Gingerbread case mod

I love case mods, and I've had some experience making gingerbread houses, but I'd never have thought to combine the two. Although this is pretty darn ugly for a gingerbread house, I give it mad props for being VERY COOL for a computer case mod.

Click here to see more pictures and the step by step building of the Gingerbread Case Mod

Some There/Therebucks history

So, the other day...I guess it's been a few weeks now, Kittenkat contacted me because she was very distressed over IMVU's proposed tiers system and she thought, since I live only six miles from IMVU and have been known to sneak attack them and just show up there, that maybe if she could win me over to her cause, she could get me to march into IMVU and get them to listen to reason.

Honestly, IMVU should probably hire Kittenkat to be their in-house economist or something, but my days of IMVU peeps telling me that they owed me a debt of gratitude so great that they are happy to buy me lunch once a month for basically forever are probably over. The best I can do right now is publish what Kittenkat shared with me after being frustrated by one of IMVU's newer employees "Joepez" telling her she didn't understand the There economy as well as There's original founder and some of his cronies and tried to explain to her a few things about the There economy.

Please enjoy this wonderful bit of There history compliments of KittenKat!

As There's founder and ex-employees should be able to tell you, I was there since the beginning, and my resale site (tbux.com) pretty much single-handedly shaped the resale market from the beginning. If anyone knows anything about the resale market at There.com, it's me.

For the record, here is the story of the There resale market:

I became involved in the There developer program pretty shortly after it was released. After time I and the other top developers had accumulated enough therebucks that there began to be talk about selling them for cash. The first person to offer us cash for our therebucks was Baloo, who happened to be There's economist (he operated his resale site on the side). He offered us terrible rates (2700T/$1 as I recall) but we sold to him, because he pressured us and because it was money.

It didn't take me long to decide that we had to be able to sell them for more he was offering. So I got together with There's other top developers, showed them my proposal for tbux.com, formed tbux.com, and began to sell directly to There members at 2000T/$1 (~200T/$ savings over There's official rate). Sure, Baloo could offer consumers a cheaper rate, but he had depended on having the major developers selling to him, so by banding together, we eliminated his supply, so we had no trouble selling for that rate. Shortly thereafter we began to resell other developers' tbux, offering them a rate of 2200T/$1 (our spread is and always has been very low).

We've had a small handful of competitors over the years, but none have ever succeeded at driving the rate of tbux down. Even during the period of economic turmoil and panic which followed There's "Black Friday" (in 2004, when There Inc. announced that it would no longer develop the consumer version of There), tbux.com kept buying and selling at the SAME rates.

And here we are, in 2007, buying and selling at the same rates we always have, and still selling out. 2000T/$1 is now the standard resale cost of Therebucks across all resellers, a whole 200T savings over There's rate of 1800T/$1.

So, to say that There's resale market is where it is because its "mature" is just completely inaccurate. There's resale market has not changed at all since it started with tbux.com back in August 2003."

For the record, *I* never sold to Baloo. My first sale was actually an exchange of ThereBucks for frequent flier miles which allowed me to attend the first There real life gathering in 2003.

Anyway, thanks to KittenKat for allowing me to share that nice writeup of There and ThereBucks history in my blog. Maybe it won't help us stop tiers, since Will Harvey has indicated that they only implement things we suggest that they were already implementing anyway, but it's still a great read. Cha right...like Will knows more about the There economy just because he founded There. According to any IMVU employee who worked on the blox project There is already dead, and yet as far as I can tell they are still growing strong. Wishful thinking, guys?

XO: approved for usage on one's lap

Did you know most "laptops" are now called "notebook PCs" these days because they aren't actually approved for usage on one's lap? They are such energy hogs full of bloatware that they run much too hot most of the time to comfortably and safely use them on your lap.

Today I ordered my OLPC XO laptop. The famed $100 laptop! Okay, so it's actually costing me $423.95 through the GOGO program, at least I was "allowed" to purchase one at all.

One of it's MANY, MANY neato features is the part where it is the first laptop to be certified as an actual laptop in several years. In other words, it is approved for use while it is actually on your lap. It has other great features, but you should watch these YouTube videos to learn more for yourself. It'll be sooo much easier than me trying to type it all out and probably more interesting as well.







The one feature I believe MY XO laptop will be missing is a manual power supply. Well, those things don't come standard even if you are a child in a developing nation, but it may be easier for them to obtain one. I'm pretty sad about this because I'm really excited about that feature. I wish every laptop and appliance had options like that. Well, maybe they kind of do...in trying to find something that would let ME power my XO, I checked out the laptop.org wiki and found, as perhaps my most promising and available option, the "Weza", a foot crank power source that costs $269.99...that's more than the laptop costs! Still, I hope I can afford one because it looks totally cool and like it would power other stuff as well although...the XO requires something like 1/10 the power of your standard laptop, so where I think you can power the XO Laptop for ten minutes with one minute of hand powered effort, I guess you would have to keep cranking or pumping or foot stomping or whatever for the entire time you were using a more energy-hogging Notebook PC.

