i need a catchy title

Several months ago while googling around looking for cheap ways to make international calls, I stumbled upon a strange service called Futurephone. You called this number in Iowa, and then dialed your international code and phone number, and boom, you’re talking for free (assuming you have free long distance).

Well my girlfriend is abroad again and I went to Futurephone’s website, and a huge red banner slaps me in the face: “THIS SERVICE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.” Ah, crap. No such thing as a free lunch. A little googling and it turns out Futurephone, and other phone companies base these types of services out of Iowa due to the low population and some phone tax loopholes described here.

I guess it’s back to Skype.

As more and more of the websites I read started offering RSS feeds, I tried out a lot of different readers to aggregate them so I could spend more time reading about cool stuff than waiting for ads to load on their respective web pages. Over the years, the software has always gotten better, especially stuff on the Mac (do I even need to say it), but of course web apps are always better beacuse they’re available from wherever you happen to be.

Enter Google Reader. This thing is awesome. I can add all my rss feeds, group them in folders, star entries for later, even mark entries to share, which I will start doing once I figure out how to link the RSS feed from that into a sideblog on this site that you can also subscribe to (which was originally the need for a blog - there’s a lot of really cool stuff out there that I think is notable enough to make you read about since you’re here anyway. Hah.)

Already use Google Reader? Yay! Be my friend!

This guy’s 15 minutes just started - student newspaper to LA times to digg to the world. Andy’s a Mac Genius and film student, and gave up paying rent for living in his truck. Not something I’d do personally, but I can appriciate the freedom. Go directly to the source, bypassing the media blitz/spin:

http://gotruckyourself.blogspot.com/

So I started an “official” blog. Again. And I’m annoyed now because while before it was a semi-elite establishment, now I get to join the masses, very late to the party, and even with the knowledge that my current/future employers may be reading this. So no details, no dirt, just, as the subtitle says, cool things I find out, travels I take, musings I have.

I haven’t picked a title yet, or even a theme I like. That’s okay, it will evolve, just as all good things do.

Lets begin, shall we?