Bnpositive's Blog

If I say "Mr. PC" most people would know who I’m talking about immediately. If you don’t know who I’m talking about then you probably don’t watch TV or keep in touch with the Apple vs. PC. commercials.

Mr. John Hodgman is more than just the PC guy in the commercials. He’s actually quite the intellectual and comedy writer. If you visit his site you can read lots of his opinions on everything you can imagine.

Before he went on television, JOHN HODGMAN was a humble writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Flight vs. Invisibility Consultant on “This American Life,” Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, Comic Book Reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, “Battlestar Galactica,” and most other subjects.

John shares interesting videos, thoughts on various technology news and developments and general current event thoughts and ideas.

If you’re on twitter, you can also follow John at twitter.com/Hodgman.

So, quite your stereotypical thinking and listen up to someone who’s interesting, funny and down right famous!

Visit Mr. Hodgman and read the areas of his expertise today.

As a follow-up to my earlier post; I’m beginning to think that the government, and specifically the United States Postal Service should take over the management and support of our Internet infrastructure.

Here’s some of the reasons I think this might be a good idea. Let’s look at the functions of the United States Postal Service:

• delivery of mail (connecting people)
• delivery of packages
• official endorsement of dated materials (think tax returns being postmarked)
• official government documents (issuing of passports, etc.)
• economic exchange (delivery of paychecks, tax returns, invoices)

These are the basic functions that I believe are provided by the postal service. As I stated in my earlier post, thinking about the Internet being considered more of a utility, what would the impact of the USPS being the entity responsible for the management and protection of that infrastructure.

• delivery of mail ultimate function is to connect to people. The functionality of the Internet in this capacity is obvious.
• delivery of packages is more of a challenge. I think this could easily be completely taken over by FedEx, UPS, DHL and other delivery companies
• official endorsement of documents could be enabled with more development on digital signatures
• the issuance of official government documents could either be continued to be down by the USPS, or perhaps distributed out to local BMV’s
• economic exchange could be pushed more to electronic distribution with more development and enforcement of secure transactions

I think I may have completely changed my mind on something that I completely disagreed with not too long ago. The idea of Internet access being considered in the same lines as a utility like water, electric and perhaps phone service or sewage made absolutely no sense to me.

I’ve always considered Internet access more of a luxury item than something like a utility. If you didn’t have Internet access you could still get by with life.

My decision may have changed though as I started to think about another government service that has been visibly getting replaced by the Internet, and specifically e-mail. That’s right, the United States Postal Service.

Similar to my last post about phone books and yellow pages, I begin to question why we still need and keep the post office around all of our towns and communities. Although we don’t always think about the other services and functions that the United States Postal Service provides to us and our communities, they do a lot more than just deliver envelopes and junk mail to our doors.

Stay tuned as I’ll share more of my thoughts on exactly what the USPS does and how I think the standardization and infrastructure responsibility of the Internet could potentially become the postal service’s next life efforts.

Later we’ll talk about how I really think the infrastructure of the Internet could be a good effort for government involvement.

Image: Gregory Jordan on flickr

I walked out of my house the other day and I saw something that was amazingly similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls sitting on my porch. I vaguely remembered these items from years gone by, but honestly hadn’t looked at them in forever.

Okay, they were phonebooks. Remember those? You used to have to use them to look up information about businesses in your area. They were loaded with great information like phone numbers, addresses, maps sometimes, pictures of the businesses and even listings of services they provided.

You’d grab this big, heavy book of paper and thumb through it looking for what you needed, then you’d make a phone call.

When was the last time you used a phone book? What do we use these days instead? The computer! Or even phones themselves to get the information we need.

Why are they still printing these beasts? How many trees are cut down for these? Do we just use recycled paper for them? I sure hope we do.

I understand that there are probably a small percentage of people that still want and use phonebooks, but do they have to print millions of them and deliver them unrequested to our doorsteps?

Why can’t I opt out of this analog spam that shows up at my house at least once a year?

Image: kamaru on flickr

Twitter has now added a feature to their website functionality that’s existed in many 3rd party twitter clients for awhile now. The ability to create lists and organize your followers can be very helpful.

The nice addition of the Twitter lists functionality is that when you create the list you can make the decision on whether or not you want this to be a list for just your use (PRIVATE) or a list anyone else can subscribe to and use (PUBLIC).

You can search for followers and add them to one of your lists or you can add people to lists as you follow them within the service. To get your lists up to speed you can open your existing "following" listing and move people into lists as you prefer.

As the graphic shows, I’ve currently got two lists created, so when I click on a follower I can add them to one or multiple lists if I desire.

When you create your lists and want to share them, they’re simply found as an addition to your normal Twitter page. For example, my two lists are available at the following URL’s:

• http://twitter.com/Bnpositive/businesses
• http://twitter.com/Bnpositive/indianapolis

I’m still updating my lists, so you’ll see some of the great folks I follow on twitter soon. As people create and add you to their own lists, you’ll be able to see where you appear on those lists as well. There’s a new link in your profile sidebar next to your followers and following stats. Hopefully I won’t be turning up in anyone’s #twanker or #socialmediadouchebag lists

My wife shared a link with me this evening that looks pretty interesting. It’s a coupon and discount site called Groupon, but it’s more than just coupons. It’s a marketing tool as well and the idea is to swarm a location or establishment with business. What company wouldn’t want that kind of attention?!

