When I was a kid, I remember my neighbor having a bike lock with three dials, for setting a three digit combination. She commented that I could probably pick the lock pretty easily, if I just tried one at a time. Being bored, I did so, and in under five minutes, had the lock open. As a kid, that was pretty astounding. When you think about it, if you spend a second on each combination, you could pick it in a max of around 17 minutes, with an average of around 8. It seemed secure at the time, but I guess that was just an illusion.

I recently found a Masterlock combination lock, to which I’ve never had the combination. I figured one day I’d figure out how to pick it, so I kept it around. Do you know how useless it is to have a combination lock to which you don’t know the combination? Directions on this have been floating around on the Internet, though recently someone posted some easy instructions, which have been making the rounds online, saving me the effort of finding them. I picked my lock in somewhere around five minutes. Well, actually, substantially longer, and over the course of a few days, but like five minutes after I started spinning the dial in the right direction. Funny how that works. Of course, this video of a Masterlock shim in action showing such a lock being opened in two seconds made me wonder if I’d ever want to use this lock on anything.

With video demonstrations of picking a Kryptonite bike lock with a bic pen, even those menacing black U-bars are succumbing to a little know-how. Yeah, the new ones are better, and you can trade in your old ones, but isn’t it weird that you’ve trusted it up to that point?

I guess I’m just living with the illusion that when I buy a lock, I expect it to work. I’m surprised, or perhaps horrified, to find that it’s just a bit more complicated than that. No locking system is infallible. I just wish that they provided just a little bit more comfort. I can dream, can’t I? How can I trust Masterlocks to secure anything in the future? Wake up, folks, this type of thing has been possible for years now. Isn’t it about time to do something about it?

Who doesn’t love a good office prank? Imagine walking in and seeing your desk laid out like this.

There’s been some random food floating around too — one of my co-workers took a piece of egg off his sandwich, put it in a bowl, and put it in someone else’s desk. That person found it, put some yogurt on it, and put it in another person’s desk. I have no idea how long that’s been circulating. I worry, because I can go for months without opening my desk drawers.

Switching the ‘n’ and ‘m’ keys is also a nice trick, for the non-touch typists. Another of my co-workers re-arranged someone’s keyboard to spell ‘Bermuda’ — this had to be pointed out to him a few hours later, unfortunately.

Tape over the mouthpiece of a phone will result in loud shouting: “Speak up?! I’m shouting into the phone as it is!”

Yet, somehow, I feel less safe. Office pranks do that to you. I’d better check my drawers, just in case.

Yes, I am committing the worst type of blogging offense: I’m posting a picture of my cat.

Actually, I’m playing around with moblogging, using Flickr. Very neat technology — check it out!

This picture was taken with a Treo 600, which, as you can see from this photo, takes atrocious pictures. You should see pictures from dark bars — almost unviewable. I hear the camera in the 650 is significantly better, but don’t really feel like shelling out a huge chunk of cash for an incremental upgrade to my phone.

Do I really live a life interesting enough to document with a moblog? Probably not, but at least I’ll be entertained.

As a technology whore, I’m always interested in new services for my various electronic devices, so when I got an email message noting that odeo.com was open to try out, my curiosity was piqued. As a tech geek, it was naturally my duty to check this out and see what they had to offer.

For those not in the know, “Odeo is the place to browse, listen, upload, download, sync to your iPod (or any Mp3 player).” Be that as it may, it would appear to help to be an iPod user. People create audio feeds for download, which people can then listen to on their PCs or on their portable MP3 players. This is a practice known, for better or worse, as podcasting.

Desite my desire to be cutting edge and my knowledge of the availability of podcasting, up to the present, I hadn’t been actually doing any podcasting yet. iPod, check. PSP, check. Downloading random audio posts from bloggers and copying the files to my player(s)? Ummm, well, yeah, I never quite got around to that step.

That’s what makes Odeo such an interesting concept. They’re basically a catalog of various audio blogs on the web, simplifying the task of finding audio feeds, “subscribing”, downloading, and importing into iTunes or Windows Media Player. Then, theoretically, it’s just a matter of syncing up your MP3 player to make them portable. Neat!

As far as implementation goes, it was pretty painless as an iPod owner / user. I downloaded the Odeo syncer (which actually downloads MP3s and drops them in iTunes), then browsed their site for various feeds to add. Nicely enough, you can listen to snippets of these channels right on the web site. As far as interface goes, Odeo is a pretty slick package, and I got subscribed to a few shows right away. No MP3 player is necessary — if listening to podcasts on your PC is your bag, then Odeo is a nice step in simplifying that task.

However, while actually listening to a podcast, I came to a quick realization: just because you podcast doesn’t make you interesting. Case in point: MAKE Magazine has a podcast, and while they discuss much that I find incredibly fascinating, I’d hate to be listening to that in the car. I might nod off and wind up in oncoming traffic. The Suicide Girls channel (to which I subscribed purely for research purposes, of course) droned on about what a guy was wearing on a blind date and whether or not wearing a belt is optional.

