One Million Donors for Barack Obama

As reported by many outlets today, Barack Obama's Campaign has amassed over 1 Million individual donors, many of whom have given as little as $25. Congratulations!

Hopefully, the March 4th Ohio and Texas primaries will cement Barack's nomination and finally give a crushing blow to Hillary.

Xobni making your computer run slow? Uninstall!

Xobni is a Outlook add-in that allows you to view data about your email in new ways. When you are viewing an email, the sidebar inside the outlook window shows you all kinds of useful information such as:
-all email sent to/received from that person
-all files exchanged with that person via email
-a graph of the time of day that you get email from that person
-people linked to that person (cc'd in an email)
-information about how often you email with that person

All of this is great stuff.....if you want to know the information. I personally have very little need for any of this information. The only thing that is even remotely useful is the 'files exchanged' function. However this can be displayed by sorting your email by person and then by attached files.

All of this functionality comes at a great price. My outlook was SEVERELY slow almost to the point of non-usability. Probably due to the fact that I have 4 years+ of business email that it is working with, and I wouldn't call myself a heavy emailer. If Xobni can't deal with even a modest amount of email, then it will probably fail.

I un-installed today after running the program for several weeks. Presto!, no more slowness!

john.he.is

About 3.7 million people have seen the will.i.am video supporting Barack Obama. I appreciate that video, I do. It's pretty good.

But a group of comedians got together to make a parody video, which in my opinion is MUCH better than the original, as parodies usually go. This video guest stars Kevin Douglas, whom I have worked with a few times on productions in Chicago. Kevin is part of the team kevINda. They do sketch comedy shows at Second City and elsewhere including steppenwolf. Kevin apparently also recently became an Artistic Associate at Lookingglass Theatre.

Here it is:

The new iPod battery

The first run on the new iPod battery from ipodjuice.com yeilded upwards of 18 hours of run time on a various mix of music and podcasts at an average volume of about 50-60%. This...is...awesome. MUCH better than the old battery. I can't believe I lasted so long on the old battery.

Replacing your ipod mini battery

I am going to 100% recommend ipodjuice.com as the best place to get a replacement battery kit for your ipod mini. Here is the story:

I got my iPod mini in October of 2005. At the time I wasn't ready to dive into a full scale iPod but I wanted to try it out and see if I could deal with iTunes and everything that goes with it. Plus this was a 6gb iPod mini, which were harder to find and more expensive. Regardless, I got a great deal on it because a friend had just purchased it, used if for a few weeks and decided to get the new hotness, the nano, which had just come out.

I have used the iPod Mini just about every single workday, 5 days a week, back and forth to work on the train/bus/bicycle for 2 years and 4 months. Plus I took it along when traveling and such, so it got extra use there. During the last 3 or 4 months I was experiencing very poor battery life. So poor that it often could not go more than 48hours without getting recharged, and I am talking 48 hours of mostly standby time, with 30 minutes to an hour of playtime in between. I was tired of this. I tried a reformat of the drive, but that didn't help of course. This was clearly a battery problem. Apparently 2 years of daily use is all these batteries are good for, which really sucks.

I decided to look online to find a possible replacement, or even how complex the task of replacing the battery would be. I found ipodjuice.com and I couldn't be more pleased with the experience. I ordered the 750 mAh battery kit and paid an extra $3 for UPS shipping. Everyone should know by now that USPS sucks the biggest fatty ever and they know it. Anyway, I ordered it on 1/30 and had it in hand on 2/4 - great turnaround.

The installation was simple enough. They include a full color instruction sheet with a very detailed description and many photos. They also have a videos on their website showing exactly how to do the installation. There were a few tricky parts, so if you don't have steady hands or tend to break things you try to fix, perhaps you should just send your ipod to them and they will replace the battery for you for an additional fee.

And now, I have the same 6gb iPod Mini, which is more than enough storage space for me. I don't need to be watching videos on the bus anyway. I honestly cannot see a time when I would want to upgrade this iPod. So a replacement battery is by far the way to go.

Thanks iPodjuice.com! I will tell everyone I know about your great product/service.