The final verdiect is in (and has been). Lately I have been confused over whether the DTV switch was happening in February or June. I now have a clear answer, well sort of. The DTV switch was delayed until June 12, 2009. BOOOO! The unclear part is when channels are going to switch. June 12th is the deadline. Some channels will switch on February 17th and some might not.

So, by law they must switch by June 12th and anytime before then.

I don’t really know what the huge deal with twitter is. I have had an account for a while now and don’t use it much. Today I got bored and took a small look at there API and came up with a little thing to grab the last tweet I made on there. You will see it up at the top right of the page.

To keep the page load time down I implemented a “javascript” way to do grab the last one. The page you are looking loads with all the content. Down at the bottom just before the </body> tag there is a div and inside it I load a PHP with javascript. That PHP file grabs the last post from Twitter and shows it. Thus, the only content not rendered right  away when waiting for Twitter is the last tweet.

=)

Not sure how much I will use it, but it was fun.

Having done ecommerce work myself I have been somewhat following this issue. For those not familiar with it here is whats going down. In New York they are working on forcing e-commerce sites that have affiliates in New York to charge sales tax to all New York residents. Doesn’t sound bad right? Well lets break it down using Amazon as its the biggest.

Amazon does NOT have a business in New York meaning right now they do not charge sales tax to customers in New York. What they do have is affiliates that exist in New York though. So the NY government wants to charge tax since the affiliates are in their states. Thats like saying Sitepoint.com would have to charge sales tax in Michigan because I have an affiliate account with them. Its not even if they go through the affiliate in state, its across the entire catalog regardless if someone used an affiliate or not. To me it makes no sense.

I have an idea in mind for Amazon however at a business aspect its bad, but on a “stick it to the man” aspect it fits. Since I do not sell products online I say this with ease but am still undetermined if I were to have a business selling online. I would boycott sales to the state of NY, and draw up a big controversy over it so the people of NY would get upset and call their elected officials. Hopefully getting them to realize its a bad idea. However in reality it won’t happen.

Amazon has been trying to stop this from happening by suing saying that they were specifically targeted with this tax. When it first came up they were claiming that it was being called the Amazon Tax (I am not clever enough to make that up) by officials meaning it was targeting Amazon.com for this. A judge has recently shut Amazon down with this case. ArsTechnica Link

There is what I am calling a new kid on the block of music sharing. I am not sure when they started but what they are doing is cool. Spotify is a new startup that streams music to your computer for FREE. Yes there are others that do this such as Last.FM and Pandora however Spotify comes with a nice iTunes like application (though it is MUCH faster than iTunes). The music also starts installing playing like it was playing music stored on your hard drive. The way they also get the music to your computer seems like a new concept for a business model. Not only to they serve the music from their servers but also p2p (peer to peer). You know, how you stole that latest Katy Perry track last night.

Unfortunately at this time it is not available in the United States. That does not mean I have not used this application. Hopefully I will get some invites to share.

Spotify Screenshot

So today I was picking up some Christmas presents and one thing I needed was a movie. Do you know how hard it is to find 1 particular movie. The first place I was at was BestBuy. Oddly they had the biggest movie selection of the three stores I went to. I spent a good while searching through the comedy section to come up empty handed at least with movies I was. So after I couldn’t find the movie I decided to go across the street to Walmart. Surely Walmart would have it.. So I thought.. Walmart had a terrible selection and it was quite small. I spent some time searching then hopped on the handy dandy iPhone to see if it was in stock. Acording to their website its only available online so I was out of luck again. After being 0 for 2 I decided to try Meijers. For those of you who don’t know what it is, think of it as a smaller version of Walmart. This store had even less movies than Walmart and I didn’t have good cell phone reception so I left after spending only a few minutes looking. In the end I bought movie on Amazon.

I have ranted several times on the local grocery store and its horrible categorization. This is why I hate traditional stores and have been working on building the ultimate eCommerce solution which I am expecting to be out later this year.