"The first honest-to-goodness full color computer you can buy for only $299.95" - William Shatner

Here's the man himself, with a circa-1980 ad for a Commodore Vic-20. We had one of these when I was a kid, and I recognize that biorhythms program they're showing on the screen.

TellMe is a free service over your telephone that lets you get information by using your voice. You can get movie listings, stock quotes, ski reports, news, and weather, or make a free 2 minute long distance call. TellMe is using Nuance's speech recognition.

They've added a cool new feature, called TellMe Extensions, which allows anyone to put up their own voice application using VoiceXML. VoiceXML is easy to learn...it's a bit like HTML, and there is plenty of information available on the TellMe website. Once it's there, anyone in the US can check it out, free.

To try out a little application I just put up, call TellMe at 1-800-555-TELL and, at the TellMe Main Menu, type in 1-37780. Then you get to hear my lovely voice.

If anyone reading this puts up their own application, let me know and I'll give out the extension here.

An old link, but one of my favorites: Mr. T versus the Matrix.

So I'm at Fry's the other day (the evil Bay Area electronics store) and there is a sign that says: "Santa's wants your family to buy one of these DVD players!" Okay, besides the egregious apostrophe error...I don't even understand what they're trying to say. Huh? Is there more than one Santa?

When I was in college, I decided to test the honesty of our US Postal System. I taped a dollar bill to a postcard and sent it to my then-boyfriend Jamie. It arrived safe and sound. Some other people decided to be a little more adventerous in what they sent through the mail, as documented in Postal Experiments. (link from Andy)

Play the game: Guess the Dictator and/or Television Sit-Com Character.

What is a blog? According to blogger.com: A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically -- like a what's new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly -- from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction.

Me, I intend to use this mostly to post links to other websites I find funny/interesting. I may also post little bits of news about things in my life, but I'm not sure yet how I feel about that. I'm also not sure how frequently I'll update--sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes not for a week.

I feel so trendy.