Friday, August 1, 2008 - Text at Your Own Risk

Apparently, texting can endanger your life, especially for those who text almost everytime. No, it's not finger cramp. Read the story below:

CHICAGO - The warning came too late for Barack Obama's adviser: Don't walk and text at the same time.

Obama aide Valerie Jarrett fell off a Chicago curb several weeks ago while her thumbs were flying on her Blackberry.

"I didn't see the sidewalk and I twisted my ankle," Jarrett said. "It was a nice wake-up call for me to be a lot more careful in the future, because I clearly wasn't paying attention and I should have."

Jarrett got off easy and didn't need medical attention.

But in an alert issued this week, the American College of Emergency Physicians warns of the danger of more serious accidents involving oblivious texters. The ER doctors cite rising reports from doctors around the country of injuries involving text-messaging pedestrians, bicyclists, Rollerbladers, even motorists.

Most involve scrapes, cuts and sprains from texters who walked into lampposts or walls or tripped over curbs.

Still, ER doctors who responded to a recent informal query from the organization reported two deaths, both in California. A San Francisco woman was killed by a pickup truck earlier this year when she stepped off a curb while texting, and a Bakersfield man was killed last year by a car while crossing the street and texting.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has no national estimate on how common texting-related injuries are. But among the reports it has received: A 15-year-old girl fell off her horse while texting, suffering head and back injuries, and a 13-year-old girl suffered belly, leg and arm burns after texting her boyfriend while cooking noodles.

Giancarlo Yerkes texted his way across a busy Chicago street Tuesday and escaped unscathed. But the 30-year-old advertising employee admitted he once walked straight into a stop sign while texting and bumped his head.

Yerkes said that he texts while walking to maximize his time, and that the emergency doctors' warning probably won't stop him.

"There's a lot of things you shouldn't do — this is another one on my list," Yerkes said.

Dr. James Adams, chairman of emergency medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said he has treated minor injuries in several texters.

"Common sense isn't always common," Adams said.

Sometimes even among doctors.

"I have to admit that I started a text while I was driving and then I said, `This is so stupid,' so I stopped," Adams said.

Dr. Patrick Walsh, an emergency physician in Bakersfield, Calif., said he is a texter, too, but tries to remind himself to do it intelligently.

"We think we're multitasking, but we're not," he said. "You're focusing on one task for a split second, then focusing on another one, and with something moving 40 miles an hour like a car, it just takes a couple of seconds to be hit."

Walsh, a native of Ireland, said that on a recent visit there he noticed an effective government TV ad campaign against texting and walking, aimed at teenagers.

The message echoes the new advice from U.S. emergency doctors.

"We don't want to sound like some stern schoolmistress, telling people don't text on your cell phone," Walsh said. "But when you're texting, look around," he said.

The ER group also says people should never text while driving, and should avoid talking on a cell phone or texting while doing other physical activities, including walking, biking, boating and Rollerblading.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/med_oblivious_texters

Thursday, July 17, 2008 - Is this the next baby boom?

The 4,315,000 births in 2007, reported as "provisional" data by the National Center for Health Statistics, gives just a glimpse of what's ahead in the nursery.

"I can't tell you anything about who's having these babies, but it is an early look and there is an increase," says federal demographer Stephanie Ventura. "It's a milestone."

She says details about the mothers won't be available until the fall, because all the agency has now is birth certificate data from state health departments.

The last time the number was this high was in 1957, in the middle of the baby boom years; about 78 million Americans were born from 1946 to 1964. Demographers have been monitoring gradual increases in recent years; data for 2006, which won't be made final until September, show a 3% increase over 2005. That's the largest single-year increase since 1989.

"I suspect this is the beginning of a new kind of baby boom, although it's going to be nowhere near the baby boom of the 1950s or '60s," says demographer Arthur Nelson of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "It will be sort of a boomlet."

To be considered a real boom, demographers say, the percentage increases would have to be much larger than the single-digit increases we're seeing now.

The last time there was talk of a boomlet was during the 1980s and '90s. Those babies were sometimes known as "Echo Boomers" and today are called Millennials or Generation Y.

Nelson attributes the 2007 numbers to a "perfect storm" of factors: more immigrants having children, professional women who delayed childbearing until their 40s, and larger numbers of women in their 20s and 30s in the population, keeping the fertility rate high. The average number of births per woman was 2.1 in 2006, the highest since 1971.

