Shit My Dad Says, book review

"...Justin Halpern...his seventy-three-year-old dad....who is "like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair," has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him..."

Introduction, page "x":

"...all day long I dealt with people...who never really said what they were thinking.  The more time I spent with my dad...the more grateful I started to feel..."

In the beginning of the book we learn of the events that led to the creation of the Twitter account, the book, and the television show.

Throughout the book are examples of his father expressing himself as thoughts come to him...stream of consciousness commenting, if you will.

The more of the book I read, the more I laughed.  Loudly.  Many times...

This is a book that can be read for short periods of time.  It's great for those times when you have a break in the action. But, not if you're in areas where you need to be quiet and maintain control over outbursts: it may cause moments of grinning and laughing.

Beginning September 23rd, the television show will be on the CBS network on Thursdays at 8:30 pm Eastern/7:30 pm Central

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

http://shitmydadsays.tumblr.com/

http://shitmydadsays.com/

you can follow my Twitter account via SMS (text messages)

"...Anyone in the US can receive Tweets on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter..."

"Fast Following without creating an account is currently available only in the US...

"...From your computer, wherever you see a user on Twitter.com, you can hover over their name or avatar, and click on the phone icon that appears in the hovercard. Whenever they tweet, you'll get it as an SMS message on your phone."

For example, in the United States of America, if you want to follow me text the message "follow slick" to 40404.

DirecTV NASCAR "HotPass"

I noticed there was a new message in the "Caller ID & Messages" area of the DirecTV service about "HotPass".  Yesterday, I caught the end of it...a good idea, but not a great experience.

On the HotPass channels you can watch the race from cameras installed in some of the NASCAR vehicles.

The channels are free...from what I have read, they were not in 2007 and 2008.

Yesterday, I watched from the cars of:
Jeff Gordon - #24 (channel 795)
Juan Pablo Montoya - #42 (channel 796)
Jimmie Johnson - #48 (channel 797)
and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. - #88 (798)

I did not like watching it on a television that had a 19-inch screen:  it was too small for me to comfortably enjoy the views.

And changing the channel from one to another was unsatisfying:  it took too long...there were a couple of seconds of pause, and dark/blank screens, to get from one to the other.

For people who have large screen televisions, there should be a "HotPass Mix" channel where all four of the views from the cars can be seen on one channel.

http://twitter.com/nascar_hotpass

'Hope For Haiti' Telethon

Friday, January 22, at 8 p.m. ET

"Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief" telethon...

All donations will directly benefit Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, UNICEF and Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti Foundation. Additionally, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and United Nations World Food Programme have joined the list of relief organizations that will benefit from the show, with proceeds to be split evenly among each organization's individual Haiti relief funds.

The show will be broadcast from New York, London, Los Angeles and Haiti...

The two-hour program will air commercial-free across ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, BET, the CW, HBO, MTV, VH1 and CMT on Friday at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

The special will also air on PBS, TNT, Showtime, Comedy Central, Bravo, E! Entertainment Network, National Geographic Channel, Oxygen, G4, Centric, Current TV, Fuse, MLB Network, Epix, Palladia, SoapNet, Style, Discovery Health and Planet Green, as well as Canada's CTV, CBC Television, Global Television and MuchMusic.

It will also air internationally on BET International, CNN International, National Geographic and MTV Networks International...

(..."Hope for Haiti" will be the first U.S.-based telethon airing on MTV in China.)

"Hope For Haiti Now" will include live streaming globally on sites including YouTube, Hulu, MySpace, Fancast, AOL, MSN.com, Yahoo, Bing.com, BET.com, MTV.com, and Rhapsody and on mobile via Alltel, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and FloTV.

Facebook and Twitter are the official social media partners who will help to drive donations and tune-in to the telethon. Facebook and MySpace have signed on as official social-media partners to help steer viewers to the telethon and drive donations.

All of the night's performances will be available for download on iTunes for 99 cents the next day.

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For those in the Tucson metropolitan area, local television schedules show:

7:00-9:00pm on KVOA, KGUN, KMSB, KOLD, and KWBA...

8:00-10:00pm on KUAT...

Saturday, on KUAT from 1:00-3:00am...

and Sunday, on KUAT from 12:30-2:30am.

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Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Bono, To Headline MTV's 'Hope For Haiti' Telethon

FriendFeed

"...is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online..."

You can get a "customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you've shared."

"...You can subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as your family or a team of people you work with...you and your friends contribute to a shared stream of information — information that you care about, because it's from the people that you care about.

"...your friends can see what you're sharing without creating an account, and you can embed your feed in your home page or blog. FriendFeed also lets you pull in updates from other sites around the web, and even publish your feed to services you already use..."

They support SSL encryption...but it appears it's just at login.

You can login using your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account. I logged in using my Google logon. As soon as I did, I noticed I had 21 friends...I don't know why. Some I follow on Twitter...but I did not use my twitter account to login with.

I did not make my account/feed "private"...and initially, it appeared that you must be a member of Friendfeed to see it. But, after a time, it seems that you/anyone now can.

"Connect the services you use to FriendFeed. For example, if you add Flickr, your feed will automatically update every time you publish a new photo...."

It does seem to automatically update. (Twitter related applications I use are http://sideline.yahoo.com and Tweetdeck.)

Here are some of the services they support:
LiveJournal
Tumblr
delicious
Diigo
Digg
Google Reader
Flickr
Facebook
Gmail/Google Talk
Twitter
Last.fm
Pandora
12seconds
Dailymotion
YouTube
Amazon.com
LinkedIn
Netflix
Netvibes

http://friendfeed.com/?auth=i5OZ1mjQu5z8SHKw&format=atom

I chose to only connect to Diigo...because, at this moment, I don't want to integrate all the other services I use into FriendFeed. I think it's a great service, but not for me to use on a regular basis...not now...maybe one day.

I wish they supported OpenID (I'm still also waiting for Facebook to).

mosaic of my Twitter followers

Get your twitter mosaic here.