Tretakoff Musings

Happy Cyber Monday! On this first Monday after Thanksgiving, I find several things to be thankful for, and Twitter is helping me celebrate: - I am thankful for the early gifts I received from Charles & the rest of the Barletta clan (Dude, Rampage was totally made for the Wii! And The Rock Criterion Edition? YES!). - I am thankful for Transformers in my living room, thanks to Lani & Pete. - I am happy to have reconnected with old friends , as their nuptials approach. - I am hysterical at the amazing prose of unexpected Twitterers during last night's Patriots game ("The Russian is cut!") - I am thankful to find Dell's Outlet pushing unadvertised deals through Twitter! So, this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for Twitter, and the fun it brings.

Yep, I'm a big Trek fan. Truth to be told, my series of choice has always been The Next Generation (over the Original Series), but it looks like I am a rank amateur fan compared to this guy. He turned his home theater into the bridge of the Enterprise , complete with chairs modeled after the rather comfy ones on the show. The subtle touches are great: a remote with a Red Alert button, the subdued lighting...amazing. Lots more photos after the link , including the bar he built to accompany it.

A band plays on Rockefeller Center's famous ice rink today, as I dropped by for a quick taste of NY.

It starts with an innocuous blog post about a social network doing something cool. Then, it's followed by a namedrop in the office of the latest cool new social network. Your email inbox starts to waft the familiar aroma of bac'n . Curiosity piqued, you follow the link, and sign up, and before you know it...you've triggered a ConnectQuake(TM). What is a ConnectQuake? I'm coining the term, so here's my definition: it's the explosion of connections on a social network that causes your network to grow exponentially. You sign up, invite a few friends. One of those friends signs up, and connects with other folks. You see the connections they've made, and you connect to the connections, and before you know it, the Richter scale needle is jerking like a Blackberry power user who's got no cell signal. Take Plaxo Pulse , for instance. I continue to maintain that they are the one social network that will become the standard, primarily because of their embracing o...

It's not quite Moore's Law, but a computer-related mark of time has just officially been passed. See that image to the left? It represents a $299 external hard drive. Nothing special right? No....except it's a full Terabyte of space: 1000 Gigabytes. Good god. Available now from Costco. In my time of being involved with PC's, for that price, I have seen us go from drives measured in kilobytes, to megabytes (1000 kilobytes), to the current gold standard of gigabytes (1000 megabytes), and now to terabytes. Look for the new branding of specs that no longer come with tuberculosis, but the "new" TB.

I've been a fan of both, but Fortune gives us a behind the scenes look at The blogs of war: Engadget vs. Gizmodo in a remarkably fascinating piece. I always wondered who had the lead...

Why, oh why, does Facebook make things so difficult? For instance, in the last week, I discovered that I could post these blog entries directly to "My Notes" in Facebook by harvesting the RSS feed. How did I discover this? The easy to use walkthrough of Facebook when you sign up? Oh, that's right: doesn't exist. Ah, the helpful tips email Facebook sends? Um, no...that's not anywhere. Perhaps the "We noticed you are not using function X..." note from Facebook they sent me? Er...no, that's my imagination again. No, I learned about this from (sigh) Plaxo Pulse , as I was prompted to hook up yet another feed to my Plaxo Pulse profile and they'd take care of everything else, so you get great things like this: Now, take the Facebook Photos application, for instance. You create a new album, and you get this: "Location:" what the heck is that? Hyperlinked for easy help, or a tool tip on mouseover? Nope. Ah, the ever helpful (hidden) Help link i...

Ever wanted to have a version of a page or site that you could browse on a mobile screen, but you weren't into the complex programming it requires for it? Welcome to Mobile for Dummies , courtesy of MoFuse . As Download Squad puts it: MoFuse lets you make a mobile version of pretty much any site. The entire process basically boils down to: 1. Create an account 2. Name your site 3. Enter the RSS feed 4. Tweak if you like And man, does it work. In just seconds, I created a mobile version of this blog! Check it out here on your mobile device. I love it when technology gets reduced to brain-dead simple. If Linux was like this, we'd be Windows-free already.

I have written several times about sports uniforms , and in particular, football uniforms. However, no one holds a candle to the UniWatch blog for the obsessive detail of this esoteric subject, but if you are the kind of person who wants to know what is up with the Redskins having a different helmet for home games, or why do some baseball teams wear vests, while others seem to have completely different outfits, UniWatch is for you. Now, Paul Lukas, Mr. UniWatch himself, has turned his full attention on my beloved Cowboys, and the results are not pretty. From exposing the three shades of silver, as well as the two shades of blue, America's Team goes under the UniWatch microscope, warts and all. There are some fascinating tidbits, including the reason the Cowboys wear white at home (most teams wear colors at home), the strange alterations the Cowboys uniforms have uniquely had (tie down panels? wraparound collars?), and even the time the Cowboys altered their uniforms for the Bicent...

I've been a podcast consumer since before they had a name. While this is not quite as outrageous a statement as recent Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's claim to have invented the internet (which, ironically, is almost true), I used to commute 120 miles, each way, 3x a week. At that time, podcasts were the exclusive property of Audible.com, using DRM-wrapped MP3's, but I consumed programs like the WSJ , Car Talk , and more. With the podcast revolution, the landscape has exploded with amazing timely content, and I bask in the glory of CNET's Buzz Out Loud , Bill Maher's Real Time , and more. As my biking has ramped up, I have relied heavily on podcasts to keep me company. As I am loathe to have multiple devices, I use my Treo 680 with Pocket Tunes , streaming wirelessly over Bluetooth to my Motorola HT280 headphones. All good, but updating podcasts on the 680 with QuickNews has proved to work, though much slower and more cumbersome than is really practical. On the other h...