’s yummy Marinara danish filling), the tasty Trout and Eggs breakfast, and the Spam Slam (Spam hotcakes with Spam eggs and Spam meat on the side–don’t forget the small cruet of spam-flavored syrup!).

Doesn’t that do wonders for your appetite?

Burn a disc on one side, burn the label on the other side with the same optical drive. Check out the story.

I got it from Brad. I guess I shouldn’t have been so close to him this week at the office (nudge, nudge).

But y’know, if the world didn’t suck at times, we’d probably all fly off into space.

Brad wrote about TiVO. He wondered why I haven’t written anything about it.

Isn’t it obvious? I’m not writing because I’m spending all my time watching TV.

Seriously, with all due respect to the feelings of the people who put down TV for political and programming reasons, there are some things worth watching on TV. The problem is that I don’t have the time to sit around (or stay up) to catch the few shows I want to see.

TiVO solves that problem for me. Rather than watching crap, I set the box to find a show I want to watch and it records it. You say “so what?” OK–unlike a VCR, TiVO finds the show whenever it’s on, on any channel, forever, avoiding repeats if I want, until I tell it to stop. That way I don’t have to keep looking for when Extreme Homes or Hometime is on, for example. Then I can watch or delete them as I find time, on my schedule instead of the TV’s. That is worth $5 a month to me.

The second big thing to TiVO is the 30 second skip. This is a button you can set up to skip 30 seconds ahead instantly–no waiting for fast forward. The first big attraction of this is to skip through commercials by hitting the button five times to instantly skip ahead two minutes, for example. The second big attraction is to skip through parts of a show you don’t want to see. I do this with the TechTV show The ScreenSavers all the time.

I can watch an hour show in probably 30 minutes this way.

I’ve actually cut down my TV watching by using this box, and I watch the stuff I want instead of junk. That seems to me like a solution to a problem.

Now, I can catch junk with TiVO too, like Futurama episodes (I never saw them when they were on prime time). But at least I get to choose.

Hey, I can even search genres or interests for shows I might want to catch–that’s how I set TiVO to record the AMC broadcast of George Pal’s The War of the Worlds. I haven’t watched it yet, and I may just delete it if I don’t get a chance to play it in the next few weeks–but it was so easy to set up I couldn’t resist.

TiVO (or any programmable digital video recorder) helps you intelligently watch TV without being a political extremist.

Check out their research projects here.

Apparently my friends and I are Content Omnivores:
“Content omnivores are among the heaviest overall users of the Internet. Most are employed. Most log on frequently and spend considerable time online doing a variety of activities. They are likely to have broadband connections at home. The average age of this group is 40.”

Or maybe Power Creators:
Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about content-creating activities. They are young, their average age is 25, and they are more likely than other kinds of creators to do things like use instant messaging, play games, and download music. And they are the most likely group to be blogging.”

I used the new Frequency beta to transfer the picture below. It’s Alyssa at the family reunion last October–she asked me to take that picture, so the pose was her idea…

🙂

Looks like Frequency 2.0 is a huge jump in functionality.