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Riding Shotgun with Adam

What is a blog?

I am sure that this isn’t the first article posted on this topic at HelpMeRick.com, but hopefully it will be the most complete.

There are three ways to define blogs: As news, as journals and as a ventilation system for people who want to be important.

In fact you could easily draw a vin diagram showing how most blogs overlap.

Blogs as News:

Blogs are websites that allow users to build and post to as easily as they send an email. This means that factors like web design, and computer literacy are of little importance.

Online Photo Editors

Basic photo editing no longer takes special software. You can now do some wonderful things with photos from any computer on almost any browser from anywhere in the world. Online photo editors allow you to edit photos simply by going to a special website.

Once fully loaded, these sites let you resize, adjust brightness and contrast, tweak color and even work with layers. While none of these editors are as robust as Photoshop Elements, they are great for doing basic adjustments especially when working on a computer that is not your own.

How about a new business model for airlines?

For a guy who has few investments, I spend a lot of time thinking about business. I watch news stories and when I hear about a failing industry I begin thinking about ways to improve it. This is especially the case with industries that shouldn’t be failing based how society depends on them.

I have offered ideas on how to save the movie theater industry and cell phone industry in previous posts but last night I literally shot up out of dead sleep with a possible solution for the airline business.

I think Google should start an airline – or at least significantly fund one. There are thousands of airlines in the air at any given time, each airliner holds hundreds of people. These people are sitting in one place staring at the back of the seat in front of them for an hour our more.

It’s time for a new cell service business model

A resent consumer reports article compared cell services and Sprint ranked last among the top four services across the board. I use Sprint and have never had any real troubles. I have also found that the coverage is great whenever I travel. They also have the best price for data and their rates are reasonable.

I am not writing this in defense of Sprint though. I am pretty upset with American cell service in general.

Currently cell phone service business models are built on a foundation of using gimmicks to get a customer to buy then punishing them for long term loyalty by raising prices and excluding them from promotional deals.

What we teach actually works!!

Today I saw a client I have not seen in a long time. They are a great family with four teenagers at home. One year I had to reformat their computer three times because of their knack for picking up spyware.

While I enjoyed the money, I did not enjoy doing all those reformats. Reformatting a computer is my least favorite project.

Gradually I would break them of their habits and have them using Firefox, AVG and a variety of anti-spyware tools. Each year I have seen them less and less.

I saw them today to help them setup a new laptop and I decided to scan their desktop computer for spyware while I was there.

What I like about Windows Vista

Please read the headline of this article correctly – it does not say, "Reasons why you should upgrade to Windows Vista." Windows Vista is still a nasty operating system that hogs resources and hides or eliminates important features, but there are some cool features hidden within and I feel that I must list them here so that I can be fair to Microsoft.

If Microsoft had added any or all of these features to XP, it would have been an upgrade worth the price. Instead they had to add all of the other junk to confuse users too.

Good bye pay phones – one more thing our children will never understand

Eighty percent of people now own cell phones and the other 20 percent are standing next to eight people holding a cell phone.

Remember pay phones? Remember stuff that made you ask, “What is that?” on the receiver of the pay phone? Remember having to insert more money to continue the call? Remember being at the airport or mall and searching like mad for a pay phone that wasn’t in use?

AT&T announced this week that those days will be happy memories by the end of 2008. The company plans to end the pay phone business.

I will be first in line for a vintage phone to put with my 8-track player, phonograph, rotary phone, cassette tape, CB radio, typewriter and film camera.

Sleepy Tryptophan effect is a Thanksgiving myth!

Most people will not read this post in time to help this Thanksgiving, but hopefully it will come in handy for next Thanksgiving and future poultry dinners to come.

The tryptophan effect is a myth.

That’s right. Every Thanksgiving after the big meal I hear family members complain that the tryptophan is kicking in as they feel a sudden sleepiness.

Tryptophan is an amino acid that is in turkey and does cause sleepiness. However, there is not enough tryptophan in turkey to cause sleepiness – and even if there was – the tryptophan would only kick in on an empty stomach with no protien present. Not likely at Thanksgiving dinner.

How do I know all this? I read it on Snopes.com.