With coupons, you did like I did tonight and save a few bucks on a variety of different grocery items. Groupon let’s you save real money on some really great stuff that you’d like to do, but you didn’t want to spend the full price on it to do it.

Groupon was started by some folks in Chicago, just a short drive to north of Indianapolis and they did it so they could “enjoy all the great stuff in our hometown of Chicago”. Sounds like a good enough reason for me.

Groupon has grown to over a million users who have collectively saved more than $25 million with the service. That’s a pretty good track record for a site that hasn’t been around very long at all.

Have some fun, save some money. Groupon continues to expand, soon it will be in your city if it’s not already there now: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis/St.Paul, Nashville, New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

My wife just shared this video with me. I grew up in Kentucky and love my home state. There are some very eccentric country folk living in the Bluegrass state though.

Now noodling, the sport of catching catfish by sticking your hand and arm into a hole and letting them bite it, is one thing. But noodling for snapping turtles is something completely different. I’ve been fishing and seen a snapping turtle break a broom stick like a twig. You can believe these suckers he’s catching would take a chunk out of whatever they wanted that they could reach.

If you’re on twitter, then you are more than likely aware of a little weekly twitter habit that people take part in on the network. Each Friday, people share and recommend other twitter users to people and take the recommendations as #followfriday or #ff

I’ve found quite a few great people to follow through this weekly twitter ritual. It’s an interesting phenomenon because the recommendations are usually right on. My own preferences and twitter habits mean that I pretty much only follow someone that I’m truly interested in hearing from and trust for a variety of reasons.

The challenge for me is to think about who I should recommend to my other followers as my own #followfriday recommendations. That’s where the Auto Follow Friday tool comes in.

Auto Follow Friday is very straight-forward. You enter your Twitter username, there’s no need for your password, and based on your twittering habits, the application will recommend a handful of other twitterers that you tweet most based on your previous 100 tweets.

What better recommendation than those people I’ve talked with most recently? I think to expand the tool it would be interesting to select different people based on different criteria on successive weeks.

Find some new folks to follow and dialogue with on twitter with Auto Follow Friday.

About a month ago I was having problems getting a client’s new computer to print PDF files from within the browser. The computer was a brand new, HP desktop running Windows Vista 64-bit edition. I thought I’d had it fixed, but not anymore.

I ended up spending some more time onsite with the client today because they started to have problems printing again. With one of the user accounts, setup as Administrator, they could print with no problems. Another Administrator account we could setup they couldn’t print PDF’s.

I first tried to update drivers on the printers, download and reinstalled Adobe Reader and Foxit Software Reader (my preferred) multiple times.

Next I tried making sure that regardless of user account, both Internet Explorer 8 and the PDF reader software was being run as an Administrator. No matter what I did, nothing fixed the problem.

Finally this evening I was messing around with changing default printers and realized that as long as the default printer was set as the HP Laserjet, the crash would occur. I ended up changing the default printer to be the Microsoft XPS Document Writer and the error would no longer occur. The problem is that the user now has to manually change the printer to the HP Laserjet, and then print.

I’m hoping an updated driver in the future may fix this issue, but changing the default printer has fixed the issue for the client temporarily.

There are those times where you uncover a website that you’re just not sure what to do with when you find it. The HavenWorks.com site is just that kind of site. My friend Simeon actually sent me a link for this site. It’s something to be seen for sure.

I’m really not sure what to say about the HavenWorks.com site. It does literally leave me speechless. It appears that it’s a randomly thrown together collection of links and information on current news events and politics.

The design is the draw, or repellant depending on your viewpoint. It reminds me of a website I featured awhile back because of it’s "design qualities". The HavenWorks.com site is much more text heavy, it’s all just overwhelming.

Would anyone ever really use a site like this as a regular source of information? 

Tonight I just realized that my personal blog has been nominated as one of Indiana’s Top 50 Blogs.

A number of my friends have had their blogs nominated for the list as well and it’s an honor to be among them in the list.

If you read my blog, I’d love to get your vote of support.

If you’re looking for some more great blogs to add to your reading list, you should check out my friends’ sites too.

• Douglas Karr – The Marketing Tech Blog: all things related to technology and the use of it in marketing
• Casey Mullins – mooshinindy: perhaps the best female blogger I’ve ever read
• Erik Deckers – Laughing Stalk: if you’re looking for a funny look at the world around us, this guy is it. He should be writing for sit-coms or something.
• Cherie Lowe – The Queen of Free: everyone loves free, find lots of the stuff here
• Bob Burchie – Around Indy: bored? then you haven’t checked out this site to see what’s happening around the city
• Lorraine Ball – Roundpeg: small-business information and insight
• Patric Welch – Mr. Noobie What’s Noo: whether its your DVR, an iPhone or a new camera, Patric shares loads of information here

Now, hopefully you’ll go vote for me and then read everyone else too!

I’m not sure what it is lately, but I’ve just had the urge and desire to relive my high school years. I’m not sure if it’s because of all the people I’m reconnecting with via Facebook, or perhaps a desire to get back to a simpler, more relaxed time in my life.

High school was easy for me. I hardly ever studied, but still made good grades. I considered myself a "bridge friend". I was friends with a variety of different people across the various cliques. I stayed busy with drama, band, yearbook and student government stuff.

If you knew me in high school and are reading this, what do you think? Would you like to go back to our days at Butler County High School? Or all the hours we spent together marching in the Blue Regiment?