Welcome to Something for Nothing

STA Travel is holding a contest to win a trip to Spain to follow in the footsteps of the MTV’s The Real World Key West cast. I’ve used STA travel before to go to Italy and Holland and I was quite happy with their service. If I could win a free trip to Spain from them I’d be ecstatic.

I also found it interesting that STA Travel is on myspace(http://www.myspace.com/statravel). Good luck and if you win I’ll be happy to take your extra ticket.

I took a gander over to the google book search blog because I’ve been waiting for Google to really take over the book world and start offering all the books it has in its database online for free. I’m sure they’ve already done this for all of their employees. Until they finish the copyright battle I guess we’ll have to wait. I did find an interesting post on the different type of views that Google provides of books in its library.

I of course am mainly interested in the full view since I want the entire book. It wasn’t too bad and on my tablet PC I’m sure that reading this book would be fantastic. I guess I would like to get rid of some of the scrolling. However, I think there’s a bigger issue at hand. Reading a book like this online is still not as good as turning the page of a book. It just isn’t as satisfying. However, while copyright lovers out there continue to hinder Google’s progress on getting books to the masses no new technology will be developed to solve this problem. Without a large number of books available in full electronically people aren’t going to waste their time developing technology to display it in an easy to read way. That’s just life. I guess we’ll just have to keep waiting.

I just got my first iPod given to me. I of course would have just bought an mp3 player instead of an iPod if I had actually bought it. Either way, I was interested to check out some different podcasts. In my search I ran across a bunch of nice podcasts form Internet Marketing Voodoo(http://www.internetmarketingvoodoo.com). I listened to a couple podcasts on RSS feeds and email marketing.

I was impressed by some of the personalities they were able to get. It also looked like they had some real targeted information for women and hispanics. Maybe those weren’t of interest because those aren’t my target markets. I wish they would have had more content on some controversial topics like PayPerPost, click fraud, and other topics which are causing problems to internet marketers. The podcasts were very professional though.

As unbelievable as it sounds, this is really true as posted in a Health News Article at Reuters.com.

I’ve been waiting for this for a while. My application of this technology is changing the tv channel with just my thoughts. It might make my wife mad since it really takes channel flipping to a new level, but I would love it.

Here’s an excerpt from the article about what this represents:

“This is the dawn of major neurotechnology where the ability to take signals out of the brain has taken a big step forward. We have the ability to put signals into the brain but getting signals out is a real challenge. I think this represents a landmark event,” said Professor John Donoghue of Brown University in Rhode Island and the chief scientific officer of Cyberkinetics.