Its interesting to compare the styles between systems: some are refined and detailed, others are just lines.

See how many transit agencies you can name just from these map sections.

I was excited when I read about the Walmart data plan, a new $30/month, no-contract, unlimited (5GB) plan back in October 2010. When announced, it was initially only going to be available at Walmart stored. Visiting a Walmart isn’t very convenient for me living in San Francisco but would be worth the one-time trek for the potential savings. The new $30/month plan buys:

• 100 minutes
• Unlimited SMS messages
• Unlimited Data (capped at 5GB on 4G and then throttled down to edge)

I had been using a 2 year T-mobile contract with 500 minutes, unlimited SMS and “unlimited” data – and for this I paid a bit more than $90/month after taxes and fees. It turns out I used very few voice minutes, about 250/month on average. Data and SMS is what I used most, but I had to get the contract with 500 voice minutes to get the unlimited data.

It turns out the new $30/month plan is available via Walmart.com and t-mobile.com – so trekking to the Oakland Airport (nearest Walmart to SF) to talk to a Walmart representative isn’t required. Both websites offer a variety of “Monthly 4G” plans. Look closely – hidden in the middle is the ideal one. $30/month with only 100 minutes but all-you-can-eat SMS and up to 5G per month in data – all other monthly plans under $70 cap 4G usage at 30MB, 100MB or 2GB – quite a bit less.

Around the same time, Google released the Nexus Galaxy – the next phone in its line of “pure” Android devices. It is the first Android phone to run version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) – many phones will never see this upgrade. ICS has many new features and is widely regarded as a significant upgrade from Gingerbread and Honeycomb. The phone has been released in CDMA form for Verizon, but it hasn’t been released in GSM (T-mobile compatible) form in the US. It might never be.

Expansys sells imported GSM Galaxy Nexus that works perfectly with T-mobile (and AT&T – but why would you use them?) that you can buy at the unsubsidized price of $660 (use coupon 40offgnx for $40 off the full price). NewEgg also has the Galaxy Nexus.

Combining both the hidden T-mobile plan and the Nexus Galaxy gives you the best Android phone and cheapest US data plan – a great combo.

The catch is – how to you actually get the $30 plan onto your new Galaxy Nexus? You need a T-mobile Sim card which you have to physically get. If you go to Walmart, they don’t sell the Galaxy Nexus. If you want to get the hidden data plan they will require you to buy their cheapest phone (about $15) to get the Sim card from it. You can then dispose of the dumb phone and use the sim card in your smart phone.

If you go to a T-mobile store they don’t have the $30 plan either (nor do they have the Nexus Galaxy). The hidden data plan is officially only available on t-mobile.com. However, at the San Francisco Mission T-mobile store, one sales rep was very accommodating and was actually able to provide me a Sim card and activate the hidden $30 plan on the spot. I got the impression that this wasn’t something they promote, but it is technically possible for them to do. You should walk in and ask for the plan by name ($30 plan, 100 minutes, unlimited data). The sales rep knew exactly what I was looking for as this plan stands out as by far the best deal.

If you don’t have a T-mobile Store or Walmart nearby, you can get the Sim card starter kit from t-mobile.com for $9.99.

tl;dr Get the Galaxy Nexus GSM and a hidden T-mobile data plan and have 5GB of 4G data per month for $30.

I’ve moved my blog and other contents to http://blog.bn.ee so that http://bn.ee can be used as a URL shortener. If you’d like to create your own really short URL and you somehow think I’m more reliable than bit.ly or is.gd visit http://bn.ee/url. Its powered by yourls.com and there is even a browser bookmarklet for creating bn.ee links on the fly.

