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Sprint: I was with them for 4 years. 4 years and my biggest complaint was that I couldn’t use all the minutes in my plan. I had a good plan- and at 4 years old compared to the current prices I was indeed getting a sweet deal by staying with them and renewing that plan. A great benefit of Sprint- was their cheap data plans in a world filled with the rising costs for other carriers. $15 a month on my awesome plan and I could pick out a sweet PDA/Smart phone and still be a great price.

I never needed to call customer service. When my phone broke I went down to the local Sprint store in Orem and they replaced it - twice - for free. I recently had my contract run out and I thought I would take advantage of upgrading to a new phone and get $150 discount by renewing. They have 30 day trials there, which I am gracious for because I wanted to find a phone that fit my needs/likes: and it was nice to know I could try a few. Initially I tried the HTC mogul, LG Musiq, and messed around with a few others. I didn’t quite like any of them so I took them back- and each time I was always using my old plan and the added data plan to it.

Finally they pitch me this “Samsung Instinct, the iPhone killer”. . . the new hotness. . . I double check- make sure I can do the 30 day trial, that I don’t have to buy a different plan, and that if I cancel I will still retain my old plan. With an annoyed looks, my ignorance cost their patience and the rep said in a pissed off tone, “Yeah…. of course…You’ve tried it 4 or 5 times now already, just figure it out and realize that’s how it’ll always be”.

I go to buy the phone, and guess what: I HAVE to buy a new plan. The rep who made me feel stupid was probably laughing inside when he asked, “which plan do you want? $89.00 plan?”… What?! Double what I am paying? .. ..needless to say, I had a debate right then and there. If it is a lot like the iphone, I could love it and only have to pay $100 for the phone and the plan is the same price as the iPhones. Also- this is my last attempt with Sprints phone selection before I stick to my old plan and just get a one of their freebie flip phones….besides, it’s just a trial anyway and I was curious. They sales reps tell me he’s sure I am going to love it, and blah blah blah. I double check that I can cancel and go back to my old plan within 30 days- and pull the trigger and buy it.

So when I decide I don’t like it? The Sprint store in Orem tells me I CAN’T go back to my old plan. No way- no how- their system is programmed that no matter what I do- I can’t have my old plan back even if I return the phone and cancel. I have to pick a new plan? For the same price as my old plan I had to choose a plan that had half of the services I was getting before. But, I am not in contract- but have to pick a new plan? They say the plan is ‘best for the company, an enhancement for more streamlined services’.

I made my decisions based on getting the plan back. I took a cheap plan and tried calling into customer service to see if they could help. Of course they gave me the ‘we upgraded our system’ BS and that I can’t go back. I mention I’ll likely cancel and I get nothing back and the call just became frustrating. If I would have been given clear and truthful information in the beginning, I would have not done the purchase trial of the Instinct- i would have just spent a lot of time in the store testing it out- but my old plan and my desire to stay with it was much higher than risking it on a $100 P.O.S. poor attempt at giving an alternative to the iPhone. Not to mention……. there were 4 or 5 other people at the store at the same time as me, returning their Samsung Instincts too!.

The Iphone 3g comes out not too much later, and I’ve been a very happy camper with Cingular/AT&T/Apple and I really do think my current phone is what I was looking for. AT&T has even proactively called ME 3 times since I signed up to ensure everything is working and to remind me of some benefits.

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Victim Effect is a pretty unique band. Some awesome people I got to know back in high school in Sacramento who started Victim Effect, came out here to UT and have been working hard to make it big, and it would be deservedly so, as hard as they push. I think it’s natural for people to have mixed feelings about them, much like “Queen” had when they first came out. Their fan base growing, sound constantly improving, and the best part- they really do what THEY want to do.

Alan Taylor Smith is a fan who took some time to mix his enjoyment for V.E.’s music and skills with graphic art. This video is a live action look- at the creation of a picture of the members of Victim Effect.

