Bnpositive's Blog

We’ve all had them. Those family photos that we wish we could go back in time and retake or just not show up for at all. I’ve got a family Christmas photo that catches me in an award-winning stupid grin, and also highlights my waistline as you can almost hear the button on my shirt screaming to release and pop-off.

The Awkward Family Photos website captures these photos we wish were never taken and shares them with the universe. Something scary and hilarious about it at the same time.

As you can see from the screen shot above from the site, I can’t even show you all of the current photo. It’s too much. Really? Really? You decided to get your picture taken like that? You’re going to have to visit the Awkward Family Photos website to see for yourself.

One question I have, how do they get these photos? They say they’re submitted by people, but I’ve got to think even your friends wouldn’t do this to you! Only one more reason to make sure those embarrassing photos never make it out for public viewing.

Hat tip to my friend Cherie Lowe, a.k.a. The Queen of Free for uncovering this website for us.

One of my favorite things is to watch a great, blockbuster movie at my local theater which has an IMAX screen. There was a time in our history where even an IMAX screen would be dwarfed by comparison of the screens you could go see a movie on.

Remember the drive-in-movie? They still exist it’s just hard to find one that’s still in operation. The Drive-Ins.com website helps you find your local drive-in and get more information. These may not be around much longer, go take advantage of a bit of history being available now.

Welcome to Drive-ins.com, a comprehensive and continuously updated web site dedicated to drive-in movie theaters and their history. The site features an online searchable database of almost 5000 drive-ins.

The kind of information we collect and share includes historical facts and data, living history or anecdotes, news and media items, images (drawings, photos, video, even sound clips), as well as website visitor comments, forums, ratings and reviews, and drive-in theater related products.

A friend just talked to me today about them enjoying a drive-in movie this weekend. They saw Night at the Museum 2 and Wolverine. Two for one! Sounds like a great deal to me.

More and more people are turning to the Internet everyday for their daily entertainment from the small screen. With the variety of online video content that’s available through YouTube and other video sites, as well as the websites for the major TV networks, you can probably find something you’ve never seen available for the rest of your life.

Hulu has been covered at a variety of angles by b5media‘s authors and on EveryJoe. I first wrote about it back in December of last year when it was in private beta release.

Hulu is now public and they’ve had some mainstream commercials about their service being aired since the SuperBowl. They’ve also recently released a stand-alone desktop application for you to get all the great content from Hulu onto your computer screen without the need for your browser to be open and screen real-estate to be lost to browser controls.

The video quality is outstanding on my laptop. I could easily watch probably hours of TV shows like this. Most of the shows have commercial interruptions but that’s fine with me. I understand that’s the price you pay for free TV.

There’s so much content available on Hulu from recent shows to old stuff like one of my favorite shows as a kid A-Team. The search function could be a little bit better about finding the actual show you’re looking for, but I understand when they try to find close matches.

Have you ever needed to meet someone and wanted to find a place that was a nice middle point for both of you? We all have our favorite locations to meet around town, but sometimes you just need to meet at the middle ground between two parties.

The MeetWays: Meet Me In the Middle website gives you exactly what you’ve been wanting.

It couldn’t be much easier to use the site. You put in the addresses of the two parties then you can add a point of interest you’d like to meet at between the two locations if you desire. For example, where’s the closest Starbucks middle way between the two addresses? Or, what’s the closest restaurant you’d like to meet with the person at for your get together? All of that is possible with the MeetWays website.

MeetWays.com was created to allow users to find a point of interest between two addresses. Let’s say you need to meet a friend or client for lunch on the other side of town. MeetWays.com allows you to enter two locations and the type of restaurant you are looking for. MeetWays gives you the exact halfway point and a list of restaurants in that area. Save hours trying to figure out the halfway point on a map and instead find it in one simple click!

I’ve used the site and it was great to find some locations between me and the other person I was meeting. I’ll be sure and keep this little site in my back pocket for use in the future.

