Archive for June, 2009
Flying Car To Be Unveiled In 2011
Posted by John Nemec in Technology on June 26th, 2009
If your anything like me you probably cant wait for the flying cars or hover boards from Back to the Future. In fact, I’ll be one of the hundreds of thousands of people rioting in the streets in 2015 if these things aren’t there. But we may need to put away our pitch forks and torches, because the Flying Car is on it’s way!
An American company, Terrafuga Transition, based near Boston, said they will unveil their ‘Flying Car’ as early as 2011. This two-seater car will be able to travel both on land and in the air and transition between the two in 30 seconds!
While in the air, the Flying Car can travel up to 115 kilometers per hour, that’s about 71 miles per hour. You wont need any special jet fuel to fly it either; it runs on regular gasoline.
It’s said to have front wheel drive on the road and a propeller for flight. The wings on the Flying Car will fold up when used for road travel, and will fit in a normal garage.
Like the hybrid car, not everyone will be able to get a Flying Car right away; its initial cost is expected to be around $200,000! So start saving now.
As this car becomes more and more popular, and drops in price, I’m sure the government will have to sweep in and make a bunch of new law for us to follow. The police may have a hard time, in less affluent communities, where the department can’t afford one but the criminals can. Hospitals and fire departments may want to acquire a version of this for emergencies as well.
Only time will tell what will happen with this Flying Car, but if it does happen, it will not only prevent riots on the streets in 2015, but also change our society forever. Now I’m just waiting for the hover board announcement.
What do you think about the Flying Car? Do you think it will happen? What consequences can you foresee our society going through?
Popularity: 2% [?]
iPhone Free App Review
Posted by John Nemec in Technology on June 25th, 2009
The age of the iPhone has begun. At least it has for me and for the next two years. My loving wife gave me an iPhone for Father’s Day, and I couldn’t be happier.
- The approved picture of my beautiful wife
The stars must have aligned for this one. AT&T was having a sale, and maybe still is, where you can get an 8 gig 3G iPhone for only $100. My contract with USCellular was up. We had a little extra cash (I recently found out my wife has been hording money). Found out my place of employment has a great discounts on the service plan, no discounts on the actual phone yet. And it all happened around a pseudo-holiday.
At the time of this writing, I’ve had the iPhone for 4 days, and I’ve already downloaded 14 free apps. The most useful so far have been TweetDeck, TwitPict, Facebook, Pandora, and Guitar Tuner. The honorable mentions are Bump, Stick War Light and Paper Toss.
Recommended Apps
TweetDeck is just what you think it is, an app to view your Twitter pages. I have both of my accounts setup in it, John_Nemec and my band’s account Achalachia (which I run). TweetDeck give you the ability to set up different ‘Columns’ to organize your friends. Of course you can reply to tweets and send direct messages as well as re-tweet messages. It handles nearly everything you want to do on Twitter.
TwitPict is an iPhone app for Twitpic, giving you the ability to share photos on Twitter. It’s a very simple program. Launch the program and your camera pops up, take a picture, confirm the image, write a short message, then submit it. It will post it on both your Twitter account with a link to your TwitPic image, just like if you did it from your computer.
Facebook is just what you think it is. A simple app that allows you to do most of what you normally would do on Facebook. One of the few things I’ve found that I cannot do, which I normally do is visit Groups. I’m sure there are a lot more things that I’m missing, but honestly, I don’t use Facebook all that often. In fact, I’ve been using facebook more now that I can access it from my iPhone.
Pandora is a nice little radio station, and is a life saver for work. It was very simple to set up, and the only question I can really remember from the whole process was it asked me to give a name of a band I like. Naturally I typed in Nirvana and now it picks a bunch of great songs that I enjoy. There is a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system that helps the program pick better music for you. But I’ve only given one thumbs down (it’s doing a good job) when some horrible Offspring song came on, I think it was “Pretty Fly for a White Guy”.
Guitar Tuner is exactly what you think it is. Just a simple guitar tuner, where I can plug in my headphones, hit the E string on both the iPhone and my guitar and tune away. It’s perfectly simple.
Honorable Mentions
Bump, I’ve never gotten a chance to use this one yet, but the concept is VERY cool. The quick of it is you plug in your info, anything you would put on a business card. When you want to trade info with another iPhone user (with Bump) you simply bump your hands holding your iPhones together. Again, I’ve never tried this, but if all goes well it will save me a lot of time typing in names, phone numbers, email addresses, and taking a picture.
Stick War Light is one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played. Simply put, stick men are trying to tear down your wall, and you have to use your finger to flick them away. The Light version, more or less a trial version, is only 20 levels but still extremely fun. For every stick man you kill you get money, with money you can buy more toys, more toys means you can kill the stick men faster.
Paper Toss is another great waist of time. The short of it is, you flick, with your finger, a small paper ball into a trashcan. There is a fan that blows air at different speeds to make it more difficult. I’m not doing this game any justice by talking about it, if you have the iPhone, download it for free and see for yourself.
Whoops!
Wow! This post took a left turn, I was originally intending to write a post about how cool my wife was for getting me the iPhone but it turned into a review of iPhone apps. Maybe on a later date I’ll write about my experience with the iPhone and less about iPhone apps but I want to say Thank You to my beautiful wife for getting me this fun new toy/phone.
Let me know about your favorite FREE iPhone apps, there are so many of them I could never review them all.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Graybar.com Facelift
Posted by John Nemec in Graybar on June 16th, 2009
Graybar.com has gone through a minor face lift, much more still needs to be done to the site, but the look and feel of the home page looks much nicer.
Visit Graybar.com
For starters, I’ve added a jQuery image rotator to display the most current / important things that Graybar currently offers.
Down the left side, there are now ‘orange tabs’ for quick access to other places on Graybar.com that seem to generate a lot of traffic, as well as the Resource Center down the right hand side.
For the most part, no content has changed. A few of the blue tabs in the main navigation have had a name change, but still lead to the same place. Markets Served is now Customers and Products is now Manufacturers.
The new theme that we are trying to put in place with Graybar.com is that it is never done. A web site is a living, breathing being that must update often and constantly evolve. If any web site becomes old and stale it will eventually die, and with the amount of time, money, and effort that has been put into Graybar.com, I will NOT let that happen.
Along with the Graybar.com face lift, I have also developed a mobile site for Graybar. If you visit Graybar.mobi on your cell phone you will receive some general information about Graybar as well as some different ways to contact Graybar. Don’t bother trying to visit the site from your desktop, I have it set up to redirect you to Graybar.com.
Building a mobile site is not only new to Graybar, but it is new to me as well. I’ve never built a .mobi site before, but as I learn more about it and what it can do, I’m sure it will grow into an equally robust site as Graybar.com is.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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