Victim Effect, considered an Indie Band by staying to a small label/do-it-yourself lifestyle, can be reviewed on shepizzle.com, and Indie Music review blog.

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According to a CNN Money article, 2006 online retail grossed an all time high of $102 Billion dollars, which is a 24% increase from 2005.

Most medium and large businesses have fairly large budgets to spend online. Search Engine Optimization, and Pay Per Click advertising accounting for two large portions of where that spend goes which is why many of them get their portion of that $102 Billion dollars. Internet Marketing is still a fairly new industry though, and there are a few reasons small and some medium size businesses haven’t had the opportunity to have a very strong presence in this arena despite having a competitive if not better service than large businesses.

Generally, the small business owner can’t meet the minimum spend of Internet Marketing Agencies. If they want to optimize for more search engine traffic such as Google and Yahoo, or manage a pay per click advertising on those engines, they often have to resort to a less than effective means of getting it done. It usually comes down to them having to business owners having to learn Search Engine Marketing themselves. This is never as effective as the expertise and technology that large ad agencies have so competing against larger companies who have hired an agency is really rough. Many small businesses deserve their fair share of the pie, and trying to manage a business and its many tedious aspects, along with learning how to optimize their site and market online can take years and waste a lot of time and money.

OrangeSoda Inc. is a company focused on providing Internet Marketing for Small businesses. They offer onsite and external Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as well as Pay Per Click Advertising for these small businesses with budgets both small and large. A business can get highly relevant traffic from a locally targeted area, or nationally for just $100 and up. Obviously the more a company spends, the more an ad campaign can accomplish, but lower spends can help small businesses test and get a feel for potential success through online retail, and potentially grow out of the small business arena.

Orange Soda also provides all of their clients a single reporting interface for both SEO and PPC. They have their own analytics solution which ties into the same simple and easy to use Pay Per Click reporting. Their reporting interface also provides a keyword position tool, which allows business owners and webmasters to watch the progress and growth of their websites position for keywords day by day, all along side the daily visitors, conversions by source, top PPC keywords and more.

Contact a representative at Orange Soda.

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The next day after the long day and a half in Rome and trying to make it way out to the Villa the previous night, we weren’t in for too much running around but we still had a pretty strong desire to get out and see the country side, possibly see a little more of the real Italy. The Villa had 6 full bathrooms, so the twelve of us really didn’t take too long getting ready each day. My parents ran into one of the nearby, extremely small villages and grab some pastries and a few different juices. They really aren’t terribly into breakfast in a big way like many American’s are, but they go crazy with lunch and dinner. Many just have a small pastry and some coffee or something. So finding something for breakfast wasn’t the easiest. We all went out to the veranda (as seen in the top picture, just above the pool) which I mentioned in the first post about our Vacation in Italy.

We headed to a small town named Gubbio. When we found public parking, there was a small Roman theater, which is the second-largest surviving in the world. Many villages and towns were built on high ground (easy to defend), like mountainsides and hilltops. Gubbio was build on the fairly steep mountainside of Mt. Ingino, and it well represented the medieval period. All the buildings and roads were made from large cut, grey and red stones. It had skinny streets, and most of them were very steep.

The shops here were pretty amazing, people were really nice, and this towns specialty was pottery, clay work, and attractive waitresses. The small pizzeria we ate lunch at probably had the most attractive Italians I saw on my whole trip. Just walking around in these streets was quite breath taking because most of the people that live in the main section of town, live in homes which are still hundreds of years older than the Declaration of Independence. The majority of historical events in this town occurred between 1000 A.D and the 1300’s- and it still clings to it’s gothic architecture.

Another pretty awesome thing about this second day in Italy, was the plan we had to just randomly stop in at any castle we saw on the drive home since we were sticking to back country roads. We got lucky, and the owner of one gave us a quick tour. The Castle was complete with a watchtower, huge iron gate, creepy black cat, creepy old man and had been converted into a hotel and restaurant (and it still looked like people hadn’t been there since the 1400’s.)

