slamboard

George Hotz, if that is his real name, headed up a team of hackers that figured out how to unlock an iPhone and operate it using a regular T Mobile sim card.

The hack is supposedly easy to replicate and the directions are being given out freely. What has George gained from the 500 hours of work that he and others put into this?

He made a recent blog post announcing that he is trading the original unlocked iPhone for a Nissan 350z automobile and 3 iPhones. The founder of a wireless aftermarket company is getting the iPhone.

As far as I am Cosmetic Surgery Advice is only valuable if it comes from an experienced professional. Obviously there is some point in listening to people who have experienced cosmetic surgery themselves, but they will inevitably be very emotional about it. Here is a link to a video interview of three women who have had breast augmentation.

The free cosmetic surgery advice that you can get from the expert surgeons at MYA.co.uk appears to be responsible and well informed. As with any major decision that you make about your health and your body, you should seek information and advice from a variety of sources.

I spent many, many hours in airports this week. It wasn’t going to be cost effective for me to blog during that time. In the area where I spent the most time, there were terminals that provided you with the internet for the surprising cost of £1 for ten minutes.

I paid this sum only 3 times during my time in Luton. I spent a few hours examining how the browser was set up on these computer terminals. I discovered that there is a link on the browser that takes you to ‘free’ content. Some of the categorized links are clearly paid advertising for loan companies, casinos, you know, the good stuff. With most of these, the free part ends at the landing page, links are either changed to revert to the page itself or to trigger a request that you pay. I also noticed that some of these sites looked dated and made claims of being the best such and such of 2000 or 2001. Spectrum Interactive began installing these desks in 2001.

There are also some big sites like Ebay and Amazon included in the free content on these machines. The marketing ploy here is to get bored people to pay to surf. The bulk of the business that these terminals get is from people who are using them to make and receive quick messages.

If a bored person sees that they can look at Amazon for free, they might be disappointed to find out that they have to pay to go beyond the landing page. They might also pay.

I found out to my surprise that while the message pops up asking me to pay for internet time, the page behind the message was actually loading. I spent part of my boring day at the airport reading reviews on Amazon.

One thing I liked about the airport internet service browser was that I could go through the whole sign-in process for gmail before being asked to pay. This saves you less than a minute, but when the minutes are this expensive, it feels like a gift.

George W. Bush was at a meeting of government leaders in Halifax, Nova Scotia a few years ago. At that time I was working for a cooperative business that held Social Justice as one of its business goals. The management consented to have employees and a company vehicle travel to the approved protest area in the city and serve free fair trade coffee and hot chocolate to the demonstrators. I fully approved of this action, but I chose not to participate.

Right now, George W. Bush is sitting down with the leaders of Canada and Mexico at a luxury hotel in Quebec. Canadian government is presently more right wing than it has been in decades and protesters are pointing to the secrecy of these meetings as undemocratic. Most of the demonstrators want a peaceful protest. There are anarchists there though and I worry about people getting hurt.

Story…

When I was in college, my required humanities course included some study of the works of Henry David Thoreau. While researching his life, I found out that he paid to have his first book published. He had 1,000 printed and four years later he found himself the not so proud owner of 706 copies. He is rumored to have carried them home on his back.

An optimist would say that he sold 294 books and that some of those readers may have ended up as longtime readers and benefactors. I would like to point out there weren’t that many potential readers back then compared to today. I often here about authors being too cautious with their first printing and actually selling exponentially more copies than they had anticipated. The book Skinny Bitch that I blogged about earlier was one of these. this might be the only post in the blogosphere that mentions Henry David Thoreau and Kim Barnouin in the same sentence.

Self Publishing is a great option for an author that wants to establish themselves and it has become an easier process as a result of the internet. I don’t think Thoreau would have been the same person had he been possessed of broadband. AuthorHouse.com is a full service site for self published authors. It includes great features like a personal Author Center that you can use to track publishing progress and then sales.

Read my Kimkins.com series here and see all the Kimkins-related Slamboard posts here.

Thanks to Kimkins Dangers, we may have some new insight into the truth about Kimmer aka Heidi Diaz. One of their readers found this PlentyOfFish.com profile of “Kimmer2″. PlentyOfFish is a popular free dating site started around 2003. This profile lists Kimmer’s son’s age as 16, which would date it about two years ago.