So, if they're going to make this laptop available at all to the "general public" in the U.S. and Canada, wouldn't it be nice to make the hand powered option available for purchase as well? I'd like to be able to power stuff by hand without paying $270. I really want the XO "yoyo". Here you can see the Yoyo in action, although you may not want to watch this entire video as it is a little boring...


After ordering my XO this morning, I spent the entire rest of the morning reading anything I could find about the promotion and the XO and stuff. First I read a bunch of news stories that all said almost exactly the same thing, then I started watching stuff on YouTube, which is where I found the videos above, and finally I ended up at the laptop.org wiki, which is mostly for developers but contained some interesting nuggets. I haven't found a community of non-engineering information about the XO yet, but then I was reading and watching more than I was searching.

I did see a video where some students in Brazil were trying the laptops. Their teacher didn't seem to like them very much, and felt it was the teachers that should get computers, not the students, but I got the impression that may have been more because the teachers seem to have been somewhat forgotten in this initiative. So, it's not that she felt her students shouldn't have laptops, it's just...why do they get laptops and all this support and SHE DOESN'T? I know I'd probably be a bit sore if I were an overworked, underpaid teacher and all my kids got laptops and I was supposed to just help them use them and make projects that used them when I didn't even get a laptop myself, all so these children could grow up to save the world while meanwhile remembering me as that teacher that didn't even really know how to use an XO. Or something like that. It just seems like maybe the OLPC initiative spent more time simply designing the laptop and not so much thinking about social dynamics or classroom dynamics.

So, I hope that even though I didn't get up and order my laptop at 3am when ordering first opened that I get mine in the first shipment. It sounds like 40,000 of them are supposed to be manufactured by the end of the month, and half of those will go to the GOGO participants in the U.S. and Canada, and the other half to a number of different developing nations. Then, in December twice as many will be produced, but people that don't get laptops from that first lot really aren't going to have them until early next year.

I am going to be anxiously awaiting mine! Too bad it's not like ordering something on the Apple website where you can track your package as it leaves the factory in China and makes it's way around the world to your home.

One Laptop Per Child: One time opportunity alert

I received the following email from OLPC today. since they claim this is the ONLY time the XO laptop will EVER be made available to the public, I figured I'd pass on the info. I certainly hope to have $400 at the ready on Monday. Oh yeah, and of course it's great that these are finally rolling out of the assembly line to get into the hands of kids in developing nations. I heard that getting governments to express interest in ordering them has been MUCH easier than getting actual concrete orders. Kudos to Uruguay, which placed a huge order with plans to have one per child by some time in 2009.

Give 1 Get 1

You are receiving this email because you requested a reminder from One Laptop per Child about our limited-time "Give One Get One" program. Starting Monday, November 12 at 6:00am EST, you will be able to donate one XO laptop to a child in the developing world and also receive a laptop for the child in your life, by visiting www.laptopgiving.org or calling toll-free 1-877-70-LAPTOP.

"Give One Get One" is the only time we are making the revolutionary XO laptop available to the public. For a donation of just $399 ($200 of which is tax-deductable), you will be giving the gift of education. Additionally, T-Mobile is offering donors one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot locations throughout the United States, which can be used from any Wi-Fi-capable device, including the XO laptop.

We will send you another email when the program begins on November 12. Until then, thank you for your interest in OLPC. We hope you'll join us in our mission to bring education and connection to children in even the most remote regions of the globe.

p.s. I AM the child in my life.

World's Worst Blogger?

I have to wonder sometimes if I'm not the world's worst blogger. I'm probably not...there are so many blogs out there that I'm likely to be more like "average" or something, but I've read some books on blogging (or started to read them, since I love to get all excited about a book, obtain that book, start reading it and then set it aside for an unknown period of time that could end up being forever) that say things like: you should blog about only one subject.

Not only do I blog about unrelated topics, There, IMVU (you can't really say those two are unrelated, but you could say that the number of people interested in posts about BOTH places is severely limited), Yelp, Cancerous Cats, Misc (a category I could probably rename "things that could be of interest to my mother, because she can read them aloud over the phone to my grandmother" but that's a little long for a tag) but I am not even that good about tagging my posts in the first place.

So I have to wonder...is my blog actually of value to anyone besides myself? I do stumble onto blogs sometimes that I find interesting and that give me hope. One I recently took an interest in is about one person's life and foodie experiences in Paso Robles, CA, which also included a bunch of stuff about her struggles with yoga. Now I admit, I am MORE interested in the foodie experiences and winery stuff, especially in Paso Robles, but I do find the yoga stuff interesting as well and even enjoy reading little bits about her life. And why not? It's much more interesting to learn about a person so you can better relate their experiences to your own and better interpret the things they say that brought you to their blog in the first place.

