Customizing your Silverado SS is easy. You’ll need: * Spray Paint * Junk Mail, and * Masking Tape That’s it. Mask off the areas you don’t want murdered-out with the mail and tape. Rattle can the areas you want murdered. The end.

I need to start peddling goods. Who wouldn’t want to wear a swantron shirt? Maybe a swantron mousepad? Who knows? They could sell like hot cakes. Or flapjacks. I have been mulling over the shopping cart issue for a while. I don’t see much harm in throwing up an e-commerce portion to the site, as so long as it is secure. I really don’t want to throw caution to the wind, and have a sketchy shopping cart that I don’t endorse attached to my livelihood. I have been looking into various options, and seem to have found a good one in Summer Cart shopping cart software. Security is my biggest concern, but one also must look at the other aspects when making a decision of this magnitude…namely, shipping, support, payment plans, and ease of implementation. Here is a quick screen shot to drive home my point. Summer Cart has integrated reporting. I’m all about my metrics…comes with the territory that I deal with on a daily basis at work. It is tough to make improvements blindly, and running reports is the way to base a business decision. What I really enjoy about Summer Cart is the admin control panel. Anything you could think of is covered…which makes for an easy decision. Stay tuned…you all better be foaming at the mouth at the thought of some swantron tees. It could be the fashion statement of the the year.

I took a spin outside for a brief reading session on my lunch break yesterday. I’m glad I did, as I was treated to a little optical phenominon action…in the form of a 22 Degree Solar Halo. FTW. I’m posting some pics I snapped…I’ll toss in the full write-up soon. I inverted the colors of that last pic, quite obviously. That will be my template, so to speak, on which to wax nerdy in a Physics-y kind of way. Stay tuned.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy (thirty year) old codger and really dating myself, I’m going to go ahead and wax sentimental for a second. We had an Atari way back in the day. Way back, as in I thought it was called a “Natari.” It was awesome. My two favorite games… Frogger, maybe of course, and an obscure game called Gopher. Gopher involved whacking gophers on the head with a shovel as they tried to eat your carrots, which you planted as a stork dropped seeds. No way to win…just hold off the gophers until you go insane. Aah, the good old days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about my Wii. Every once in a while, it is good to take a step back from the buzz and take a look at the state of things. I’m going to wager that *most of the games thrown out to the market are not even slightly as rewarding to the player as Frogger, Gopher, or Pong for that matter. It is easy to get wrapped up in new things…super easy. It is often hard to qualify, when everything is marketed to its quantified value. The same exact thing holds true for my dear computers. I always want a new one. If not a new one completely, I want more RAM, a better video card, a meaty hard drive, etc. Even though I spend most of my time hammering out paid posts such as this, for some odd reason I think I need something that can store the Library of Congress and play two first person shooters simultaneously. It is a problem. Let’s focus on computer video cards for a moment, to illustrate my point. I could, without a doubt, get by with a budget video card. Like this little guy: However, my tech ego dictates that I look at things like this monstrosity: …and, I’m drooling a little. I don’t need that…if you do, hit that link up there and check them out. I’m going to play some Wii.

Here is the first pic I have seen come in of the soon-to-be-infamous Metra Twister. Shot from the Heights by none other than Hat Shop Tony. Hopefully someone posts some image of the Metra getting nailed.

Breaking story…The Billings Metra is roofless. I imagine it went something like that. How it spun down from the Heights and still had that much power may be interesting to see. More to come.

I’m writing this post on the road. Opera Mini is what it is… It certainly is not a blogger’s smoothest means of posting content. That said, another day another dollar; there are paid posts to write. Like this guy about Kodak cameras. The posting tool isn’t optimum, but the timing is right. We made it to Helena without our trusty easyshare digital camera. I should say the ‘we’ with a disclaimer, since it is a bright pink Kodak Easy Share. Color aside, I love the thing. The picture quality is super, and the user interface is super easy to use to boot. I’d you haven’t tried Kodak cameras in the past few years, you should give one a shot before buying another brand. They really have focused on usability instead of the bells and whistles, and have the best easy-to-use product on the market. They still have the features that the average consumer wants, but leaves out the type of additional stuff that is largely unused by most. Check one out. They are fairly inexpensive now, and give you a ton of bang for your buck.

It has been too long since I have sang the merits of Ubuntu. Meerkat is great. 10.10 LTS has been flawless for me, even since the beta, on both my notebooks and my Mini 9 netbook. Anyhow, I have had Stellarium running for some time. I realized I have yet to mention it. Here is the view from my ’laboratory’ from two nights ago: Awful photojournalism. Wanna fight about it? Pictured is the Moon, Venus, the Moon, and Venus…the two former live, and the two latter via Stellarium. Pretty sweet. I have had Stellarium cranked up several times looking at stars, but my BlackBerry is far worse when it comes to photographing stars than it is when photographing planets and the Moon. Check it out…price is FREE.99 via the Ubuntu Software Center. FTW.

I’m all about Google. It is no secret that Android gives me the warm and fuzzies; I suppose that is the root of my affection. As I sit here, looking at my quickly-dying BlackBerry Pearl, I’m counting down the days until I can blog via my HTC Incredible. It will be, undoubtedly, incredible. Especially since I can have the Android holler at my Arduino, and vice versa. My warm and fuzzies just turned into warmer and fuzziers. Enough about that. Today, we are talking Google Apps. Buy into the cloud computing revolution, my friends, as it is upon us. Google is far more than the search engine of times earlier: If you haven’t received the memo, there now exists Google Apps: Long story short, Google Apps allows you to free up system space by whisking your info into the clouds. Cloud computing is the future…no need to keep several TBs of data locally, when info can be collected and accessed via an online warehouse. Check out the Google Apps Marketplace, if you don’t believe me. Secure solutions for practically any info that was once married to one particular machine or server. I stumbled across this site, after they asked me to blog for dough about them… Mavenlink is on the cutting edge of the Google Apps scene. Login with your Google ID, and you are given direct integration with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites, et. al. Now that Mavenlink is now integrated with Google Apps, sharing info is easy as whistling Dixie. As far as I can tell, the ease of and subsequent utilization of Google Docs alone would pay for itself in absolutely no time. Perhaps I’m jaded after far-too-long spent accessing user shared folders and fighting firewall rules, but I feel that documents in the cloud is a superior means of disseminating information. Hit one of those links and see for yourself. I’m going to go look at some more Android spec sheets. So excited.