• 7-zip – This program will handle nearly any type of compressed file. Its pretty solid and supports drag and drop. – Replaces WinZip & WinRar
• Daemon Tools – Daemon tools is a CD emulator, needed if you want to mount CD or DVD images. This download is freeware, but it comes bundled with a spywareish toolbar which can be deselected from the install. – Replaces Alcohol 120%
• Filezilla – This is a great FTP program. It keeps getting better with every new release. – Replaces lots of less fun FTP applications
• PuTTY – a telnet/ssh client
• Songbird – With an interface like itunes, but a whole host of useful add-ons, songbird is my new choice for when I want to listen to music. It supports syncing with ipods as well (but not iphones yet)Replaces Windows Media Player, itunes
• VLC – VLC will play the media files that windows media player won’t touch. Its also very lightweight, although the interface is not as smooth. – Replaces Windows Media Player
• Keepass Password Safe – Got lots of passwords? Keepass will help you store them securely and also can generate pretty tricky passwords & help you sort them. – Replaces random text files or spreadsheets.
• Firefox – This is the web browser of choice. Add extensions to enable firefox to do all sorts of things. Recently, I started using chrome, another open source browser started by google – Replaces Internet Explorer
• PDFCreator – Make a pdf from printing any document – Replaces Adobe Acrobat
• TightVNC – Remotely control a computer
• uTorrent – a very lightweight and solid BitTorrent client
• InfraRecorder – Open source CD & DVD burning – Replaces Nero & Roxio
• Notepad++ – Text editor with everything you need – Replaces notepad
• Open Office – This is a full featured replacement for MS Office. There is little difference between the two except the price tag. – Replaces MS Office
• Multiple IEs – As a web developer, I need to test my sites in multiple and outdated browsers. Multiple IEs lets me have internet explorer 6 & 7 installed simultaneously. (Note, I use IE for testing purposes only)
• NetMeter – I used to use dumeter
• Twhirl – Twhirl is a great twitter client built on adobe air. It has support for friendfeed and other services as well.
• mint.com – I now use mint.com, a free online web application to track my personal finances – Replaces Quicken or MS Money
• Dropbox – Dropbox is a free web app with a cross platform desktop client for quickly sharing files between computers and other users. Instead of emailing files, using FTP or trying to network, dropbox has a streamlined interface that makes sharing or storing files online simple.
• uTorrent – uTorrent is my torrent program of choice

Commercial Software I still use:

• Adobe CS3 Suite – This is pretty key for a web developer. I use photoshop, illustrator & occasionally indesign.
• Quickbooks – This is the industry standard for small business accounting. I track our expenses and account balances with Quickbooks. I use the online web application Freshbooks for accounts receivable (That was a referral link). I would love to be able to replace Quickbooks with an online application, and it seems like Freshbooks might move this direction.

Thats pretty much everything on my computer at the moment. I only use google chat through my web browser, and I guess I don’t have any games.

Brendan Nee observed some children at a Hong Kong airport enjoying one of my favorite passtimes – dancing on a projected DOS prompt!

View the post on The Daily WTF

The DOS prompt reads: “Error on Web Fetching: Could not connect to remote server” over and over on the DOS prompt. Also, I misreported that it was in the Kong Airport, a closer inspection of my image library indicates that it was actually in a subway station near the Kowloon train station.

One option is to install the gmail notifier program. I opted instead for a quick change to the Windows filetype settings.

Note that following these instructions will cause all mailto links to open in Google Chrome, even if you are browsing in Firefox, Safari or (gasp) Internet Explorer so make sure you want to use google Chrome as your primary browser before continuing. In Firefox, you can go to Tools->Options->Applications and configure “mailto” to set Firefox to use gmail for mailto links and not the system default (thanks to Eric for the tip).

WIndows XP

In any windows explorer window (except desktop):

• Go to Tools > Folder Options > File Types
• Near the top of the list of filetypes, click on “URL:Mailto Protocol”
• Click on “Advanced”
• With “open” highlighted, click on “Edit”
• Change the application to:

  "C:\Pathto\chrome.exe" https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

This should all be on one line with a space between the quotation mark after the path info and the https. My path was “C:\Documents and Settings\Brendan\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” To find yours, just right click on a google Chrome shortcut (like the one in your start menu), go to “properties” and copy the “Target” field.