Could this profile be a hoax? At first, I seriously considered the possibility that the profile was faked. But here’s why I don’t think that’s the case: the uncropped photos on this profile, which appear to be of Heidi and her son Brandon (who is now about 18 years old) have not to my knowledge been seen anywhere else online.

Take a look at the picture with the marina in the background. Heidi send this exact uncropped picture to Catherine to crop and use as her before picture for Kimkins.com. Catherine has never released the uncropped photo to anyone else. Neither of us had seen the uncropped seated photo until now.

If Heidi did indeed create this dating profile herself, it seems quite likely that she is now an older, perhaps heavier version of the woman in the blue sweater. After all, why not post the red dress photo if that is what she looks like now?

Also, the profile says Kimmer is a former foster mom. If Heidi did not really have foster children when she accepted money fundraised in their name (summer of 2006) then she could perhaps find herself facing criminal liability for fraud.

Things are only going to get more interesting.

The best thing about broadband phone service from Comcast is that you get a ton of features.

Every package includes unlimited local and direct-dialed long distance calling. I have a service that includes this feature and it saves me a lot of stress when my teenage kids are talking on the phone for hours.

Call waiting is a feature that come in pretty handy as well. We occasionally use three-way calling for business reasons. We are in a very different timezone from most of our extended family, so voice mail saves us a lot of missed calls.

All the other features like speed dialing, auto redial, call return, standard and selective call forwarding, caller ID, call waiting ID, incoming call block, anonymous call rejection and caller ID blocking are nice to have just in case you need them. I don’t have caller ID with the service that I am presently using. That is frustrating sometimes. We run a small business out of our home and even though we live where we work, we don’t want to give any clients the impression that we offer 24/7 support. It’s bad enough that we work 18 hours a day sometimes. I should work on a script for a voice mail message that is polite and business like. It would be much better than answering the phone when I am half asleep and mad at the caller even though I don’t know who it is.

Something else that is great for Comcast customers is the savings that can be had by bundling telephone service in with other services that Comcast offers.

Ronald Reagan is a Navy ship that is based in California. It is longer than the Empire State Building is high and has as many as 5,500 souls on board. One of these souls posted a video shot from the deck of this nuclear powered vessel.

That sailor is in a bit of trouble. Officially, the trouble is called counseling.

The Captain was summoned to the Pentagon.

The video was removed from YouTube.

What is interesting about this story is that the video was well within societal norms for every imaginable measure of good taste and propriety. The fact that its musical score is Shania Twain doesn’t impress me much, but musical taste isn’t an issue. The reason that it is a big deal is because the doors of the nuclear power plant are in some frames.

“If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you are coming because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
–Australian aboriginal woman

This quote has been republished in many different places. I thought it was a pretty interesting viewpoint. I discovered a business model yesterday that captured my imagination. It was a niche travel services company that served the unique needs of missionaries. It was specifically for Christian missionaries. I can imagine that other companies exist that work primarily with secular charities and possibly missionaries from other religions.

I guess the primary difference in focus with these travel agencies is that they take people into regions of the World with no functional tourism industry. There are lots of areas with an overlap, in that a thriving tourist and hospitality trade can exist in shockingly close proximity to poverty.

The GotTrouble.com directory is a unique directory for legal services and other services like traffic schools and rehab. What makes it a great service and a great marketing model is that it is categorized by personal problems. There aren’t very many of us who go window shopping for lawyers because it is such a nice day and we just love looking at lawyers. We start a search for a legal service because we have a compelling problem.

On the lighter side, they are sponsoring a Sing Your Troubles Away Video Contest and the available prize money is a heart warming $5,000. I have embarrassed myself on YouTube for much less than $5,000.

Amy Winehouse is famous for a tongue in cheek song about Rehab. I hear she is in Rehab now. If that is how writing these problem songs works, I’m going to minimize my risk and choose a problem that I can handle better…

How about White Collar Crime? I have not actually committed one of these, but I read about them a lot. It seems like the tide has really turned in the way that judges view this problem.

Here’s a few lines that I have managed to think up on the fly…

“They say I did the crime,
So I should do the time,
But I’ve seen that State facility,
It has a horrible back nine.

I’ve got the blues,
I’ve got the white collar crime blues,
If I had used a shredder,
Things would’ve been much better,
I’ve got the blues.”

I may enter GotTrouble.com’s Video Promotion, but don’t worry too much about me as far as competition, I have a horrible singing voice. I wish you the best of luck, should you decide to enter this contest.