Author: Rick Klau

Thanks to a tip from Buzz today, I checked out Anagram. Anagram is a slick little application — highlight some text, trigger Anagram, and it intelligently recognizes whether the text is a new contact, a todo, a calendar entry, or a memo. It then adds it to your PIM (currently supports Outlook and Palm Desktop).…

There’s an interesting thread going on at the [non]billable hour right now, between Matt Homann, a lawyer, and the CEO of LegalMatch, a company that used fairly aggressive tactics in pitching their services to Matt. Read Matt’s original post here, and his follow-up (excerpted below) here. The other day, I titled a post, Why I’ll…

From Phil Wolff comes this spectacular assessment of what it takes for volunteer groups to be effective in political campaigns: I’ve been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I’ve been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we’re doing that. My takeaway is what…

From today’s New York Times, an article on how the print version of the monthly Reason is using personal data on readers in coordination with satellite technology to create magazine covers that picture the neighborhoods of respective subscribers. [beSpacific] Imagine that — every subscriber is getting a magazine with a picture their neighborhood on the…

Will Cox points out a terrific new (?) news aggregation service: ResearchBuzz points to Topix.net for local news. It’s the BOMB! [Cox Crow] No kidding. It’s even got a page for Naperville, my home town. Best of all, it’s got RSS — so I can read this stuff in my aggregator. Wow.

Catching a spammer at an Internet Cafe: A sysadmin for an Internet cafe in Dublin describes in nice technical detail how he caught an alleged “419” spammer in flagrante delicto. (“419” refers to a Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud.) Evidently, a 419er is that stupid. [Peter Kaminski] Funny — with all that money these relatives of…

Just spent over an hour on a Skype call with Matt this morning. Wow. The first time around, I had several significant complaints about Skype — I was in the minority at the time, but the sound quality for me was terrible. I had several drops, a couple cases where it would go several seconds…

One of my best friends is getting married next month. As a result, he’s leaving his apartment in Chelsea and moving to Brooklyn. (My New York friends tell me this is a big deal. They’re not that far away, right?!) In any event, if you’re looking for a great “alcove studio” apartment in mid-town, you…

A couple weeks back, I wrote about my iPod’s unceremonious death. I’m a huge fan of the iPod, so I was dreading losing it. Thanks to a commenter who recommended stopping in an Apple store, I swung by the Apple store in Oak Brook, and less than 5 minutes later had a replacement iPod, free…

Just sent the grandparents on their way, and the house is quiet again: not two hours ago, we had eight very busy 2 year-olds (and a handful of younger and older siblings) helping celebrate my youngest’s second birthday. My favorite moment of the night: we open presents after people go home. Less stress for all…