General

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I’ve been a long time customer of Amazon.com, going way back into the mid-90′s when all they sold was books. But lately, I’ve found myself using their products and services more and more often, and I am very impressed!

Since buying my Roku XD I have since become an Amazon Prime member to gain access to the unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows that Amazon Prime has to offer. While the interface of the Amazon On Demand channel for Roku needs much improvement (their customer service dept was happy to hear my suggestions about creating a queue/playlist/subscription), it gets the job done, and it has a good selection of content to watch. I’ve also puchased a couple season of TV shows to watch On Demand, and their HD movie rental rates are cheaper than what I get direct from Charter (my cable provider).

Moving on from their video services, I’ve been very impressed with their new cloud storage and MP3 cloud player service. I’ve purchased several albums from Amazon that I would have previously purchased from iTunes because they were a few dollars cheaper. And with the Cloud Player on my Android phone, it makes having my music with me wherever I go as simple as a click of a button. (I just wish there was a native cloud player app for my iPhone/iPad2).

I’m also an avid book reader and enthusiast, and the fact that the Amazon Kindle app works on my EVO, my iPhone, and my iPad2 means that I can take my whole library with me wherever I go. Granted, I also have the Barnes & Noble Nook app on all 3 devices as well, but the Kindles whispersync is so much nicer to keep my books synced between devices. With the Nook, it’s annoying to have to figure out where I was in the book when I want to read a quick chapter on my EVO after reading for a bit on my iPad2 before bed the previous night.

Amazon’s seller marketplace also makes it easy for me to convert my old collection of physical books into money, which in-turn helps me expand my Kindle library. I’d love it if they had a book exchange program where you can send in physical books and receive discounts on the kindle versions of those same books.

All in all, I’m a very happy Amazon customer!

HTC Evo & Apple iPhone

Jun 8th, 2010

by Amish_Geek.

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I’ve had an iPhone 3g for just over 1.5 years now, and I LOVE IT! I’ve also had the Samsung Instinct as a work phone for the past 2 years, and it’s been pretty meh. Today, our new work phones arrived, the new HTC Evo, the worlds first 4G smartphone blah blah marketingspeak.

All I can say is this thing is HUGE! And when I turned it on, it’s got a nice, crisp, hi-res display and it looks fantastic. I can’t wait to get it activated and start playing with it. I primarily use my iPhone for personal, but I use the email / web features of it for work because it was so much better than the instinct. I might actually start using my work phone for work (email/web) as well as personal.

Here is a picture of the phones side by side while I wait for the new phone to activate…

Building a Blog Empire

Dec 10th, 2009

by Amish_Geek.

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I’ve always had a bit of entrepreneurial ADD, and I’m always thinking of the next project or idea. Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of building a network of websites, and to get somewhat serious about blogging, (well, as serious as I can be, doing it in my free time between work and family).

One of my hobbies and habits is to pick up domain names that match some “big idea” that I’ve had, and I’ll throw up a simple site or something, or just hold onto the domain for one of those “rainy day” projects.

I recently picked up a copy of WP Robot, which is an auto-blogging plugin which will automatically post and update a blog with content from ebay, amazon, articlebase, and other sources. I think this will help me keep some of my sites updated, and hopefully be able to generate some affiliate commissions as well. It is SLICK! I showed it to a couple of my co-workers and they were impressed with how it worked, and how it simply automated a blog.

Now, I understand that SE’s and readers alike prefer to have genuine hand-written content, and so for my blogs, I’ll still post articles that I write myself. As well as comment on happenings and other things. But by having an automation tool, I can also have some filler things within my blog.
Who knows! perhaps in a year, I’ll have a nice little blog empire that will pay for a vacation to somewhere tropical.