With a push of the unlock button on the key chain I quickly entered the car.  My phone was nowhere within reach. My search moved quickly beyond routine to thorough as there was no sign of the phone anywhere.

I jumped out of the car and got down on my knees to look beneath the driver’s seat. No luck. No phone. My search continued underneath the seats, between the seats, and on the seats. Still no phone.

I began to doubt that my phone was even in the car. But how could that be as the car was the last place I used it. I plopped down in the driver’s seat and sat there trying to recall my every move in the last couple of hours.

I leaned over one last time and looked at the rental papers laying next to me. I took a double take. I wiped the sleep out of my eyes and looked again. It wasn’t my name. It wasn’t my car. It wasn’t even the same color interior. I had jumped in to the wrong rental car.

A hundred thoughts came to my head as I quickly slammed the door shut and exited. Am I hearing police sirens? Was I on camera? Was the real owner watching from a motel window? How could a guy possibly keep his rental car unlocked in Atlanta, Georgia?

These thoughts and many others raced through my head as I quickly stepped over to the almost identical car to the right (my rental car) and quickly exited with my cell phone returning to my room.

While this isn’t an advertisement for foresquare, this nifty little application might have saved me a  lot of time. Foresquare is  piece of software you download on your cellphone. It allows you to see where your friends are. It allows you and your friends to post quick little comments about what you’re doing.

Had my wife and I be foresquaring, it would have been a lot easier to find my phone than it was the way I did.

Imagine what schools would be like if all students are required to use foresquare on their phones during school hours.

Source: http://foursquare.com/

Things have come along way since then. With the purchase of my latest cellphone, the HTC Pro 2, I think I’ve finally found a phone that I can live with for a long time. This phone is more like a computer than a cell phone. It has all the usual characteristics that most smart phones have including video, photo, texting, etc. But what really makes this smart phone fun is the really neat applications that work with it.

I just added Pandora to it. Now I have my own free Internet radio stations. While I still can’t listen to satellite radio on it like I can on my Ipod, Pandora is a nice replacement. With Pandora you can pretty much pick what ever genre or group you want to listen to and Pandora builds a station around it.

Another great feature my HTC Pro 2 has in it is the GPS applications. Recently on a bus trip, I wasn’t driving, I turned on the GPS application courtesy of Google and actually saw an icon that marked my exact location as I moved along Interstate 80. This GPS application also is great for finding nearby businesses like restaurants.

As schools start to think about allowing cell phones into the classroom, they pretty much can throw out the effect that Internet filters have. While smartphones like mine can connect to a local wireless network, it’s still a lot easier to simply use the Internet service provided with the smart phones. I know that’s an additional $20 per month, but those rates will more than likely fall in the near future making Internet access even easier for students.

That is certainly something to think about. And you thought Pandora’s box was a myth.

Here’s something else to think about. Internet World Stats is an up-to-date  Website that monitors Usage and Population statistics throughout the world. A look at the latest data reviews that Asia has nearly three times the amount of Internet users as North America has . However nearly 3 out of every 4 individuals in North America have Internet Access. I wonder how many of them have cell phones?

That domain name–Symbolics.com–is now used as the personal blog of Aron Meystedt, owner of XF.com and Symbolics.com–not that you probably ever heard of either Mr. Meystedt or either Website. I am most certain he has never heard of me.

Symbolics.com was originally the domain name for a now-defunct computer manufacturer according to Wikipedia . You can find a 1998 archive of the Symbolics.com stored in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a virtual library of past versions of current and defunct Websites. It’s an amazing place if you’re into that kind of thing.  I even found shards of my old Website on HyperCard programming built in the late 1990′s.

As helpful as it is, the Wayback Machine hasn’t survived without scares.

Being the keeper of such knowledge brings into question ramifications owners of copyrights, patents, and trademarks might have. The clock has ticked with the Wayback Machine since its start in 1996. Since that time several lawsuits have been filed against this Internet Archive.

One of the more unusual cases occurred in 1999 when lawyers used the archive of the Wayback Machine as a defense for their client Health Advocate. Those lawyers used stored Webpages of the plaintiff Healthcare Advocates (Notice the similarity.) to win their case.

It turns out Healthcare Advocates eventually sued both the law firm and the Internet Archive for illegal access to its old Web pages. A Pennsylvania judge later dismissed the Plaintiff’s claims due to copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention provisions, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state common law. source: http://copywrite.org/2007/08/17/healthcare-advocates-inc-v-harding-earley-follmer-frailey/

Can you believe everything you see on the Wayback Machine as being factual records of Websites and Web pages? It’s doubtful according to Larry Donahue.  Mr. Donahue’s experience includes 18 years of Internet business development as well as being corporate counsel for FatCow Web Hosting.