Windows Vista

Thanks to Ed H. in the comments below for these instructions

• Open your registry editor (Type “regedit” at your start menu)
• Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command
• Edit the (Default) command from whatever it is (right click and select modify) to:

  "C:\Pathto\chrome.exe" https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

In Vista, your path will be something like “C:\Users\Brendan\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe ” with “Brendan” being your username.

Ubuntu

How-To Geek has great instructions on how to accomplish this in ubuntu.

Open with Google Apps

Another tip from Ed H. in the comments:

If you have “Google Apps for your Domain” (i.e. you’re having Google host your domain’s email,) you can customize it for your domain by changing the URL above so that instead of “mail.google.com/mail?…” it reads “mail.google.com/a/yourdomainhere.com?…” (obviously, use the rest of the URL mentioned above after the question mark; and use your domain instead of “yourdomainhere.com”.)

After trying both, I give the gold medal to Orange Chicken with Beijing Beef taking the silver and the Kung Pao chicken not even making it to the final round.

On a related note, a representative from Boingo wifi promptly commented on my last post and stated that they were looking into the firefox compatibility issue. I was impressed by their prompt response (someone at Boingo must monitor Twitter or google) but still surprised that this was the first they had heard of the issue.

On my return trip through Houston I didn’t check into whether or not the issue was resolved, I discovered the free wifi available from the Continental Presidents club you can use if you sit at the Gloria Jeans Coffee between E11 and E12.

I decided to take a last minute trip to Belize with Lisa to meet up with Jed who has been traveling around Mexico for the last few weeks. Lisa found a $360 ticket at 8 PM leaving at 12:30 AM so we packed, hit up a Taqueria for a goodbye burrito and beer and BARTed to SFO.

I had some last minute work I had to get done this morning, and a 3 hour layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. I haven’t jailbroken my old-school iphone since I upgraded the firmware, so I didn’t have a good way to tether it to my laptop, nor did I have an SSH application on my phone, so I had to buy the $7.95 airport wifi provided by Boingo.

I opened up firefox and after sitting through a flash intro on the boingo website, I entered my credit card info. After a confirmation screen, I was presented with the data I had entered and asked to download the GoBoingo Utility, an application that could run on my PC and notify me whenever I am within range of a Boingo hotspot. Clicking “Download and Install” was the only way to continue purchasing internet access.

Only after beginning the download was the page redirected to the page announcing that my credit card info was incorrect. I retyped my info and even tried a different credit card with no success. Noticing how quirky the website was, I decided to open Internet Explorer just to see if perhaps this form couldn’t be completed in Firefox.

After downloading the GoBoingo toolbar for the 6th time (this time in IE) I was given a page showing that my credit card details had worked.

Not only did they make me download unwanted software (note: you just had to download the .exe file, it is up to you to install it) but I had to use IE. What if I was using a mac? Would I have been locked out of wifi at George Bush Intercontinental?

I was able to complete the necessary work before getting on my plane to Belize. If you ever run across a boingo hotspot, make sure you are using IE.

$pages = get_pages(‘child_of’ => [[THE PARENT ID]], ’sort_order’ => ‘ASC’);
foreach ($pages as $page) {
  // Do your thang
}

This seems much better than what I had previously used, but for reference, my old post is below:

I spent some time figuring out how to get the wordpress wp_list_pages function to return the results as a PHP array of URLs and page names. There wasn’t an obvious way to do this and searching google did not yield anything particularly useful. The wp_list_pages function has an “echo” parameter which when set to 0 returns a list of links as a string. That won’t help much if you want it as an array with links and page names.

I ended up writing a short script that will query wordpress for the name and URL of all of the subpages of a specified page. This could be used to make a function that formatted a list of pages a particular way (like making the list wrap into two or more columns). Its nothing fancy, but perhaps it can help other wordpressers who are looking for something similar.

<?php
$querystr = “SELECT $wpdb->posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = ‘publish’ AND $wpdb->posts.post_type = ‘page’ AND $wpdb->posts.post_parent = [[Parent Page ID]] ORDER BY $wpdb->posts.post_title ASC”;

$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);

if ($pageposts):
foreach ($pageposts as $post):
setup_postdata($post);
// Add your own logic or formatting here
?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endforeach;
else :
echo ‘Not Found’;
endif;
?>

Where [[Parent Page ID]] is the id number of the parent page you would like to get children from. If you want all pages included, don’t include this parameter.

