The funny thing is that most of the law is already in place under current federal laws, all the Arizona legislation does is give the power to officers of the state or local governments to act on it since the federal government is not…. say what you will, but its a pretty decent bill that should be in place across the country and not just in Arizona.

Submit entry

Contest details

So recently, Abbott Medical Optics Inc. (AMO) sponsored the iLASIK Video Contest where the winner could win $5,000 and some other cool prizes. Entry was simple, all you had to do was submit a video about the impact of improved vision on their lives. People submitted entries from raps to plays to the winning video above by Alex with his “You Gotta See this” music Video… Its a pretty entertaining look at the difference Lasik has made and it looks like the face plant the guy in the video took would have really hurt.

It’s actually a pretty cool idea for a contest and a good way for AMO to gain some fresh eyes on their offerings. In addition, some of the other winners were pretty fun to watch too like “robbo” in the “My Contacts Are Getting In The Way Of My Good Time” category who won an HD TV and Danny V with “Orbs Of Perfection” in the “You Should See Life After The iLASIK® Procedure”. If you want to see all the winners hit up http://www.gottaseethisnow.com/ or the iLASIK Video Contest for more information.

Have you or someone you know had lasik? Was it worth it?? Would you recommend it?

Its funny that as an adult, one of the booming past times that twitter and facebook have created is the location based service of foursquare. Never before did our friends care that we were at the local Starbucks getting a Double Mocha extra cream skinny vente latte or at the barbers getting a hair cut. Until foursquare came along.

Now people every where are checking in at work, at play, at parties, in the carpool line and more. Here are a couple of tips gathered from around the web to make you the Mayor of your city, or at least make you seem a little less douchey for constantly letting your friends know you’re at Caribou Coffee.

1. Add your Friends Carefully – According to Mashable this is the number one tip for being successful at FourSquare and for good reason. As Mashable points out and the site PleaseRobMe is based on, FourSquare is a GPS based service. The people you’re friends with KNOW your location when you post it, and they know where you aren’t. If you’re friends with every tom, dick and John in your city, they’ll know when you’re not home, and if you’re not smart, they’ll even know where your home is.

   The nice thing about Foursquare is the fact that you can mark your location as private and choose whether or not you want to share it with your friends or publish it on twitter and facebook. Unlike facebook where you’re friends with anyone you’ve ever talked to in your life, save FourSquare for only your close friends who need to know when you’re at the pub.

2. Don’t check in if you’re not there – It might sound like a nobrainer, but if you missed checking in at a location earlier in the day, don’t bother with it. If you get a notice that you lost the mayor ship of your local brew house, don’t sweat it. Faking check in’s is not only bad form on FourSquare, but its a good way to appear douchey. Let your check in’s happen naturally.
3. Leave Tips! – Not the cash kind, but things to do. For instance, if your favorite bar has a really good sandwich or your favorite beer on draft, leave a tip to let it be known to the world. Not only is it good Karma, but it’s also a good way to find new places to visit and let others know why you’re the Mayor of the local DQ.
4. Add Shouts to Your Checkins – You do it in Twitter. You do it in Facebook. Why not do it in FourSquare as you check in as well? If you’re at the pub its easy to add “Hey @gruntled why don’t you pop in for a pint” to your check in as well. Let your friends know where to find you and why. Not only that but by adding comments with phrases like “at another birthday party” you could unlock cool badges like the 16 Candles badge or more!
5. Don’t Drive By – No one likes a drive by. If you’re sitting at the red light near the BK lounge, resist that urge to check in unless you duck in for a Whopper. Its along the same lines as “don’t check in if you’re not there”, if its meant to be a check in, it will happen. Let it.
6. Have Fun, Explore New Places! – Perhaps the coolest feature of foursquare is discovering new places, or old places you forgot about. It’s fun to see where your friends are checking in and who knows, maybe you didn’t know there was a junkyard around the corner. FourSquare is all about exploring and becoming an adventurer. See where you can check in!