Yahoo 360 was developed as a new social media portal platform that in my opinion never really took off. It was supposed to combine a social network functionality with all the content aggregation from other sources that you’re actively involved. It’s not a huge shock to me it’s shutting down.

I had a Yahoo 360 account because I had a Yahoo account. I’m not sure I ever used the Yahoo 360 platform. Did anyone really use it on purpose? To me it was just another one of those services that really wasn’t thought through well and didn’t offer anything new that somebody else wasn’t already doing and executing the idea better to go along with it.

Will Yahoo 360 be missed? I doubt it. Where do you aggregate your online information instead.

Image: Screen shot of email notification from Yahoo!

I heard a bunch of chatter this morning on twitter about a new application and service that’s under development by Google called Google Wave. My initial thoughts were how big of a deal is this? Google is regularly producing some great tools and products, but how much could communication on the web really change? The video below is of a presentation of Google Wave that was done at the Google I/O conference. It’s over an hour long, but it’s pretty impressive!

Image a merging of email, instant messaging, live updating, photo sharing, editing, cooperative document development and even more. Someone can be added to the conversation at anytime and can rewind the updates and see how messages were added in sequence to the stream of thought.

The tool can be embedded in websites, blogs, updated live in all places and all changes are displayed live. Private messaging, spell check, sharing, it’s all here. Oh, and it’s not using any new platform. It’s all running in current browsers with current technology, just some amazing development and coding from Google.

And all that is just in the first 30 minutes of the video above! Looking forward to see what else can be done. Like this, four people dynamically editing the same document and everyone seeing everyone’s updates concurrently.

What do you think? Will this really change communication online forever? I can easily see Gmail taking on the features and functionality of Google Wave as soon as it’s available.

More information about Google Wave:

• Product wave.google.com
• Platform code.google.com/apis/wave
• Protocol www.waveprotocol.org

I found this website today after Kyle Lacy had an update of his own photo posted with a link on his Facebook profile. The DailyMugshot makes use of your webcam to take a picture of your face on a daily basis and share them with the world.

I’ve been shopping for a nice webcam for myself and sites like this just seem to give me one more reason to need one. The good news is that you can start using it immediately without a webcam though as they will accept photos from digital cameras or your cell phone.

The Daily Mug shot began when I came across a dude who took a picture of himself every day and turned it into a video. He had taken pictures of himself every day for years, and the video was amazing. I thought: I want to do that too! Then I began thinking about what sort of system would make the entire process as easy as possible, and furthermore, what would be the most fun and easy way to show these videos to friends on the net.

Have you already heard of Daily Mugshot and been using it? Let us know in the comments and we’ll take a little look-see on who’s reading the site. Would love to meet more readers and get to see you at the same time.

Image: DailyMugshot website screen shot

One of the things I almost always need when I’m working is music. Not sure what it is but there’s just something about silence when I need to be moving and doing or thinking and processing. It’s been that way since I was a little kid and was told to clean my room.

Normally when I’m working on my computer I’m listening to either my own music I’ve ripped to my hard drive or downloaded legally; or I’m streaming some great music from Pandora into my headphones.

The only challenge is that when I’m working I’ve also usually got a number of applications open and running to be productive. Right now I have 8+ applications going.

I started wondering which method of listening to my music required more system resources. I was surprised by what I found.

• Pandora Desktop App: 103,868K Memory Usage
• Windows Media Player: 18,685K Memory Usage

I’d always heard and thought that Windows Media Player was really a system hog and I expected the Pandora streaming app to be a little lighter on the requirements. Pandora is using 4x+ more system memory to function though.

The one thing I didn’t think about checking to see was how much memory was being used for playing an audio CD via Windows Media Player instead of ripped MP3′s. May have to check on that later, but then I’d have to go dig out a CD from somewhere.