I use buxfer to keep track of expenses among friends, it had really streamlined paying for trips and meals and cut down on the confusion. I use it almost daily.

Recently, I attempted to add a new group to share expenses among friends but I kept getting a popup that said I had encountered a bug with a form to submit a report. As I was in a hurry, I didn’t submit a report but almost instantly I got an email from Buxfer:

Hi Brendan,

We are having some difficulties with the group creation
functionality. It will be resolved by the end of the day
today. Please be patient until then.

Thanks so much!

That is the kind of support and customer service more web apps should have. I didn’t even submit a bug report.

I found a variety of solutions to backing up files using S3, but none that exactly met my needs, so I decided to post my work here.

Note that these instructions assume your web server is Unix, Linux or Mac OS X based. It also assumes you have a basic understanding of FTP, SSH, firefox extensions and compressed files.

1. Get the s3-bash code library

The s3 BASH library is a collection of scripts that can get, put or delete files from Amazon s3. You can grab them from Google Code.

2. Unpack and upload these scripts to your server.
They should probably live outside of your webroot. Depending on how your server is set up you might put them in:

/home/USER/s3

Where USER is your username.

3. Give s3-put the proper permissions
We need to be able to execute s3-put so chmod it to 744.

chmod 744 /home/USER/s3/s3-put

4. Sign up for an Amazon S3 Account
You’ll need an Amazon S3 account, so sign up and then get your access key ID and secret access key on the AWS access identifiers page.

5. Put your secret access key in a text file and upload it to the server
You could call it s3.key and put it in the same folder you uploaded the s3-bash scripts to. Chmod it to 640.

chmod 640 /home/USER/s3/s3.key

6. Create a folder for the backups
Make a folder on your webserver for backups, perhaps:

/home/USER/backups

Where USER is your username.

7. Create a bucket on Amazon S3 for your backups
The easiest way I found to do this is to use the firefox extension S3 Firefox Organizer. Add the extension, restart firefox and then in Firefox go to “Tools” > “S3 Organizer”. Click “Manage Accounts” and enter your access key ID and secret access key and then login. Create a bucket (directory) for your backups. I created a one called bnee.

8. Write the backup script
This is the tricky part. Here is the script I came up with. The [[Double Bracketed]] items are places where you’ll have to enter information specific to your account (see below).

#!/bin/bash
USER=[[USER]]
mysqldump –add-drop-table -u [[DBUSER]] -p[[DBPASSWORD]] -A >/home/$USER/backups/mysql.sql
rm /home/$USER/backups/backup.tgz
tar -czvf /home/$USER/backups/backup.tgz [[PATHTOWEBROOT]] /home/$USER/backups/mysql.sql
NOW=$(date +_%b_%d_%y)
/home/$USER/s3/s3-put -k [[S3ACCESSKEYID]] -s /home/$USER/s3/s3.key -T /home/$USER/backups/backup.tgz -v /[[S3BUCKET]]/backup$NOW.tgz

[[USER]] – Because the username of my web server is used a lot in the paths, this is a variable
[[DBUSER]] – The username of the mysql database. You can get this from the wp-config.php file of your wordpress installation.
[[DBPASSWORD]] – The password for your mysql database. You can get this from the wp-config.php file of your wordpress installation.
[[PATHTOWEBROOT]] – The path to the webroot. Its likely something like /home/USER/public_html
[[S3ACCESSKEYID]] – The access key ID for Amazon S3 (see step 3).
[[S3BUCKET]] – The name of the bucket (directory) you created in step 6.

You might have to change the various paths depending on the way your web server is set up and the folder names you chose in previous steps.

Paste all of this into a text file and name it something like backup.sh. Upload it to your web server, outside of the webroot.

