BrainFuel

I do.

This is really cool folks. You can control a puppet with your mouse and keyboard. I haven’t spent too much time exploring however what I did try was lots of fun. I’ve always thought puppets were great fun and this site lets you play with a puppet without actually having to keep the lines untangled.

Want to play Venture Capitalist for a day? Be the lender you are and spread the love. Want to fund a new business start up? And do it single handedly? Then go check out Kiva because now you can.

At least, in Africa.

The idea is that you donate $25 or more and you can help fund a company over there (really just a person) and a lot of the businesses are really simple (buying and selling goats anyone?). It’s really cool. If you visit the site check out the About Us page and take a look at the photos. I like how they made them slightly animated. Makes your typical web site photo that much more interesting.

This is going to be humorous for a few people so just bear with me here.

A developer gets a call from some designers and they are concerned about a certain few web sites going offline that some other developers had produced and host. The designers are concerned because they say the developers want more money than was agreed (saying they never saw a proposal). The designers are checking the waters with other developers in town (who they have worked with in the past) to get some feedback.

It’s clear that the original designers and developers have a disagreement and the new developer decides to research. The new developer snoops around a little bit and realizing he knows everybody involved. Deciding he doesn’t want to get in the middle of things the new developer decides to decline saying he doesn’t want to affect his relationship with the original developers.

The question is, was this the right course of action in this scenario? I think so.

Sidebar: For the folks involved don’t worry, nothing is gonna happen and if you wanna talk just let me know (I’m cool).

It was November 18, 1996, I can remember the day like it was yesterday. I had just harvested my entire crop of hot peppers. Grown with great care. I think I picked about 75 peppers.

I had one thing on my mind: to make some hot sauce.

Here was my recipe:

• 68 freshly picked peppers. Anaheim, Cubanele
• 10 tablespoons of tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon of BBQ sauce
• 6 tablespoon of honey
• 7-11 cups of Water
• Dash of salt
• Half cup of vinegar for freshness

I just copied that from a document I wrote back then. So now we know the total harvest that year was 68 peppers. Quite the bumper crop if you ask me!!

Directions: Chop the ends off the peppers and clean out the inside taking out all the seeds. Place tomato paste into blender with some peppers then add BBQ sauce and some water as needed, blend. Place some more peppers into blender with water and blend till all peppers are a nice smooth liquid. Place your hot sauce into a glass jar and put the honey in, add as much as you prefer. Stir sauce. Place in refrigerator for 3 weeks. Place in another 3 weeks then serve. Stir occasionally as needed.

Frankly at this point it only gets better.

After cutting the peppers up I threw them into the blender.

“Whiirrrrrrrr!”

Check.

“Whiirrrrrrrr!” some more.

Check again.

“Whiirrrrrrrr!” even more!

Finally the peppers are done and we have a nice pesto pace of hot pepper juice. I can’t begin to tell you how impossible it was to breathe.

GASP!!!

I couldn’t. My throat closed tight because of the fumes. I ran towards the door barely making it outside. That’s some seriously thick stuff!

In the end I think I came away with a half dozen bottles of hot sauce. I even made lables and gave a few bottles away.

Then a couple of years later I found a bottle in the back of the fridge. I thought to myself “do I dare try some?” -

Nope, I used it as ant killer in the backyard.

I just ran across Pie in the Sky yesterday and have to say that everything is perfect here. You’ve got great photography, great layout, crisp easy to read copy and on top of that the logo is slick! It was designed by a local agency.

This is a shout out to all of the people I work with in Phoenix and the surrounding areas. I keep seeing announcements for mini conferences and workshops in other cities and states that sound really cool and are all far away.

Some very talented people live in Phoenix and there’s no sense kidding ourselves. We could pull this off and make some waves.

They usually have a half dozen to a dozen topics with a few speakers that talk about such topics as blogging, design, web standards, SEO, web business, and whatever else is of interest (Ajax anyone?).

So this is a shout to my neighbors asking if anyone would be interested in organizing a mini event like that and see what happens. If you are, just email me. I couldn’t even begin to think about it until mid to late November so we’re looking in the first half of ’06 here I think.

Is there any stopping Google? Will the days of Google dominating the search market ever end? What does the future hold? I fear that Google might be getting to an overvalued place. I mean, think about it. The only way they make money in a big way is through clicks on ads. And a huge percentage of those clicks come through ads sitting on web sites just like this one.

For all of the ad campaigns we manage for our clients we don’t place ads on content networks (and believe me, content network is ‘codeword’ for blogs). I made this decision because I knew the ads would be appearing out of context (despite the best claims from the ad networks).

What happens when the general advertisers wake up to this fact and decide to change?

So do you think Google will eventually crash? Maybe slow down? They do have a tremendous product but they’re not the only players and I wonder when their heads will get too big and people will start to notice the cool things happening at Yahoo!

What do you think?

And Google is now considered to be worth more than Coca-Cola according to this article from Bloomberg.

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc. approached $100 billion in market value and analysts rushed to raise heir price estimates after the company’s results soared past the most optimistic of expectations.

Analysts at three firms including Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said the stock may climb to $450 from today’s record close of $339.90. At that price, Google would have a value more than double that of Yahoo! Inc. and vault into the top 20 largest U.S. companies, worth more than Coca-Cola Co. and Wells Fargo & Co.

Then theres this series of blog posts outlining how far ahead Google really is.