A few years ago I was chatting with someone using the instant messenger that came with another program, while talking with this gentlemen, he asked me how the weather is today in Lebanon TN. This shocked me, I had just met this guy online, how did he know where I worked? Was it someone I knew, but didn’t know I was talking to him? I had to chat with this guy for an hour to get him to divulge how he knew where I was.

He explained that his firewall program showed the ip address of incoming connections, and my chat window was just that, an incoming connection, so he took the ip address number and popped it into a free online tool, ip location, and had my whereabouts pinpointed in about 30 seconds. If that sounds complicated, believe me, it is not. Just about everyone has a firewall program running on their computer, it may take some tinkering to find connected ips, but that is the only hard part. Once you have someone’s ip addy, simply put it into one of the free online ip address tools and it will show you a map of where they are connecting from the internet.

Don’t worry, these tools don’t give you the actual street address of the person you are connecting with,just the connecting node from the net. So Jack was able to find that I was accessing the internet through comcast in Lebanon TN, he knew the area that I was in, but not my actual, exact location. Of course a subpoena to comcast could them to divulge the address wince they have the exact records of where each ip resolves to.

There are also cool tools for checking the email headers someone sent you, and getting their ip and it’s originating address on a map as well.

There are ways to mask these things, proxies, remailers, and other programs to hide ip’s from email and while surfing the net, but most people do not use them.

The past two years I have moved so much I have been using temporary hand me down chairs at the home office, and now I spend so much time working at home the chair situation has gotten really bad. I saw a cool looking chair at best buy recently, it seemed to have many of the features that I like in a good chair, but it was on some kind of rack and not accessible to sit in and really check it out. So I came home and did some looking online, and google has brought me so many choices I just don’t know what to do. Ultimately I would like to try all of these chairs out in person, but I doubt there is any place in town that has a majority of these chairs I am interested in.

So here are a few of the chairs I am considering, if you have any experience with any of these in your home or office please chime in with how satisfied or unsatisfied are / were with any of these:

Ak Designs Octane – This one looks futuristic, it caught my eye at Best Buy, i had no idea it was being billed as n office / gaming chair. Sounds cool, but how comfortable is the padding?

True Seating – Vinyl Executive Chair – Titanium Silver/Gray – This is much more affordable, it looks cool, says it has “Waterfall seat design fosters leg circulation”

This Iron Horse chair looks awesome, but when a place has “request a quote” in lieu of prices for a chair, I have to assume it’s in the “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it” category. It does feature “Anatomically contoured foam cushions engineered for hours of seated comfort.” which sounds and looks) awesome.

This Ergocraft Phantom Deluxe Control Chair looks like it would be very soft and comfortable, it actually looks like it would be softer than my bed, at more than $400, I would probably buy a new bed first though.

I found this Executive Black Leather High Back Swivel Computer Chair at Amzaon.com it looks great, sounds great, but I can’t tell if it has adjustable arms or not, it kind of looks like it, but I’m not sure. It does look very nice for a chair under $150.

Now this chair (Office Star Black Leather Managers Chair with Platinum Finish Base and Height Adjustable Arms) looks stylish and comfortable, it has adjustable arms, but it’s around $350 – hmm. A new chair, a new bed. Decisions decisions.

Then I find this one, the Multi Function Super Ergonomic Task Chair, it seems to have lots of adjustment options, which is great, the back looks like it may stick out a bit more than I prefer, but that may be helpful for leaning up on the keyboard and typing. i like to lean back a lot when working however, and a back that sticks out a lot may make that more difficult. At $180 the price is good for a very adjustable chair though.

Then I see this chair, the Office Star Super Ergonomic Task Chair, it may be the best of what all the other chairs have, at a price that is decent. For $230 it boasts:

# Thick Padded Seat and Back with Built-in Lumbar Support
# Pneumatic Seat Height Adjustment
# Ratchet Back Height Adjustment
# Multi Function Control
# Height and Width Adjustable Arms with PU Pads
# Heavy Duty Nylon Base with Dual Wheel Casters

I really have no idea what a ratchet back adjustment is, but is sounds hi tech, especially compared to the wooden chair I am using right now.

All in all I like the technology of having adjustable arm rests.

I must have soft padded arm rests, hard plastic or hard rubber will not due.

A good soft padding, especially in the area that the hamstrings rest on. With most of the chairs I have used in and out of the office I find that I put a lot of pressure on that area when typing and mousing around, sometimes my legs go numb, and when that happens I know that the poor circulation must be bad for my legs and it keeps my feet cold, so I am trying to avoid that like the plague. I do remember seeing some kind of pulsing air cushion invention somewhere online , this may make a cheaply padded chair workable, but I think it was around $100, so if I have o make due with less comfortable padding for the legs, then t he chair would have to be considerable cheaper.

From the wired campus blog:

Indiana U. Receives Grant for Development of Virtual World for Children

The Indiana University School of Education has received a three-year, $1.8-million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to expand the virtual world Quest Atlantis, which is designed to help foster creativity, social responsibility, and compassion in children ages 9 through 12.

Watch Sasha Barab, the university director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, discuss Quest Atlantis.-Andrea L. Foster

Looks like virtual worlds will continue to be developed, I wonder how much better they can get? It seems the the VR worlds I’ve explored are already very good, perhaps these initiatives will not be as much about making new VR or 3d technology, but about creating community. I wonder which VR worlds will end up with the most regular users.

and From Techcrunch:

EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.

Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players. Sounding a lot like Second Life? It gets better:

There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”

I remember when there were several social networks trying to coral the most users, and it seemed for a while that myspace had won the most people, but wasn’t necessarily the best social network software running. I would have bet that tagworld or me.com would have prevailed in that arena since the user interfaces seems better to me. There were many things that shaped myspace as a popular destination for the majority of users, and I believe a large part of that was myspace staying out of what people were putting on their pages (and by extension their 2d virtual world). With EA pushing to keep it rated E for everyone, I hope that take two will make an adult version and perhaps base it on Grand Theft Auto where it is not for everyone, so me and my friends can have a VR world that is not kid friendly, and therefor more fun to run around in.

This apparently has saved her a ton of time, now instead of editing 100 photos not knowing which ones she is going to need for presentations the next day, she simply downloads a list of thumbnails to her USB drive, then she can show the group the thumbnails, and when it is decided which ones to touch up and use in projects, she uses remote access to pull the full sized images up from her home PC while at work.

Crystal has been using Remote Access and has been raving about the ability to control and use her home computer from work, I’ve heard that they are considering a small business account to allow everyone int he group to do the reverse and access the work computers from home as well. She is basically using her home computer for remote storage, and I found that remote PC has a neat remote storage program that comes with each account. Danny could be using this as a way to have backup music available for his DJs. I’m sure there are other people who would use this remote storage in other ways as well. It amazes me that so many people are not familiar with the remote control abilities that are available with today’s fast access internet services.

Someone had the military channel on and I was hearing about a new idea for military BDUs that was part of saving lives, a basic idea. There was an interview with a guy explaining that a lot of trauma occurs after a wound in the battlefield simply because the time it takes to get a tourniquet tied to the body is often a long time. The idea was to have tourniquets built into the BDUs soldier’s were wearing, several in strategic locations around the body so that if needed it was right there and fast to stop excessive bleeding. This is one of those simple and great ideas.
I had thought that the tourniquet system was still on the drawing board, only to find out that it is already in production and available. I also learned that premium military BDUs can have an infrared repelling coating tot he fabric in an effort to reduce the heat signature that shows up with night vision scopes that the bad guys might be using. I had no idea there was such a technology, but I guess it’s working and in use.

I think most everyone in the company will end up getting their BDUs without the ITS system, but if you are looking for military clothing BDU.com should be your first step in finding the hi tech stuff.

So far my legs are warm and happy, the laptop is warm, but not overbearing hot. I’m enjoying like a cup of hot tea, and it was so much easier to just grab the laptop for some extra warm, rather getting up and boiling some water.

Wikileaks recently had a court order to shut down, but i think the whistleblowing site will return and the court proceedings should pave the way for other sites like it to stay afloat without challenge. The college rumor site juicycampus.com has gotten some bad press, but my hope is that people will wake up and learn to take thins they read online, and hear in person for that matter, with a grain of salt. I know that there is a whole industry of forensic web people out there that scour the internet looking for information about companies online, trying to protect the reputation of businesses from being tarnished by people posting information on web sites. While I see the value of this type of work, I think sometimes these places go to far in their tactics for changing information that has been posted. I mean if someone finds a ranting blog post on a myspace about xyz company or person for that matter, surely adults can know in their mind that the post is only half the story, and it is one person’s view of events. I seriously doubt that someone will come across a random anonymous post and decide that they shouldn’t invest in something.

The power of technology and the internet should not be limited with frivolous cease and desist letters and law suits and malicious prosecutions, all limiting free speech. People should be adults and consider all angles and makeup their minds by the credibility and amount of posts. If you read something that is anonymous, you take it with a grain of salt. If you read something on CNN.com from Larry King, well, you take that for what that is. Heck a lot of people today don’t even believe what the mainstream media reports, why should eveyone be freaking out about what is posted on a no name site with no credible author?

Perhaps this will be the decade where people learn to toughen up their listening skills. Already you see a big movement on digg.com where people will demand references and sources before buying into any story. Now if we can just get the rest of the world to wake up, demand proof, take everything with a grain of salt, and stop listening to gossip so much. I do believe that listening to gossip encourages it. When someone is talking about someone to you, be sure that they will be talking about to someone else later, and probably in a similar scandalous tone.

So use technology to spread the word, use sources when you can. If you must write anonymously be sure not to include any details that will get you found out through a process of elimination. If you are going to hate on something keep it real, and realize that when other people are hating, often they are only telling part of the truth.

From mobile crunch

“The two fibers scrub together just like two bottle brushes with their bristles touching,” converting the mechanical motion into electrical energy, explained Wang.

“Many of the devices could be put together to produce a higher output,” he said.

The nano-fibers use the “piezoelectric effect”, which is the method of generating power from friction.

read the story at Mobile Crunch

Nokia’s Ovi

There is talk about an itunes like music section, photo and video collaboration sections, and more. It sounds great, but how will it really play out?

I know Danny has been using truecrypt to hide adults only pics and videos from his family (good safeguard Danny, I’m glad you are being a responsible adult surfer), Jerry has been keeping his medical reports under lock and key with it when he takes work home. I use it to secure all the docs and photos on my USB thumb drive. I also keep a backup copy of all my pictures from college encrypted. It’s a great way to store financial information for emergencies as well.

I’m a big fan of TrueCrypt and PGP, I’ve been using Handybits Easycrypto for a while as well, but the truecrypt is what I use on my USB thumb drives and my main system now. There are cool new features that allow mac users to use it, and linux users get a better GUI, and some other goodies added in as well. Download the program and go through the tutorial for using it. It takes a few minutes the first time, after that you are all set and you can use this great data safeguard anywhere.

A few people have had some issues with it working in some scenarios with a mac – check out the truecrypt 5 discussion at digg for some of that info.