I’ve had some recent changes to my computer system that I had shared about recently in posts and thought I’d provide a little update on the matter. One of the issues was with Gmail not displaying images in messages, even though I’d told it to, and Xobni having a new release version available.

I wrote awhile back about Gmail not displaying images in my email messages, even though I’d told it to specifically always do so from specific senders. I had written this back in November of 2008 and up until now had continued to have issues. Recently I noticed that I was once again seeing graphics and now I don’t believe I’ve been having anymore issues. There was talk in the comments on the original post that it could be due to some Google Labs issues, but I never was able to confirm or fix anything there. Is everyone else noticing images again? Any ideas of what it was?

Also I’ve been a huge fan of Xobni since I first found out about it. I think it adds some great tools and features to Outlook that don’t exist. They continue to develop and improve the tool and expand the features. My problem though is it still brings my machine to a sluggish pace that’s just not acceptable. Honestly, part of the problem is probably with my machine. Pushing 4 years old and I put it through the wringer in my daily use. I uninstalled Xobni from my laptop, but when I get a new machine, Xobni will be one of the apps I’ll immediately reinstall and give it a try again.

If there’s one thing you can do online it’s find people. It’s amazing just how much you can find online about someone just by popping their name in Google and seeing what comes up. This is a good way to also see what’s happening with your own image or personal branding online.

I was recently doing a search for someone I’d recently connected with on Facebook trying to find out some more information and photos about them. One of the search results was from the pipl website.

The pipl website brings in results from loads of different sources and organizes it very well. In a search of my name I got six pages of results if they were printed off. Most of the information that was found was accurate for me and came from many of the same types of mainstream people search locations you’ve probably already used like Whitepages or Zabasearch. It combined those results with information about me from Geni.com, LinkedIn, Amazon.com, Plaxo.com, Flickr, Spokeo, MySpace, ZoomInfo.com, YouTube, and a variety of other sites including blogs I’ve written on and other social networking groups I’m active in online.

The next time you need to uncover some information about someone, give pipl a try and see what you find. Or, do some ego-searching and see where you’ve been online and what information is out there and available for yourself.

Image: pipl website homepage search

I’m one of the weird people on this planet who doesn’t believe Apple is God’s gift to computing. I believe Apple makes some great products as well as believing that Microsoft has probably done more for personal computing than Apple could even dream.

Do I think Microsoft makes great products all the time? No. But I don’t think Apple is perfect either. I believe that the world can exist peacefully with both options available to consumers. I believe both companies benefit from each other nipping at their heels.

My friend Douglas Karr has a great post on his blog about how Microsoft‘s new marketing campaign is doing a great job of selling Microsoft‘s strength and where they truly compete with Apple. On price! And folks, in this economy, that is a mighty important factor.

My favorite comment from Doug was that I would hope Apple products don’t have as many issues like Microsoft has to deal with in their systems. You’ve got a product where the hardware and operating system are made by the same company. There shouldn’t be any issues you’d have to deal with there.

However, I’ll also be the first to tell you that one of my number one complaints with Microsoft is when their software doesn’t work with their own software the way it could and should.

Image: Microsoft brand with apple photo from www.sxc.hu

I’m a sucker for a t-shirt that makes a statement. Usually my preference is one where only about half of the people that see it really get it. Then the ones that do get it love it! Glennz Tees delivers on both accounts.

As you can see from just the few shown in the screen shot of the Glennz Tees website, they deliver on making a statement. With clear and concise imagery and bold colors, this is the place to grab some great t-shirts to add to your collection.

If you’re like me, your collection could probably use some replacement of a few worn out and tattered t-shirts that have become your favorites.

Glennz Tees will capitalize on popular tech, classic pop-culture and some artistic classic spins like his Escher’s dog tee!

After  a quick scan of their homepage, here are a few of my favorites. Feel free to purchase one for me as a gift. I prefer XX-LARGE, email me for my shipping address! =)

Image: Glennz Tees website and product images