/home/USER/backup.sh

9. Test the script
Verify that the script is working by running it.

sh /home/USER/backup.sh

If everything is working ok, you’ll see a lot of output as each file of your website is added to the compressed backup and then uploaded to Amazon S3. It may take a minute or so to run, but when it is done you can verify that the script worked by using the S3 Firefox plugin to check that the file ended up where you expected it to.

10. Automate it
Add a cron job to run it every night

0 0 * * * sh /home/USER/backup.sh

If everything is configured correctly, this should perform a full backup nightly at midnight.

Note for subversion users: if you’d like to exclude all of the .svn folders and files from your backup, just use

--exclude=".svn"

before the [[PATHTOWEBROOT]] in step 8 above.

I chose to pay £5.00, which gives Radiohead much more income on that album than if it was sold via a record label in stores, and it gives me direct non-DRM access to the mp3s I want. What I don’t want is a physical CD. I probably wouldn’t pay £5.00 for most albums, but since Radiohead is pioneering a different model I thought I would give them some financial encouragement.

The last mainstream album I purchased was Blue Man Group which I bought after seeing them perform on a high school band trip. I purchased the disc used on half.com, so maybe that doesn’t even count as a real record sale. More recently I bought all of the albums in compact disc form from the New Orleans Bingo! Show off of the Louisiana Music Factory Website. (If Clint or any of the Bingo Show members read this, I love your music and would really love to be able to download it from y’all directly using the Radiohead model, and if anyone from the Lousiana Music Factory reads this, I like lots of your musical offerings but your website really needs some user interface work and search engine optimization).

Update: In writing this post, I realized that the first New Orleans Bingo! Show CD, Bingo!, is now available to order so I ordered it for $12.99 plus $5 shipping. I’m curious what percentage the band receives from that sale.

Buxfer recently added the ability to track your shared payments by account and to import transactions from a very limited set of banks. This expands buxfer from just a shared payment application to a personal finance tracking application. This space is filling rapidly. Mint.com recently won the techcrunch 40 competing against 39 other tech startups. Wesabe and Geezeo are similar applications, although mint.com has the cleanest interface.

I’ve used quicken to track my finances since starting college (and have the graph showing the inverse relationship between net worth and education to prove it). I am still using it but I’m ready to jump ship once there is a viable online application that can download info for all of my accounts and track stocks & loans. Right now, mint and wesabe do not provide the loan & stock tracking I’d like but most importantly, neither integrates properly with my checking account at Mechanics Bank.

The last thing I want is what they currently offer on the front page of their site: a box of software. I can’t remotely manage my finances using quicken nor can I use any computer except for the one on which it is installed. I also get the responsibility of dealing with backups and updates.

It seems to me that if Intuit wanted to stay relevant, they would either create a competitor to these finance startups or acquire one. They certainly have the widespread brand recognition to attract non-early-adopter users to the service and also already have established relationships with most financial institutions in terms of syncing transactions. Given the state of quickbooks online which requires Windows AND Internet Explorer, I’d imagine that an aquisition might be the more effective route.

Geezeo added the ability to track investments and loans this week, so I’ll have to check that out. I love the concept behind buxfer and it would be great to be able to use one application to track my personal finances and shared expenses. They have a ways to go until they’ve got something to compete with mint, but at the rate they have been adding features it may not be long.

Its only a matter of time until I can reduce the commercial software count on my computer.

Surrounding cities, like Onalaska, WI don’t have their own facebook network, so people living in these cities are no doubt in the La Crosse network. Regardless, this means that 10% of the population of Metro La Crosse is on facebook.

La Crosse is not extemely tech savvy, but 10% is much higher than the New Orleans, LA facebook score. With 42,789 facebook users in the New Orleans network out of an estimated 1.2 million metro New Orleans population, New Orleans facebook score is a 3.8%.

San Francisco (city, not metro area) scores 15.4% (114,792 users of 744,041 population) and New York is 5.1% facebooked (425,963 users with 8,214,426 population).

It would be an interesting mashup to take facebook network membership numbers, us census data and put them on google maps.

For reference, heres a google map of the same area.

