Sorry for the lack of postings, work has been kicking my butt. We have an important client coming up so my energies have been pretty focused on that. But there have been a few things I’ve noticed going on around the net.

Carlos Men’steal’ia vs Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan is my new favourite person just for the utter way he destroys Carlos. At a deeper level though it’s an interesting allegory for intellectual property rights. There’s ideas and then there’s implementation. It’s one thing to take an idea and expound upon it, it’s another to steal an implementation outright. (as an aside Microsoft’s spell checker recommends “Menstrual” to replace “Men’steal’ia”).

Give Me A Friggin’ Break

Rex Dixon & Scot Duke’s new site. It’s kind of like digg but with a satirical twist. Have you ever seen something that made you go “Give me a friggin’ break!”? Well here’s your chance to share it with the world. It’s a fairly well done site that’s gone through some cosmetic changes since it’s been launched, I’d wager it’ll go through a few more, but the idea is a good one I think.

Havidol

Is something missing from your life? Feel like all your material possessions you’ve acquired isn’t enough? Do you want more then more? Perhaps Havidol is right for you. Take the self assessment and find out!

GMAiL.pl

So much for that “Do No Evil” slogan. I still think this may be the year that Google looses it’s luster. With all the bad press the time may be ripe for a new geek friendly search engine to take the throne. Remember, it was word of mouth that made Google, it can break them just as easy.

Always A Bridesmaid

Poor Mark Martin. He’s literally within seconds of winning the Daytona 500, and up comes Happy to steal it from him. He’s the eternal runner up. Nice guys don’t finish last, but they do finish second alot. I wonder if there’ll be a backlash against Harvick, regardless his late run was amazing. I’m more upset at NASCAR for not throwing the caution.

I saw this post on Rex Dixon’s site “Technically Speaking” on Infield Parking, the new social website for NASCAR fans. I’ve been a NASCAR fan for a few years now, so this intrigued me. One of the pluses that IP has going for it is that the President and Co-Founder is Little E himself Dale Earnhardt Jr. This fact will instantly give the site credibility to a large segment of the racing fan population (though admittedly there may be some who will forgo it just for this reason).

So I decided to sign up. When you first hit the site, the one thing that stands out is the slick design. It looks clean and professional. Registration was a breeze, but why do some sites insist on emailing you the password you set in clear text? I would recommend they use https for authentication and please don’t email me the password I just set up 2 minutes ago in plain text. If you’re going to show me what I typed twice in the email, why block it with asterisk when I type it in at the web site? The other thing you have to do is pick a favourite driver, some people have more then one or would rather not specify, so I don’t know how that’ll work. Then you can set up your “Infield Parking Space”, the cool thing about that is the profile pages aren’t random numbers, it’s a nice intuitive URL naming structure. For instance my profile is here: http://www.infieldparking.com/Michael_NET. Easy to remember and type.

The other strength of the site appears to be its forums. Forums are the way to build community and IP has a nice selection of them with a fairly active community. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out up to the February launch.

The NASCAR fan base (and drivers for that matter) are no longer restricted to the original south base that started the tradition. There’s plenty of tech and gadgets in NASCAR for any geek to enjoy. If you haven’t checked it out before, I suggest at least giving it a glance, it’s much more then people just turning left.