Blogging in Fat City

I first heard about the Chumby back in early 2007. It’s a local San Diego company, and they were featured in the San Diego Union Tribune (more recent article here), highlighting the fact that this company was coming out with this cool new gadget. Say the word “gadget” around me and it’s like saying “candy” around my daughter; my eyes light up, my head swivels around and you definitely get my full attention. So hearing that there was a cool new gadget coming was music to my ears.

The Chumby is essentially an internet appliance, but cute. I have followed internet appliances since, well, forever. I have always had the hope that one of them would really hit it big, and everyone would have one in their house, but that has yet to happen. The Chumby is probably the most successful of this class of gadget that has appeared to date. Let’s go back in time for a moment…

Around mid 2000, 3 Com announced that they were going to produce an internet appliance called the 3 Com Audrey. It would have internet connectivity (wired and wireless, via a dongle), be able to browse the web, and to store and use “channels” for shopping, music, news, etc. I was instantly on board, and arranged to pre-order an Audrey and get it before the end of the year. Mine was “linen white.” With all the add-ons and accessories, it came to something like $700. A bit beyond what was comfortable, but still okay for an early adopter like me.

I unboxed it with fevered fingers, shaking from the adrenalin flow, anticipating grand things from it as soon as power hit the device. My wife was non-plussed, but I was in ecstasy.

Remember that scene from A Christmas Story, where the dad wins the grand prize and unboxes a plastic female leg table lamp, complete with lace stockings and high heel? That’s what was happening at my house as I unboxed my Audrey…

The Audrey quickly got a spot of honor in the kitchen (after all, that’s the point of having an internet “appliance”; it has to be ubiquitous in the house). Aside from a bewildering array of things you had to do to it to get it connected, it functioned exactly as they said. It browsed the web, and understood how to resize itself to fit the smaller screen. It had channels you could subscribe to, and news and information flowed into our kitchen. It even offered the Holy Grail of being able to sync multiple Palm-device calendars (actually, one of the reasons I bought it) into one at-home master calendar. It was awesome, and I loved my Audrey. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with Shelfari. A very cool tool that I found recently. Basically, it’s your virtual bookshelf. Or, if you’re like me, it’s your virtual home library. I have a ton of books at home, and we’re not talking fiction paperbacks; I mean textbooks and hardback technical books. My wife has pretty much looked past my book hoarding, but I’m sure she’d prefer if I kept less in stock at any given time. As it stands right now, the books occupy a wall in our house that is 7 feet high and 17 feet long. I’ve always wanted a better way of cataloging them than I have currently. Enter Shelfari.

I read about this site somewhere (sorry, can’t remember the link) and thought I’d check it out. After entering the first few books I had at work, I was hooked. Basically, you create a free account, take any book you own, type in the ISBN number and you’re set. You now have a virtual bookshelf! Shelfari pulls all the data about the book for you automatically, including even the cover image. When you look at your bookshelf, it shows up as a title facing forward sitting on a virtual shelf. Very cool.

If you like how it works out, you can also do a one-time create of a custom name for your bookshelf. Kind of like registering a domain name. Just pick it out, make sure no one else has it, and then you can refer to your bookshelf through a shortcut such as http://www.shelfari.com/MyBookshelfName.

Does it sound daunting to enter all your books from your collection into a website? It did for me too, but the reality is that it really wasn’t hard at all. I just started down each shelf, briefly pulling out each book, typing the ISBN number into my Treo and then moving on to the next book. I’d do a vertical rack at a time, then email myself the list of numbers. A visit to Shelfari to import the list and -bang-, it’s done! What I thought would take me weeks to do only took a few days. And out of the 400+ books in my collection, dating back to the early 1970′s, it had problems with only six titles. That’s pretty amazing. Read the rest of this entry »