Anyway, I'm in the process of lining up new work but will be employment free until at least mid to late January of my own volition. If Hongyun's businesses stay healthy and we keep adding to our cash stockpiles, then I'll stay out of gainful employment for a bit longer and pursue a degree of some sort. Here's the rundown of things that I would like to do:

1. Update HongyunArt.com. It needs to cover a broad base of activities that Hongyun is actually engaged in. No problemo...maybe a 2 days of solid work.

2. Update XiaoDaVinci.com. Slight redesign and more site sections. Easy peasy stuff...1 to 1.5 days solid work max.

3. Super secret project 1: Glenn (my partner in this venture) has been chomping at the bit to get my overbooked brain all to himself. Come, Dec 15th or so, I'm 100% full time on SSP1. 2-3 weeks for functioning prototype with hacked up drupal and the like...working over Xmas? You betcha!

4. Super secret project 2: This is my own baby and will revolutionize the world. Well, probably not, but it will fix a MAJOR headache I have these days around my digital content. It will be done in Windows using .net and c# first since that's what I know and enjoy using. I'll try my luck at Java or C++ to make it portable if time allows. C# v0.1 will be 2 weeks. The goal is to have it function for 3 major APIs in that time frame. Mid January, here I come.

5. dodoskido redesign: Movable Type 3.2? Are you kidding me? Yeah seriously...dodoskido is totally long in the tooth, totally hacked up to hell version of movable type. In fact, I started messing with this thing in 2000 with MT 2.1 and haven't looked back. It begs for at least a simple template update and hopefully a nice tie in with social networking tools that are so prevalent. 4 days...We'll see, my young padowan....we'll see.

6. GRE - Oh no, not again! Yeah yeah, I took the GMAT and did rather well, but not well enough for Haas. Maybe I'll retake the GMAT too while I'm at it. And maybe throw in the LSAT if they cover similar ground.

7. Crash some courses at Stanford. Also complete some ITunesU courses along with doing all of the exercises.

8. Unconsumerist.com - YABI (yet another blog idea) to address my personal wrestling with desire to buy and need to not.

9. Processing, Flash, Photoshop - visualization and design are hobbies of mine that just have been begging for some attention and I hope that I'll have enough time to at least fix up some of my favorite photos over the past 8 years or so. I'd also like to work on some API connected visualizatoin

Well, a few smart people have recognized the problem and are working to solve it. I've tried out Ping.fm and Tarpipe.net and not sure which I like better. Here's my quick review of each:

Ping.fm seems to have simplicity in mind but lacks some of the control that tarpipe has. That being said, it gets the job done for about 95% of the things I want to occur. With a single email or IM, Ping.fm updates my facebook, linkedin, mysapce, twitter, friendfeed, yada yada statuses and will even upload a photo attachment to flickr and provide a short URL to it in every status update. Neat trick. So why is not the cream in my coffee? Well, I'd like for the status to read something like:

"Tommy is on the moon! http://www.flickr.com/photos/dodoskdo/tommysmoonphoto"

But currently it reads:

"Tommy http://ping.fm/lskjeE is on the moon"

Blech! A minor fix I'm sure, but I know they need to drive traffic somehow and decided this would be a good way to go about it.

Now for Tarpipe.net...this looks intriguing for the total geek user (which I count myself to be), but I'm guessing that 99% of the users will totally give up at first glance. So, I think that tarpipe needs to have templates for the 95% cases:

Post this photo to flickr, facebook, myspace, yada yada
Update my status on facebook, linkedin, etc
Post this photo flickr then update my status on facebook, linkedin, etc with a link to in and a little comment

This will provide users with a nice starting point to make their own tarpipe workflows and get people up and running very quickly. Also, having featured or new workflows that everyone could share would be neat too. Another thing I found annoying about tarpipe is that it lacks connectivity to facebook, linkedin, myspace, and a couple of other biggies in the field. I'm sure this is just a momentary oversight and hope they'll connect the big guns of the social networking world soon.

Overall though I'd say that between the two, I'm likely to keep using both for now. Ping.fm will be used for status updates while tarpipe, I'll use to post photos to flickr and have my facebook-flickr connector update my profile with new photo updates

ShopShop - can't add new items...bummer. Guess I gotta go pay for Grocery IQ now.
FlyCast - playback stops when the iPhone locks itself...oops.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and fring seem to all be working.

That is all.

I just installed Live Mesh and have to say that I think it's rather slick but we'll see if it lives up to the hype.

The service seems to share more than a passing resemblance to Foldershare so I decided to see if others have found this to be the case and to find out what the differences really are.

I found this article: Skydrive, Foldershare, and Live Mesh - hendrikch.com - Hendrik Christian Blog on Daily Life and got to thinking about it. So here's my response to Hendrikch (which I will also email to him):

Hi Hendrikch,

Great summary of these disparate yet related services. I worked for MS for several years and I think the reason MS has so many disjointed offerings is that no one really is a "master of ceremonies" in the way Steve Jobs rules Apple with an iron fist. It really is a company with too many VPs, too many Directors, and too many General Managers to have a coherent strategy. Now, they've bucked this trend before (see: Xbox), but there are still too many examples of these approaches that each get customers 80% of what they need and overlap about 75% but none get us completely there.

Now that these things are out there, I believe everything will coalesce around Live Mesh (I really have no idea since I'm no longer a Microsoftie) which will integrate foldershare & skydrive.

Here's my dream service:
-- No file count limits (foldershare limits you to 10,000 files)
-- No file size limits (I think one or more of the services limit you to 2GB)
-- "Smart" live desktop that watches what I use on the PC and uploads those files and things that seem related. For example: if I listen to a song a lot, it would find all of the playlists that song is in and upload the songs "near" that one in the playlists (or the entire playlist if it is small enough).
-- Unified sharing center. "Share this folder with..." one email addy, one email domain, multiple addies, everyone, facebook friends, etc. Also a really nice UI for those that choose to browse photos on live mesh rather than other services.
-- "Super Sync" - "Mirror this folder structure to..." facebook, myspace, flickr, windows live, smugmug, photobucket, kodak, etc. AND keep them in sync (e.g. if I upload something to flickr, notice this and mirror everywhere else.)
-- Remote Desktop of course (Live mesh has this, but I use logmein still)
-- Browse other machines without sync (Foldershare has this)
-- Full, unlimited backup in the cloud for $5/month (I use Mozy for this now).

So I would do pricing like this:
Free unlimited syncing (foldershare)
Free remote desktop (logmein)
$5/month unlimited backup (mozy)
$5/month unlimited sharing(sky drive)/super sync/unified sharing center

So you see, we're about 80% of the way there on each of the services...just need to snap together the bits of each together into one big service. I'm actually in the processing of writing my own super sync service for all platforms that will keep my gazillions of photos and home videos sync'd to flickr and other services (since flickr is blocked in China and my wife's family is there and needs to use other services to access our photos).

Kineticy Typography Tutorial | The Crooked Gremlins.

Couldn't hurt to start here right?