One last tip, don’t check in from home, we know you’re the Mayor there (or, if you’re like me, your wife lets you think you are). We don’t need proof.

You can Follow me on twitter @mcangeli if you really want too, but don’t worry, I won’t add you on 4sq unless we’re good friends (or I like your picture… )

I’ve talked about it before and now is as good a time as any to talk about it again as spring rolls in with some hopefully nicer weather this year…. but Branson, MO. is one of the best family destinations to get to on a budget. Whether you want to enjoy the great out doors, take in a show (or two or three) or hit the outlet malls for some amazing shopping, Branson seems to have something for everyone in your family.

For instance you can stay at the Hilton Promenade at Branson Landing and be only a stones throw away from Lake Taneycomo, award winning golf courses or the Theatre district. Not to mention that you’re a mile from City Center where you can catch shows from the Acrobats of China, Amazing Pets or the Osmonds (or even the Oak Ridge Boys!).

In addition, the Promenade is having some awesome deals on packages at the moment in case you and your love need to get away for some R&R (before school lets out for the summer).

Or maybe you need a place for your company retreat or conference. The Hilton Branson Convention Center. Not only are you in the middle of the action, but the executives can ink out deals on the course while their spouses soak in the luxury at the spa. Its a win win for everyone isn’t it?

If you’ve never been to Branson before, now seems like the perfect time to fit in a trip, doesn’t it? What show’s are you going to take in?

When the internet first started making its rounds, websites were horrible things. Bright colors, bad lo-res images and static content made up the bulk of what we could view online. I’m a guilty as the next guy as some of my first websites were terrible.

As is the natural progression of technology though, things changed. Sites became more fluid. Database driven. Code progressed to the point where a website will tell you the weather in your location with out you having to do anything other then open the web page. News is streamed from media sites and iReporters like you and I every second of every minute. Often times, thanks to facebook and twitter, news of a tragedy (or a triumph) hits the web and is widely known before traditional media can get it out there.

The net has gone from being a static, immovable object to a fluid work of art (some times a train wreck) that we’re constantly plugged in to. Search engines like google and leapfish have a harder and harder time coming up with ways to track and catalog twitter updates, facebook streams, youtube videos. Things that are constantly changing and in a lot of ways the challenges of the new web presented in the video are harder to over come as the web becomes more real time and less, this is what was.

How are you going to adapt? How are you going to become realtime?

When it came to building the car, we chose a shape that we thought would work well. Kind of a wedge shape with a concave back end to it. The bottom was flat, working its way up. I can remember spending hours (ok, maybe not hours, but to this seven year old it seemed like forever) sanding the wood, drilling holes for the fishing weights, painting and sanding again until the car was smooth. Almost magic like.

We added the wheels with their polished nail axles and added graphite to them so they’d spin even faster. One of my favorite things to do was put the nail in the drill with the wheel on and hold the wheel as we spun the nail adding graphite to help it run fast and smooth.

The finished product wasn’t like the car the boy makes in the Subaru commercial which is rather box like, but like something out of speed racer. I placed second in the Pack, which was good enough to go to the District race where I finished first. It was fun and I still have that trophy, the car is somewhere too, though its missing the wheels.

Today, I wanted to let you know about some of the new “enhancements” that have been made to the sponsored tweets site. Most are for advertisers like the use of ClickForensics to make sure that the click thru’s you’re seeing are legit or the new ability to “Bench” a certain member if you don’t like the results (or if they’ve tweeted too much for you lately). Also added for the Advertisers are some new reports. Advertisers now get a great high level overview of their clicks. This will detail when the clicks happened, how many were considered invalid and more. Invalid clicks won’t show up on the graph, and won’t count towards the total clicks for this opportunity. Advertisers can even drill down and see the referrer for clicks on their offers.