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This is just an update on the first few days of my recent trip to Italy. We flew into Rome and headed over to our hotel called Hotel Colombo and then bounced out to hit up the night scene around the Colosseum area. We sat down to a pretty jive little street restaurant and I got an amazing olive oil, chicken and ham calzone, and also had my first Gelato (lemon and raspberry).

These are all original pictures I took while I was there from Oct. 3rd to Oct 14th.

We headed back to the hotel and got some needed rest. The time change was a little rough but we had somewhat of a big day coming up so we did our best. First thing (7:00 am) the next morning we headed out to The Vatican for a tour. We hired a Vatican tour guide, which gets you past the long lines and get early admittance compared the 4 hour wait for general admission. I was quite amazed at how amazingly huge The Vatican is. They ransacked all of Italy for ancient greek statues, and even confiscated some pretty priceless works of art, as well as commissioned many to be created specifically for The Vatican. I did snag some good pictures when guards were other wise occupied of an original painting of DaVinci, one of their halls of art, and The Sistine Chapel, The Laocoon, The Pieta and more- and I swear we didn’t mess with any holy water. The Vatican has it’s own post office (being it’s own country-state) and I sent a postcard to myself from that post office and received it the day I got back.

After the Vatican, the 12 of us (it was a ridiculously large group) headed back to the airport just to pick up our three rental cars. My dad, me, and my sister carol and her husband James took off first to head up to the Villa we rented for the rest of our duration. The manager had been waiting for us, and we were already going to be late. The other 2/3 of our group had to wait for a few items to be recovered back at the hotel before they came up an hour behind us. One of those items was a GPS. Since we didn’t have one, we tried our best to follow maps, and written directions to get the Villa. Which was ridiculous and quite stressful. Luckily, we all made it there (2 and 1/2 hours north of Rome) that night with out any snags. Italians drive wicked fast (140 kph was quite slow)- and getting used the street signs at night weren’t the best way to initially be exposed.

The Villa is pretty stinking old. But has been updated and restored in many ways. It had a separate private veranda which we ate breakfast on each day, a fairly large pool, and pretty much the compliment of a normal house. Laundry was nice, and used by all because we packed light. The bottom right as seen in the picture was originally a stable; apparently a few hundred years ago the animals lived under the house to help produce heat in colder times. We hardly had any neighbors, and most of the time you could only hear church bells randomly donging through out the day from the different villages and towns in the far distance on hill-tops all around.

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Coming tomorrow night.

Tuscany is pretty alright.

I need to bring my Daewoo over here to be more appreciated. There are tons of em and they work. If I wasn’t worried about the security issues, I would bring home a new A/C for my Hoggle.

The villa is gorgeous.

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It’s finally that time and I am leaving Utah for just under two weeks to go to Italy.

Why our trip will be awesome:

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The big Halo 3 release is just around the corner.

Here it is. What I demand be in the new game.

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Your big 3/4 ton pick up might have an AC power plug built into it somewhere, but where is the one in my Lanos? (it’s a Daewoo….) The Civic? Camry?

iPods and MP3 Players sent a huge demand through the auto industry for built in 3.5mm inputs. Those devices need power though dag-nab-it.

I think it should be easy to prove that with the huge increase in sales for power inverters, the demand is there.

Even if you don’t own an AC power adapter/inverter yet, if you had a plug built into your car you would use it for sure. For a laptop, charging station for phones and iPods, you could take your toaster with you too. (pop tart heated in 3 seconds… ding-bang! Food on the go, even faster. Eat that Brian Regan.)

Bueller? BUELLER? Come on auto-indsutry . . . . we need this, stop slacking off. I don’t need 5 new $3,000,000 concept cars each year that will never get built. I need more functionality from the cars that do get built. I need to get all this crap in my front-wheel drive 700 lb. car, and I want you to help me.

