The first all iPhone band coming soon…
Posted by johnG on 7th November , 2008Ocarina and the other virtual instruments on the iPhone will born an all iPhone band soon! You heard it here first!!
Deja Vu
Posted by johnG on 2nd November , 2008
Windows 7
I’ve been reviewing the initial features in Windows 7 via the CTP. I remember this same phenomenon in the fall of 2005 when I received my first preview of Vista. (Longhorn)
So far I like this:
Windows 7 "Play To:"
The “Play To:” will let you play media to any device on you network. Great for network enabled media play back devices — finally!
john…
Parents Computer Support
Posted by johnG on 7th October , 2008My Mother called and said “My computer keeps telling me to install “A Dopey Flasher” —Adobe Flash!!!! LOL
Testing Live Writer from Microsoft
Posted by johnG on 17th September , 2008Helloworld.com - this is a test from Windows Live writer.
“My Bad” — “You kids today”
Posted by johnG on 16th September , 2008My observation of the day is kids that say “my bad.” Most of them think this is a recent trend. Well, get educated:
Mea culpa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Mea Culpa (disambiguation).
Look up mea culpa in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Mea culpa is a Latin phrase that translates into English as “my fault”, or “my own fault”. In order to emphasize the message, the adjective “maxima” may be inserted, resulting in “mea maxima culpa,” which would translate as “my most [grievous] fault.”
Intel’s X25-M solid-state drive - outperforms todays HDD by 2X!
Posted by johnG on 8th September , 2008
Ever Seen a Gas Pump Running Windows Embedded Crash?
Posted by johnG on 7th August , 2008
This is a first for me. I’ve seen the big reader boards here in Las Vegas “blue screen,” however, I’ve never seen a gas pump crash before.
LOL,
john…
Militia 2.0
Posted by johnG on 8th May , 2008I had a thought about ten years ago. How many U.S. kids are at home playing video games, especially online video games every day, 20, 50, 75 Million? Ok, here is what we do. We build low cost, restricted drones that can navigate within a conflict theater like Afghanistan and we allocate a drone to each online participant. Then we offer $1Billion dollars to the person who achieves our US objective like finding Osama Bin Laden. How a fast do you think the gamers will achieve our objective?
Are you kidding me? What a military force that would be, eh?
Cheers,
John…
ICK
Posted by johnG on 6th May , 2008Found this on www.digg.com:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14647
Funny how I use www.twitter.com as my MAIN source of news these days instead of www.digg.com or www.slashdot.org. The Internet is “a-changing.”
Cheers as I tip my glass of Pinot Noir to you — yes you!
john…
Email from Tammy Pretto
Posted by johnG on 30th April , 2008From: Lato, Tammy [mailto:Tammy.Lato@nationalcity.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 10:21 AM
To: john@pretto.com
Subject:
Hello…
My name is Tammy Pretto…. I come to this website often trying to find out any info that I can…
A few of our family members have emailed you searching for family information… we have a wonderful family my father is Giosue Pretto and he has 12 brothers and sisters… I would love to hear from you I live in Columbia Il.. with the rest of our family….
Hope to hear from you
Tammy Pretto
“I wish I could be a fly on a wall…..”
Posted by johnG on 22nd April , 2008
4/22/2008
“Death of the Portal and social network?”
Microsoft is announcing www.mesh.com tonight at 9PM!
I have a glimpse of the future with the rapid growth of sites like:
1. Twitter.com
2. Pownce.com
3. Friendfeed.com
The features of the above sites coupled with web 2.0 technologies like “mash-ups” is creating the next generation of web existence. Mash ups allow you to aggregate multiple features of many sites onto one landing page or feed other services from one site to another. Therefore, you wouldn’t be a member of just sites like myspace, or facebook etc. You will use the best in class features from the free sites such as Flickr for photos, helloworld.com, nowlive.com or, ustream.tv for live broadcasting from the PC, Qik for broadcasting from your cell phone, wordpress for blogging, and twitter from micro blogging. You will then syndicate those services and “mash-up” or “mesh” those services into an aggregate presence.
Brief historical background:
We techies create this stuff first and then it transcends over to the main stream. First blogs were born which were nothing more than chronological stream of consciences that the techies used to document mostly their work on the web. We would write about interesting sites and tools we used to help us in our daily technical tasks. The main stream thought that it was a good idea and now you find blogs on most corporate websites detailing corporate activities.
Next was podcasting. In 2004 David Winer added “enclosures” to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that facilitated the distribution and subscription of audio and video programming. Podcasting was “word of the year” in 2005 and now there are millions of people and companies using podcasting to disseminate programming.
Next is micro blogging with links to the mash-up. This is difficult to articulate without you experiencing the value of micro blogging, but here it goes:
Traditionally we read magazines or watched television shows. We might read Wall Street Journal to read that one column or watch Saturday Night Live to see John Belushi. You are forced to watch the aggregate to get to your “fix” of that person you wanted to read or see. With microblogging communities such as twitter.com and pownce.com you join that micro blogging community and you “follow” the individual. Now every time that individual does something he micro blogs about it and his/her community follow. Sounds stupid, right? I thought so too when twitter was announced last year. When the community picks up critical mass and you follow enough of the “A listers” in your industry does the effectiveness present itself. For example, I follow the top 100 “A” list techies that I’ve been reading and watching on television for over 20 years. They are ALL on twitter now and every time they write something, do a live broadcast, make a comment on something, break – breaking news it shows up on my twitter account immediately. In the past several months I find out information on twitter much faster than you can find out about it anywhere else. This phenomenon basically put you “in the know” rapidly.
The techies have once again started a trend because we invented it and this will hit main stream quickly. Think about the applications. Just think of MSNBC’s Kramer was micro blogging and he was doing live broadcasting from his phone and you were following him. Remember the saying “I wish I could be a fly on the wall.” That is what micro blogging is all about.
Cheers,
John…
Las Vegas Indoor, COED Soccer
Posted by johnG on 13th April , 20084/10/2008
City League match
Rise and Shine vs. Red Rockets
They win 
Temporal Social Network Patent Proposal
Posted by johnG on 10th April , 2008Geez, I wrote this last year and saw a saw a blog by Michael Arrington that reminded me of it:
United States Patent Proposal
Temporal Social Network
Pretto
July 15, 2006
——————————————————————————–
Method for connecting users in an online computer system based on their physical proximity in a temporal social network.
Abstract
A method for creating a temporal social network where people enroll in the network by being in proximity to each other. A geographic defined area becomes the boundaries for these temporal social network. As members of the network are within these boundaries they may elect to become members. Once members in the network, the method herein provides online activities for the members and an active gaming environment defined by event the members are there to see such as a sporting event or activities while commuters are stuck in traffic. Relevant advertising is facilitated by the geographic proximity of the members of the temporal social network.
——————————————————————————–
Inventor:
Pretto; John G. (Las Vegas, NV)
Assignee:
Human 2.0, LLC (Las Vegas, NV)
Appl. No.:
Filed:
Ugh, the week after I installed Wordpress v. 2.3 v. 2.5 comes out!!
Posted by johnG on 5th April , 2008A week after I installed Worldpress 2.3 v. 2.5 was released with features that I wanted. I couldn’t believe there was no simple upgrade path. You basically install the new version over the top of the old. Ugh! Today I found An Automatic WordPress Upgrader PlugIn from: http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html.
1. Download the upgrader
2. Extact the files locally
3. Move the files to the server in the plugin folder
4. Enable the plug in and follow the steps.
Bravo!
That is what I call “The Easy Button.”
john…