Without going in to detail, Mr Donahue states that what you see isn’t always what was. Sometimes pages are a hodgepodge of what was and what is today. This is particularly true if the archived page is still a live Website.

Mr. Donahue further states that the Wayback Machine archive may also make changes to HTML as well as making other mistakes. Source: Debunking the Wayback Machine

Even with this is mind, the Wayback Machine is still good clean fun. You can fill your time looking for gems such as rare footage of Samuel Clemens (1909) as filmed by Thomas Edison or Abbott & Costello doing their “Who’s On First Routine.”

As I was doing a little research, I stumbled across press release sites from Microsoft, Apple, and Google. So my quest began, how could I get these three technology giants’ press releases into my “little search engine that could?”

There was a slight problem with Rollyo preventing me from doing so. It’s all or nothing with Rollyo. If you add a site address like “http://www.google.com/press/” you get the search results from “http://www.google.com.” That’s a big difference. The same thing happened when I used the Apple press release address. I got results for all of Apple.com.

So this is where serendipity tapped me on the shoulder. I figured what if I entered Apple’s press release address into a short url? I figured why not give it a try. What could it hurt? I figured the results “http://bit.ly/MPljp” might just hide the entire Apple address from Rollyo and direct it to http://www.apple.com/pr/ and not all of Apple. No luck.

But something curious did happen. With a quick Web search for “kindle”, unique addresses from bit.ly started showing up like http://bit.ly/info/4HzUmv. Apparently bit.ly allows the creator of a short link to track their links. The result not only show the article linked, the title, but also how popular the link is and where it’s linked to. Amazing. I’ve just discovered a backdoor into someone else’s link tracker.

So my next thoughts turn to who actually uses short link websites? Well, probably someone who will be sharing that link a lot such as bloggers, writers, columnists, etc–people who are into technology and educating people. Or just lazy guys like me that don’t want to keep typing the same old long address in over and over again. Not a bad group to be associated with.

I finally gave up on my quest to direct Rollyo into peaking into specific directories. But as a consolation, I replaced Apple.com, Microsoft.com, and Google.com press release sites in my Rollyo Search Engine with a few URL shortening Websites such as http://bit.ly and http://www.shorturl.com.

I’m pretty happy with the results.

Xtra

In a recent review CNET took a look at a few of the better netbooks out there. The Dell Inspiron rolls in at a price of $299–not quite half the price of an IPad.

To be or not to be. That is the question. Will the IPad move into the market place and steal away otherwise netbook happy customers? Will Ipod and Iphone purchases decline as IPad purchases go on the rise?

Will the IPad be able to compete with electronic books like. the Kindle. Perhaps the IPad might deliver a knockout blow on this fairly new type of personal technology. There’s obviously a lot more an IPad can do than a Kindle can. The Kindle does have an edge in price over the IPad as the  starting price for a Kindle compares to that of a netbook, somewhere near $250. Apple also has an application (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kindle-for-iphone/id302584613?mt=8) developed that allows you to read all of your Kindle books on either an Iphone or an Ipod.

The window of a typical netbook is approximately 10.3 x 7.2 inches while the IPad screen is only 9.7 inches diagonally. So the IPad display is just a tad bit smaller.

Resolution wise, the IPad runs at 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch. The window of a netbook can’t compete with that as there is noway to get the higher-resolution 1,366×768 screen.

With an IPads built-in touch-screen keyboard, you won’t have to worry sunflower seeds stopping your shift key from working. Ergonomically, this new keyboard may not be suited for long-term keyboarding projects but you might have to worry for simple tasks like Email or surfing the web.

One of the nicest features of the IPad is that its memory is not a moveable hard drive like a netbook. It is a flash drive. These flash drives work just like the storage devices in thumb drives and the newer IPods. With fewer moveable parts there will obviously less that can go wrong.

As far as a classroom teacher, the price still may a be a bit prohibitive when you compare the cost of a netbook to that of an IPad. However, if you’re looking for something that stays on the teacher’s desk…

Global Education Swicki

If you take a look at this extinction timeline, you will see what I mean. This timeline was created by Ross Dawson. According to his website, he is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. Now that’s a lot of talent. He even has a Facebook account.I just requested to be his friend. I wonder if I even have a change.

Now back to this timeline. It looks like the demise of the desktop computer is roughly in the year 2025. Actually that’s about ten years after the computer mouse bites the dust. The death of Blackberries, (the machines not the fruit), is sandwiched somewhere between there. That’s something to think about.

Now’s also probably not a good time to open a video rental store or develop landline telephones or fax machines. We say “good bye”to those devices in the next five years.

What’s this? no more text-based search by 2016? Think about how that’s going to change our libraries. Will we ever need encyclopedias again?

There’s a lot of changes in store for education.

By the way, you better sell your Microsoft stock in the next decade or so. By 2035 Microsoft ceases to exist.