California beach-goers are going high tech! Heal The Bay and Go Live Mobile (a mobile marketing company) have joined forces to update residents with a beach report card. Instead of heading out to a beach, only to be disappointed by poor water quality, people can send a text message to 23907 with the name of the beach they’d like information on. A text message will be sent in reply with that particular beach’s weekly grade. Heal The Bay has published the Beach Report Card since 1990, but this will be the first time that California’s analysis...

I’m not big on text messaging. I just can’t type fast enough to keep up, and leaving the vowels out of words annoys me. But text messaging is useful, and 2 events in the news proved that recently. In the first, a Malaysian teen thwarted an attacker by sending a text message to family. After hearing a noise outside, Salima Mohamad Noor sent a quick text message, and the next thing she knew, a guy had a knife at her throat. (What’s up with the kids today, anyway? They here a noise and their first instinct is to text for help? What about...

I’m always interested in new revenue steams for my blogs. I’ve often wished I could get paid for sharing video content – there are a few videos I’ve put up on YouTube that have received thousands of views – wouldn’t it be nice to be making money each time someone watched one of those videos? It’s not an option on YouTube, but it IS an option on your very own blog, with a new site called The News Room. CPM start at $1 – that means for every thousand views of a news story, you get paid. You earn more money...

An update on my earlier post about the Virginia Tech tragedy…as I mentioned, we had a spammer sign up here in the GeekySpeaky forum under the name of the shooter, and of course, I immediately deleted the post and the profile. Spammers are now using emails to attempt to infect computers with a trojan horse program. The emails say they are linking to footage of the slayings. Why anyone would click on that to see people in fear for their lives in dying, I don’t know, but they probably deserve the virus that they get for doing so! In addition, fake...

I watch the show Medium every week – ever seen it? If not, it’s a weekly drama that focuses on a woman with psychic powers, and she dreams things – places, people, phone numbers, etc. I was instantly reminded of that show when I read this story about a man who had a phone number running through this head. He dreamed the number and couldn’t stop thinking about it, so he finally sent a text message to the number, wondering if he somehow knew the owner of it. The woman he texted continued to exchange messages with him, and they eventually...

Last week it was Turkey blocking YouTube, this week it’s China blocking…everyone in the free world. Fark’ers have plenty to say about it.The link isn’t working right now (is the USA blocking it in retaliation? Hmmm) but it can be found at: http://greatfirewallofchina.org/test/ I’m not surprised that China blocks websites. Are you?

I love my VoIP telephone service, but this article from ZDNet has me a bit worried. It reports that computer security experts are warning of spammers using VoIP to spam you via your phone, just like the spam you get via email (or blog comments) now. I’ve got visions of my voice mailbox being filled with ads for medications and mortgage refinancing, and worry that in order to combat this spam, the price of my phone service will increase dramatically. There’s already software being made that seeks out the IP addresses of people using VoIP and...

You know, people are stupid. And this proves it. A woman in New Jersey named Melanie McGuire was arrested for the murder of her husband, who died in 2004. Among the evidence presented in court were logs of her computer activity. She googled “how to commit murder”, “instant poisons”, “undectectable poison”, and other naughty search terms a few days before her husband died. Let’s see…let’s plan a crime, and use the computer in my HOME to find out how to commit said crime. Duh!

It was only a matter of time… Viacom is suing YouTube & Google for showing unauthorized Viacom videos on the video sharing site. And not just suing…but a suit for $1 billion (with a B!) dollars. This reminds me a bit of Napster…and the recording artists going after people sharing music there. If anything, seeing clips of shows on YouTube makes me want to buy the full season disk. I love that anyone can share a 30 second clip from an old show there, or a funny commercial. Until Viacom opens up their own video sharing site, I wish...

In the recent L.A. Times article I appeared in, I was quoted as saying (in reference to paid blogging): “People talk about how we’re destroying the credibility of the Internet,” Caldwell said. “Let me tell you — there are a lot worse things happening online.” What “worse things” you ask? How about the teens in Denver that killed someone, and blogged about it? Bryan Grove (17) and Tess Damn (15) conspired to kill Tess’ mother, Linda, and then blogged about the crime afterwards on MySpace. This reminds me...