There’s a decent number of podcasts catalogued in Odeo, including categorization, with the ability to see the Top 40 channels, as well as a selection of featured channels that change each week. Unfortunately, I can see how easy it is to get lost in the shuffle here. Being driven by the network of people actually using the service, good channels that haven’t been promoted very much will get buried in the listings. The fairly open ability to add any feed into Odeo also clutters up the choices. Random shows like “The Dawn and Drew Show” (self-proclaimed as “sex, jokes and more from a married couple in Wisconsin”) combine with junk marketing like the show “Adv – THIS SPACE FOR RENT” by Aruntx and people blogging just for the sake of audio blogging (I’m talking about you, Tom Greene), making it hard to find the fledging, good quality content podcast. The signal to noise ratio is rapidly decreasing!

That’s when I discovered something else: this is just radio. Yeah yeah, it’s downloaded off the Internet and allows people without FCC licenses to broadcast in some form, but at the end of the day, it’s still radio. I was listening to on-air ad spots in these things. The people who actually create good on-air personae and line up the sponsors will probably be the most successful.

My overall thoughts: Odeo is pretty good. Not bad at all for beta. It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re looking to get into podcasting. However, we’re going to see a few things happen in the not too distant future, namely:

• Cataloging sites like Odeo will be flooded with poor podcasts and marketing spam. A rating system will be implemented, or some sort of moderation will happen.
• Dead channels will ensue. The low barriers to entry mean that a lot of people will start podcasts, and then just stop doing them.
• Someone will do a good job of consolidating podcasts. Instead of having a bunch of sites each running their own podcast, they will combine a slew of smaller podcasts to consolidate the marketing, and split the revenue.
• Good audio personae will develop the largest audiences. Leo LaPorte, you’ve got the right voice!

Overall, podcasting is still growing as a technology. I look forward to Yahoo and MSN folding in support for Podcasts into their portals, as that’s when you know the technology has gone mainstream. Looks like we’ll need more MP3 players, stat!

What ever happened to the phrase the cat’s pajamas? There’s a lot of old phrases that have just dropped out of vogue (predictably), which is a shame, because it’s such a colorful part of the lexicon.

The cat’s pajamas is a phrase meaning that something is neat, hip, or cool. You might think of it like the other archaic phrase, the bee’s knees.

This phrase is such a strange concept. Who puts their cats in pajamas? Why are cat’s pajamas so desireable? Do cats really need to keep extra warm?

I have three cats. I have no particular desire to put them in flannelware. Well…maybe if…no, no, I stand by my statement, I don’t really want to see them in pj’s. Really. I’m not picturing a fluffy cat in flannel green pj’s right now. With slippers. Nope!

I think about how people who are learning English react to such colloquialisms. It must have been quite something to be having a conversation about something intriguing with an English speaker, only to have them bust out a “that’s the cat’s pajamas!” Their mind would probably think, “I know what a cat is, and I know what pajamas are, but I fail to see how the subject of our conversation is either of those things.” That is, unless they were actually looking at a pair of cat’s pajamas.

This phrase is quite widespread, despite its demise in popular culture. That’s what makes it so odd that there is such a dearth of good cat pajamas pictures on the Internet. Especially from cat lovers. Ah, if only we had more pictures available — that really would be the cat’s pajamas.

If you can read this, then I’ve successfully migrated from one hosting company to another. While it appears to have gone off without a hitch, I’m left wondering, “How does the average person do this?”

This is not an uncommon question when it comes to computers. I think one of the standards of the industry has to be, “Would my mother know how to do this?” If the answer is yes, then congratulations, you’re ready for prime time. If the answer is no, then you’re developing for that smaller group of technorati who know what the hell ‘DNS’ or ‘ping’ mean.

To migrate between hosts, I had to copy all the files, do a mysqldump of the database, go to my new host, install the blogging software, restore the MySQL database, copy over original files, update files, change paths, and otherwise run around doing techie stuff on a terminal window that would send the average person into conniptions. I have no problem with this, mind you; having worked in the interactive industry for several years, I knew what I was doing. That’s not to say it wasn’t a headache: it most certainly was. However, I at least knew what was going on and why, while beating my head against the keyboard. Ah, the simple pleasures in life.

People who are “good” with computers are well aware that a lot of technology isn’t ready for the masses. Ask them about assisting family members or friends with spyware. When I was setting up a web site for my wife, she asked simply, “Can you teach me what you’re doing?” About ten minutes into the affair, I could see her eyes glazing over. Another friend of mine asked for help installing a hard drive. He did the initial installation fine, but when he asked for assistance and I had to boot into a Knoppix CD to run fdisk on his unpartitioned drive, I definitely lost him.

This need for tech knowledge in the modern day is ridiculous. The advancement of technology means that there’s always a learning curve for new things, but even existing technology is beyond the average just-started-paying-bills-online soul. The problem is that people are more excited about the advance of technology, and less about bringing current technology “down” to the common person. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is arguable, but it’s still definitely in the realm of techno-geeks, for the most part.

There’s probably nothing to be done about this. As advances continue, current technology gets obsolete. The problem is that people become more and more dependent on assistance from the technorati to do the things that they should not have to know how to do. Perhaps this is good in a way; it forces people to expand their social system a bit. Or pay for it. Hmm. Anyone interested in a little consulting? I can remove that spyware fast for a price!

Maybe I should just get back to work. It’s less aggravating.