List: Car Companies Who Are Slacking Off

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If you are merely interested in the programs themselves, I would just scroll past this next stuff.

I finally approached the one year mark of owning my first Apple computer. I have a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo Macbook with 2 GB of RAM. I am not quite sure I really knew how much I would eventually appreciate this little laptop. I had a pretty decent list of reasons why I wanted to get an Apple computer, and just figured I would probably still have a Windows machine as well (or use Boot Camp/Parallels to boot windows on it if I had to). From my family’s basic use of the computer’s we had (they actually did get into computers pretty early in the 90’s), my schools, jobs, and the friends who all had PC’s, there was a pretty high level of calls to tech support companies, and lots of replacements. Actually, I think there still may be a dedicated area in my parents’ house for the pile of their old PC’s. I really just kind of hated computers growing up, and the stress’s caused to everyone around me trying to get them to work right didn’t help.

Sure, there may be some people, that could make assumptions and generalizations on my exposure to PC’s to date; “Your family probably is just computer illiterate, or were bad consumers”, “your school sucked obviously and had old hardware” etc. etc. Nope. I was the typical and average person (still am you say?), I fitted in the majority demographic for PC/Windows exposure. Thats the point. Any time a Window’s lover tries to slam Apple, or prove they are “superior” (though we are naively comparing ‘apple’s to rotten oranges’ really) they just fail to admit that in an average situation, where a Window’s based machine was being used by an average person, the process was too much of a struggle. Only higher than average computer |\|3®Ð$ (nerds) were seemingly without worry or stress.

Everyone in my family were all average computer users, my friends and jobs were average in technological advancement, and I attended an average high school. I was in the 4 year engineering program my high school had which was given the most advanced computers on campus. When a computer craps out, something goes wrong, Windows error messages pop up in the thousands; I know as well as the next guy, that many of the problems were hardware more than they were software (which even now gets chalked up to %100 user error by the previously mentioned Windows lovers). My uncle was in charge of moving forward Salt Lake Cities technology in the mid 90’s, and research was conclusively showing that it takes 1/5 as many full time employee’s to support Apple’s over PC’s. managing a full school district’s comprehensive computer system, and the computers cost less and lasted longer.

If it’s user error, then the point is still-> Windows software and machines weren’t made for the average user, they were made to take advantage of them. If it’s hardware problems, PC’s were made cheap and likely designed to wear out and be out dated in a few months contributing the disposable society. The average computer consumer doesn’t seem to buy into the ‘you get what you pay for’ concept. If you want a long lasting computer with $2000 of hardware, what do you think it’s gonna cost? Comparing the mere hardware on my computer and it’s cost when I bought it, it was the same price to get an equal PC. Actually, when I bought this computer, it was named the most advanced computer that could run Windows XP under $1800. Yeah- if you can’t figure where this is all going yet, you are better off on your disposable PC.

I love my Mac- it’s opened a ton of doors that PC’s couldn’t approach out of the box, and not because I can’t do the same things on a PC, cause most of the time a person can, but I can do them with quite a large selection of free software that came on my computer. My Apple computer doesn’t get viruses, no built in out-of-the-box spamming software (shame on you dell, compaq and all the others), isn’t susceptible to bad/spam software being installed with out my knowledge, and everything is just plain full of good looking software, and equally attractive form factors. Click the ensuing link in the sentence to find a better Mac VS PC argument.

So.. here it is. The list of my favorite software for Mac OS X Tiger.

Mac OS X Applications: Get your Apple the hook-up.

For an Apple owner, I am still just an average user I suppose. There is so much freeware out there for Mac’s, that can do just about anything and everything, there are probably some really good lists much better than mine for you to look through. There are newer machines out, but mine isn’t outdated or disposable really. It’s faster than it was before and I know how to use it more.

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