Maybe to learn what makes a good blog, I need to spend more time reading blogs and less time reading books about what someone else thinks makes a good blog. Probably the number one thing is just posting to it regularly. November is a good month to do that, too, because it's NaBloPoMo.

If you actually enjoy reading my blog, or even if you think it sucks, feel free to leave me a comment. I love just knowing someone is out there. I try not to be annoyed when people email me or talk to me in person and indicate they were reading my blog, but I can't help thinking "if you had something to say about it, why didn't you...you know...share with the rest of the class?"

Yelp at Commonwealth Club

The other day, my bf and I went to the Commonwealth Club for the first time ever. I'd been meaning to attend events there for quite a while but never got around to it. What finally got me off my butt to go? The founders of Yelp were speaking.

I was quite excited to go to this event, as my imagination along with the program description billed it as a visionary talk about the future of marketing and how Yelp is leading the way in empowering consumers and really letting their voices be heard using the power of the Internet, and the way Yelp channels advertising dollars into things like free food/wine/events for targeted consumers, providing more value for BOTH businesses AND consumers.

Oops, I think most of that was all in my head. I was a bit disappointed with the event, which turned out to be a question and answer session that didn't have much of any new-to-me information or anything visionary. The format and questions were a bit uninspired and pedestrian and the Yelp founders just didn't have much energy or that much to say.

I did learn that Yelp was almost called Yocal, which sounds almost exactly like "yokel", which was rather amusing. Imagine trying to get people in San Francisco or New York or anywhere else to call themselves "Yocals". Yeah, right. The person who thought of Yelp was so convinced of the idea that they purchased the domain name for $5000, managed to sell the founders and others involved on the name and then transfered the name to them for the same price of $5000. Good call.

I also learned they spent twenty minutes pitching the idea of Yelp to their first investor, who then gave them a million dollars to get started. Nice! I want both friends like that and the persuasive power to get them to give me a million dollars after a 20 minute pitch. I can be pretty tenacious...I bet I could get much more than a million if I only knew the right people.

Their business plan seems very sound and seems to have been executed almost flawlessly, but I also learned that Yelp's elite stuff and the parties/events were more like an afterthought. Kind of like "we like to party, and hey people want to give us free stuff. We can meet these crazy people that actually want to be Yelpers, have a party and businesses will PAY FOR IT." Geez, people just want to throw money and free stuff at these guys...I want to rub up against them just to see if some of that mojo will rub off on ME. Actually, from party pics I have seen, a lot of people (well, mostly women) want to rub up against them...but what is really interesting is that I think their whole Elite program is what really makes Yelp special and sets it apart from any other similar online consumer rating service (although Amazon just started something similar for products in a program called Vine.) Without the Elite program, Yelp is just another site to rate stuff, although one might argue it is designed better than the others.

And that's it...that's basically everything new I learned. Oh except maybe that for businesses like dentist and doctor offices and hair stylists, Yelp has the power to give them more business than they can possibly handle. Be careful who you give a great Yelp review to if they provide you with a regular service like that...you may find there is a wait list to get in next time you want to make an appointment!

Although I was disappointed a bit by the Yelp talk, I did have a great week with Yelp in general. After the Commonwealth Club Q&A thing, we found a great restaurant called Salt House and managed to get a seat without a reservation, then the next day one of the founders (Jeremy) sent me a compliment (my first "great writer" compliment) on Yelp saying how great my Salt House review was. Wow, a compliment from a founder! Well, to be fair it looks like he makes a point to send out a few compliments a day...but still I was thrilled. Then I got a ROTD (review of the day) for my review of Golds Gym, which garnered me some more compliments. Finally, my week culminated with a woman who I have secretly been a fan of on Yelp for some time sending me a friend request. Yeah okay, if you don't Yelp and secretly worship a few of the really good reviewers you probably can't appreciate that at all. So go Yelp already...try it, you'll like it!

Now, if only Amazon was that easy. I have been trying to increase my ranking on Amazon, and instead it's going DOWN. I think part of what I need is just time, now that I've figured out as much as possible HOW they give people their rankings.

Oh yeah, and my IMVU ranking, too. IMVU developers now have "Tiers", and to be the top tier (7) you have to have a perfect score of 21, and I have a score of 19 because I don't have enough forum posts (yes, part of your ranking as a developer or "content creator", in this silly system, is based on how often you post in the forums) so I only have 1 point out of a possible 3 in forum posting. Probably easy to remedy as long as I just remember to go back to the forums and post a few times EVERY DAY. I should be a perfect 7 next time they recalculate, unless they make other adjustments.