Paid to craigslist 2007-09-27 — paymentID

real estate for sale Total to be charged 0.00

Is craigslist setting up the infrastructure to charge fees for brokered real estate listings like they have in New York? That would be interesting.

Update 9/29 - I’ve also gotten this response from posting rental listings.

I’d like to be able to show my facebook photos on my blog and have my facebook status posted to twitter. I also use dodgeball a fair amount to let people know where I am at. I’m not sure this would be useful to post anywhere else, but it would be cool if I could do so. Overall, it looks like more things are getting integrated, which is a good thing. Techcunch is suggesting that google will help facilitate this integration by opening up a lot of their services via API starting Nov 5. I think that will be interesting.

Myspace is difficult to navigate, full of irrelevant ads and lacks most of the features of facebook. It won’t be something I miss.

Now we’re both pictured on the freshbooks blog. Preston and I ended up taking Mike & Sunir out to Zeitgeist, one of my favorite San Francisco bars, which is just down the street from Espetus, my new favorite San Francisco Brazilian steakhouse.

1. Tab Mix Plus: Allows you to control how you browse by opening tabs for events you specify. This gives you full control over what happens when you browse, and when new windows get opened, recycled, or new tabs get opened.
2. IE View: This adds an item to your right click menu that opens the current page in Internet Explorer. Some poorly designed pages require the use of internet explorer, and as a web developer I am constantly checking my pages in both browsers.
3. del.icio.us extension: If you use del.icio.us to keep track of sites & bookmarks, you can replace your firefox bookmarks completely with this extension. Its also a great way to keep bookmarks synced between computers if you have more than one. It gives you the option of displaying del.icio.us bookmarks in a toolbar.
4. Web Developer Extension: If you don’t do web design, you don’t need this. However, if you do, you need this more than you can imagine. My favorite feature is the “edit CSS” which allows you to play with a page’s CSS in real time to see the changes. Other useful features are outlining block level elements, and turning off images.
5. DOM Inspector: This goes great with the web developer toolbar for anyone dealing with web design. It allows you to examine any element on a website and see what its parents are and all of its properties
6. Google Toolbar: This allows Easy searching of google news, froogle, google, images, and groups. It also has a very useful spell checker for web forms and displays search terms at the top of the page. You can click on them to jump to the point in the page where the term appears, which is useful for wordy pages.
7. BugMeNot: When you get to a site that requires free registration, you can right click on the login field and select bugmenot. This anonymously logs you in saving time and privacy.
8. Adsense Notifier: If you use google adsense to monetize your website, this statusbar extension will show you how much money you made today and the number of views and clicks.
9. FireGPG: This extension provides an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG. This allows you to send emails securely.

Having the iPhone has made this trip much more tolerable. During the trip, both facebook and netvibes launched iPhone versions of their sites, both of which are great. Hopefully yelp and others do this soon.

I’m en route to Chicago from San Francisco (well, really Emeryville) to visit my brother. I’ve got my iphone which I hacked last night to allow my laptop to use the Internet via ad hoc wireless. I’ve got 3 full batteries, so we’ll see how long I can keep the trainblog going.

Hour 1: Left Emeryville. I could see the skyline, Berkeley marina, Carquinez straight and San Pablo bay. The ATM at the station qas broken so I had to rush out and find a gas station so I could eat for the next 55 hrs. We’ll see how on time this train thing is.

I always knew that someone in my family had records going back pretty far, but geni provides a number of advantages:

Its efficient
Everyone who is invited (requires them to be alive and have the internet) can view the same tree. This means that when I make a change or upload a picture, everyone in my family (339 people) can now see and use that picture. Thats a lot more efficient than doing this on paper or even using a standalone genealogy application on my computer. At one point, I was adding people and families to a more distant branch and someone else logged in and corrected some of the tree which I had made mistakes on (sometimes divorces get confusing, especially if you have never met anyone involved).

Its easy to use
Because the people who know the most about family history tend to be the oldest, its key that any type of application like this be ridiculously easy to use. Geni is very easy to use and moreover its pretty obvious what to do within a few seconds of logging in. Its flash interface quickly allows users to add members to the tree using fairly obvious arrows.

