Welcome to the Monkey House

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Top 5 Holloween Candy

1. Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups
2. Sweetarts
3. Mini-box of Nerds
4. Dots
5. Mini Snickers

What’s your favorite Halloween candy?

Technorati Tags: Candy, Halloween, Halloween Candy

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Disqus Among Yourselves

I’ve installed the commenting system, Disqus on this website. I’m hoping it works better than the shitty default commenting system in Wordpress. The feature I am most interested in is threaded comments and replies.
Leave a comment here and test this sucker!

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Two Weeks

Well, as of tomorrow I will have been laid off for two weeks. So far, so good. I’ve put out a few resumes, posted my resume to a few job sites, gotten my first unemployment check, and had a lead on a potential job.
I’m not in a hurry to jump into any old job. I’m looking for something I will enjoy and want to do. I’m really hoping to finally break into IT industry on a full time basis, even if it’s just as PC support. I’d really like to get into Network Management or Engineering.
That being said, it isn’t as if there is a ton of work to be found in Northern Michigan, or Michigan in general. Things are depressed economically with the auto industry circling the drain. Lot’s of people are looking for work and it has had an effect on industries that are unrelated to the Big Three.
We’ll just have to see how things go.

Technorati Tags: PCs, Networks, Work, Unemployed

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I got jobbed

Well, I was laid off from my job yesterday. I’ve worked at the same employer since 1994. It would have been 14 years on November 11th. I’ve been there since I was 17 years old. Business is really bad and I was laid off with a number of others.
It’s an interesting feeling. I’m not upset. I’ve been burned out and ready for change for a while now, years in fact. I really just needed this push to move on to something else. I’m kinda excited to find something else, but I don’t need to jump to the first thing that comes up either. I can afford to be a little choosy. We’ll see where this takes me.
I want to thank all those have sent me their well wishes. It means a lot.
On the plus side I should have more time to start blogging here and at the Record-Eagle again.

Technorati Tags: Work, Layoff

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The Best Mobile Web Browser?

A few weeks back I finally got my invite to download Skyfire. It’s a new mobile internet browser for Windows Mobile devices that is currently in beta.

There are a bunch of mobile internet browsers out there; Opera Mobile, Internet Explorer Mobile, Etc.

Skyfire is different. It delivers real webpages to your Windows Mobile Device. That includes Flash and Java, which is missing from other browsers. This means you can watch Youtube videos or streaming audio.

Skyfire does this by routing all the webpages through their servers and delivering images of the page to your browser. All the links and text boxes on the page are still clickable and work as if you were looking at the page with a desktop browser. When the browser is started it logs into Skyfire’s server, where it also stores your bookmarks.

I impressed by Skyfire’s performance. Even thought all it’s traffic is routed through their servers, the browser seems speedy. With my EVDO connection, it is only marginally slower than loading a mobile webpage in another browser. Videos on Youtube, while not the smoothest you’ve ever seen, are very watchable. Audio is delivered very well.

If you have a Windows Mobile device I strongly recommend this beta. Sign up at their website. There are versions for traditional Windows Mobile devices and those that have touch interfaces.

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Spammed-a-lot

Apparently the spambots have discovered this site. I use to get a spam comment every day or two. Not too bad. Wordpress has a plugin called Akismet that does a very good job of filtering out the spam comments from real comments, placing them in a queue for a site administrator to review.

For some reason, in the past couple weeks I have received  17+ spam comments a day. Akismet is still catching them all. I’m no really complaining, just curious what might have changed.

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You Read This?

I’m blown away, I was just looking at my FeedBurner account and apparently I have 12 individuals subscribing to this site’s feed! I’m just shocked it’s that high.

I just want to say thanks for reading, either directly at this site or via the rss feed.

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Vote Nugent?

Technorati Tags: Ted Nugent, Bumper Sticker

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FriendFeed Me, Seymour!

I’ve started to use my FriendFeed account. FriendFeed is a place to find all the postings a user’s makes across a whole smorgasbord of websites and communities.

As an example, if you followed me at http://friendfeed.com/jasonwert then you will see an entry every time I update this site, Plurk, Twitter, Flickr, Pownce, Facebook, or digg up an article on Digg.

Should anyone care what I think enough to follow me to this degree? No. But feel free to subscribe to me at http://friendfeed.com/jasonwert and I’ll subscribe to you in return, as long as you aren’t a filthy, rotten spammer!

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E.T. Phone Home

For some reason I started looking at the phones available through my cell phone service provider, Alltel, this morning. My current contract isn’t up till January so it’s a little pre-mature to be hunting for a new phone. Although I’m not the world’s biggest Alltel fan, it’s doubtful I would move away from them in the near future. They are the number one cell company in this are, in regards to their coverage and customers.

I think my cell phone wanderlust was spurred on my playing around with Kris’ Blackberry (BB) Pearl this weekend. I really don’t like the BB OS. It seems a little too locked down. I might like it if I played around with it more, but as shitty as Windows Mobile is, it is still more familiar.

 A phone that caught my eye was the HTC PPC-6800 (Titan). It has a lot of the features I’m looking for. It has a big screen, touch, a QWERTY keyboard, wi-fi, Windows Mobile, USB port charging, upgradable memory, a camera with flash and video. Another cool thing is that it has already been hacked to work with Google’s new Android OS.

Whether this is the phone I end up with only time will show. Hopefully a phone even cooler will be available by then.