Today is my older brother Scott’s birthday. He died of cancer in April 2002 after battling the odds for over 10 years. He was 4 years older then me. I wrote a little bit about it back in November 2004 during the Livestrong wristband craze (read the Livestrong post). It’s been a few months since I wore my yellow band but I put it back on today.
I was never as good at remembering his birthday as I seem to be these days.
Happy Birthday Scotty. We miss you.
Me on the left and Scott on the right
A really cool new service was just launched where you can send anyone money by just sending them a text message from your phone. It works similar to Paypal.com only instead of sending money via an email address, you use your cell phone. Of course the person you are sending the money to also has to be registered but it’s free to join. Paypal.com is rumored to be working on a similar service but this new company beat them to the punch. The site is called TextPayMe.com. If you signup now you get $5 free in your account to start with. You can link your account to a bank account or a credit card.
You may be wondering why you would want to text someone money. Well some possible uses are:
1. When you go out to eat and one person pays the entire bill - you just text that person your share so you don’t have to split the check or worry about remembering to pay them back later.
2. When you split your rent or utilities with your roommates. One person pays the full bill and you just text them your share.
3. When you want to pay for a purchase, like on Craigslist or a yardsale or even a local business if they are setup to accept such payments.
4. When you want to send money as a gift to a friend or family member.
5. When you want to instantly transfer money to another bank account, like a son’s or daughter’s bank account if they are out of town, in college or travelling.
6. When you want to instantly loan someone some cash.
The possibilities are endless. It really could be a pretty useful little service. It will be interesting to see what Paypal.com launches and how integrated their services are.
Check out this new music video from Lacquer. It’s a stop-motion film from LA to New York City. It’s really cool and pretty amazing how they did it.
Technorati Tags: lacquer, NY, LA, Los Angeles, New York City, music+video
Let me put on my geek hat here. I just thought I’d pass on a little tech news for those of you who are a Windows Pocket PC junkie (like me). Here’s the latest Windows Mobile devices lineup announced at the 3GSM World Congress. FINALLY, HP is releasing a phone with a faster processor. The new iPAQ 6900 has a 416MHz processor instead of the crappy 200MHz one that the h6315 came with. It also has a 1.3 megapixel camera, which is still crap but better then the .3 megapixel (yeah 0.3) one in the older model.
Read the full lineup at Pocket PC Addict
Technorati Tags: HP, iPAQ+hw6900, hw6900, pocketpc, gsm, windows+mobile, ipaq
Here’s a funny and cool little tool I ran across on another blog. The site is called myHeritage.com and uses face recognition technology to match your face to a database of people. The online demo is free and currently only matches you to celebrity faces but eventually they say their technology will be able to match personal photos with family history. So maybe you can find that long lost relative that looks just like you.
What would be cool though, I think, is if you could eventually upload a group photo of say your friends and it would tell you the degrees of separation among them. Like if your best friend is actually the son or daughter of a son of your grandfather’s cousin…. something like that.
You can register and try out their demo for free at http://www.myheritage.com
I ran the test and my top match was Anthony Hopkins. Of course I didn’t really use the best quality picture of myself, but I wanted to see what it would do. The 5 matching runners-up are in the screen capture below. What’s the deal with the Margaret Thatcher match? lol
Another great way to waste some time on a Friday afternoon 