Its viral (sort of)
Not only will you find out more about your direct ancestors, your tree spreads out laterally as distant family members log in and add their family and inlaws. In my case, the tree can only go so far back (there are no records beyond a certain point, and everyone is dead). But there is not really a limit to how broad the tree can get as my second cousins add their spouses family or my great aunt adds her branch of the tree. Already I’ve found relatives on both my mom and dads side who live in the bay area.

You don’t have to do that much work.
All in all, I spent less than a few hours on the site and I have a huge family tree including pictures and facts which would have taken me weeks of research to add myself if I was doing it in a non-social networking way.

Social networking
A relative of mine I’ve never met messaged me and called geni “facebook gone legit”. Its certainly not a facebook competitor but I am now connected to lots of people I’d never find on facebook. Geni has features that allow you to view a map of living (or dead) family members & inlaws to visualize your family geographically and it also makes a list of birthdays and anniversaries. Also, I was able to look up names of distant relatives who are on my generation of the tree and I found four people on facebook. Maybe at some point I will meet them. Geni would be a great tool to plan family reunions.

Learn what a second cousin twice removed is
Even with some relatives I’ve met I had no idea how they were related to me. Geni provides a very visual way to figure this out and when you view someone profile it tells you exactly how you are related.

I look forward to seeing what other features geni adds and hopefully watching my family tree grow.

1. istockphoto.com: A great source for really cheap stock photography. They have a huge selection of high resolution images sold for $1-$3. I’ve found this useful for all sorts of projects. Its an easy way to make your project or presentation look very professional.
2. addall.com: When purchasing a book online, you need to start here. It is a very comprehensive comparison engine that will find the best deal. It factors in shipping and can even search used books on half.com and amazon.com.
3. auctionsniper.com: Bid at the last second on your ebay auction and win. This allows you to specify a bid and have it placed with only a few Aseconds left of an ebay auction, leaving your competitors with no time to respond. Sniping is only effective because most ebay users do not fully understand how the ebay auction system works and thus underbid assuming they will have time to rebid should someone outbid them. Use ‘bikeperson’ as your reference when signing up and we both get free credits.
4. biddingfortravel.com: People who have recently bid and won hotels on priceline.com post their results on this forum. You can use this to pinpoint exactly what to bid and sometimes predict what hotel you will get. This site is essential for getting crazy deals on four star hotels.
5. housingmaps.com: a mash up between craigslist.com housing listings and google maps. This is very useful if you are looking for a place to live in a very specific neighborhood.

1. Google Documents – This is a google product which can replace Microsoft Word and Excel. It is perfect for storing notes and abstracts and allows two or more parties to edit at the same time. Also, it allows me to easily share some of my notes easily with other researchers as needed. Google documents currently does not support most advanced foramtting that word does, but it is great as far as collaborating on content. As far as spreadsheets, you can’t write macros or use some of the most advanced features that Excel offers, but you can easily edit and share basic spreadsheets with anyone. There is a bit of a lag when using it as it recalculates cells, but we have found it highly usable and much better than emailing spreadsheet versions back and forth.
2. Gliffy – This is a non-Google product which replaces Microsoft Visio. I’ve used it to collaborate on a few flow charts to explain the funding streams and the decision making processes. Gliffy won’t allow two people to edit the same page simultaneously, but it does have an interesting feature which allows you to post an image of your chart on a website which will be automatically updated each time the chart is updated.
3. Google Calendar – Google calendar is great for sharing a calendar and allowing multiple people to both update and access it from anywhere. I guess this replaces Microsoft Outlook’s calendar feature. Its also a good way to easily add a calendar to a website with an easy to update backend.
4. RememberTheMilk.com – This is a great way to share and collaborate on a to-do list. It has a great ajax interface and is very easy to use. They’ve implemented numerous ways to keep it updated too, including offline with google gears and via sms through twitter.
5. del.icio.us – I use this service for saving and tagging links, and sharing them with others. Every time I find something I think I might need later I tag it. Check out the del.icio.us firefox extension to make it even more useful.