Don’t fret though, Tweeters are also going to see some of the benefits such as a change to the user dashboard that now shows you revenue generated, missed and from referrals right above available posts. They’ve also made a ton of improvements behind the scenes that iron out a ton of bugs and other creepy crawly’s that were bogging the system down.

If you haven’t had the chance yet, stop by SPONSORED TWEETS and sign up today, it costs you nothing as a tweeter and you have everything to gain. If you’re already using Sponsored Tweets, let me know how you’re doing with the program and what you like about it (or hate about it) and we’ll see if we can’t get some more improvements made!

Currently, you can link Youtube, Twitter, flickr, picasa, google reader, google talk status, a web site and what appears to be buzz itself to your buzz account (which is really just a tab in your gmail in box). This is ok, but it doesn’t allow me to add facebook or myspace or any of the other social networking sites I can access through Tweetdeck or socialscope or any number of other apps. Plus, you HAVE to have a gmail account in order to use buzz. So if you’re tied you your ISP’s email, or your ancient hotmail/yahoo email address, unless you sign up for gmail you won’t be buzzing.

One of the other aspects that truly annoys me about buzz is the fact that I get an email for EVERY BUZZ. This is ok, except that it sends me emails about my own buzz’s as well as those I follow. If buzz catches on, I’ll soon be receiving more email from buzz then from anyone else on my contact list. I haven’t found a way to stop this yet, though it seems my mail program is filtering most of the buzz emails out as spam any how.

Unfortunately, I fear Google may have jumped the shark with Buzz like they did with Wave. When wave hit, it was all people could talk about (there were wars over getting invites!) and now, people hardly check their wave inbox at all. Buzz generated a lot of initial interest, until people realized that it was pretty much another service along the same lines of what we already have. True, it does allow for a little quicker response then traditional email, and its a little easier to use then google wave, but is it really needed in this time of twitter, facebook, buzzd and all the others?

If you want to follow me on buzz, check out my Google Profile and let me know what you think about buzz.

We ended up having around three inches of the white stuff on the ground by Midnight, not bad for Atlanta, where most of our frozen precip is in the form of ice. The kids were able to make a decent snowman, go sledding on our street and play out in the snow for about half a day before it was almost all gone.

The sad thing is that it was all gone by Sunday evening (though a few spots remain…) and there was little left other then hats and scarves that had once adorned snowmen everywhere. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. There are more photos in the Gallery

I saw it when I redesigned Linuxtracker last year even though most of the layout stayed the same it was the images that changed. I complained at first when my account was moved to the new Facebook layout. After all, I had heard so much about it on twitter and from my friends on FB that how could I not be offended by the new layout, until I realized that it didn’t suck at all and was in fact much better.

A nice young programmer at Facebook, Jing Chen, actually BLOGGED about it on the facebook blog (did you know they had a blog?) and after reading her post, it all makes sense. Too much sense!

For instance, the last change that brought the News Feed and the Live Feed to your home page was more or less done away with and now there’s one news feed. Yes, it’s still segmented in to two sections, Top News and Most Recent, but its all back under news. Right where it should be.

If you look under your photo, you’ll see the menu for the other sections. Go ahead, click on photos. I dare you. Woah! Look at that! That makes way more sense doesn’t it? The news feed is replaced by photos. Click on events or messages and you get the pages for that. Its much easier to browse now.

Another change for the better is moving the notifications to the top by the Facebook logo. Under the old style, everything was in the bar on the bottom. If you clicked the notifications, it shot to the top of the page (and I was NEVER) able to see all of the notifications unless I managed to click see all before it was gone. Not any more. Its a better layout as it keeps the important stuff above the fold and it doesn’t place a bar at the bottom of the screen. Yes, the chat is still down there, but then thats a good, out of the way place for it. After all, how much content is in the bottom right corner of the page?

The other change that you Farmville fans will love is the easier access to the games and other applications in facebook. Now they function in almost the same manner as the photos and other items at the top. Its all around easier.

For more information on the changes to Facebook, check out the Post on them and let me know what you think (or what you would have done differently.