"We have three different phenomena around birth happening at the same time," he says.

But family demographer Ronald Rindfuss of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill says there is a bigger question looming than who's having kids.

"From the perspective of schools that have to educate these children, this is a real increase in the number of births and something they're going to have to deal with," he says. But it won't be "the kind of shock that we saw at the beginning of the baby boom. In 1952 and '53, in many parts of the country, schools had to run double sessions. This is a gradual increase."

For more detailed number, visit: www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-07-16-baby-boomlet_N.htm?csp=34?se=yahoorefer

Sunday, June 8, 2008 - No Post!

Sunday, April 27, 2008 - Coke and Free Car? I'm In!

Thailand, Coca-Cola has launched a major end-of-year lucky-draw and redemption campaign called "Coke - Chances for Everyone". The campaign offers prizes worth more than Bt6.5 million and is backed by a Bt30-million advertising and publicity budget. It began on early October and runs to mid-December 2007.

The promotion offers lucky draws for five Mazda 3 sports cars worth Bt899,000 each and 150 Samsung U600 mobile phones worth Bt13,900 each.

Consumers may also collect 10 bottle caps or can ring pulls and redeem them for a Samsung C140 mobile phone that comes with a 300-baht True Move phone card for only Bt1,190. A lucky draw for the Mazda 3 sports cars will be held every two weeks for the duration of the promotion and each week for the Samsung U600 mobile phones, with the first draw on October 15.

To participate, consumers must send one bottle cap or ring pull from a Coke, Coke Zero, Coke Light, Fanta or Sprite drink that has printed on the underside "Take a Chance or Redeem". They should place it in an envelope along with their name, address and telephone number and send it to "Coke - Chances For Everyone", to PO Box 9, Pathum Thani 12000.

I want that campaign here too! Source: Fun Blog

Thursday, April 10, 2008 - Who's the Real Telephone Inventor?

You and I might have been taught that the inventor of telephone is Alexander Graham Bell. It's a common fact, and everybody accepts it. There's even a company named Bell, which I assume named in honor of Graham Bell.

However, there's someone who challenged the credit of telephone invention by Bell. Seth Shulman wrote a book "The Telephone Gambit," that states Elisha Gray was the real inventor, and Bell stole the patent. Pretty intriguing, huh?

Read here for complete news. If you're very interested, you can buy Shulman's book.

Thursday, March 27, 2008 - FBI Forgot to Pay Their Phone Bill

Forgetting something is just human nature. Everybody does that, right? And so does FBI. Read on...

Telecommunications company cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals and terrorist because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday guilt lost connections on the FBI lax oversight of the money in the undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for the wiretaps from a telephone company, a total of 66000 dollars.

"We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

More than half of the 990 bills to pay for the monitoring of telecommunications in five unknown FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows.

Saturday, March 15, 2008 - Reverse Cell Phone Lookup - No More Unknown Phone Numbers

It's been a while since I posted article about prank calls. Now, I'm going to post about reverse cell phone look up. This article is taken from ezine.

Reverse cell phone lookup is something you and I may need to do at times. Almost everyone with a cell phone has experienced receiving phone calls from people we do not know. The person on the other side could be playing a prank on us and make repeated calls. We want to put a stop to it. Or it could be a situation where the person on the other line is a long lost friend and we wish to keep in contact. This is why you need more information about the cell phone number and this is how reverse cell phone lookup comes in.

Why do you want to conduct a reverse cell phone lookup?

Basically, with a reverse cell phone lookup, you can locate the address and name of the caller. This is so useful if you want to find out who is the one making all the prank calls, the home address of an old classmate or who is the gal or guy your partner is talking to secretly.

Though a reverse cell phone lookup is helpful to you, you do need to know which service to use before you conduct a search. If you do a quick search online, you may find some free reverse phone search directories or services. They are completely useless when it comes to searching for numbers other than landline numbers. You will get nothing out of them when you need cell phone numbers or other unlisted numbers. There is therefore a high probability that you will not find what you are looking for.

So where can you do a proper reverse cell phone lookup?

Go for paid services that provide directories for cell phone numbers as well. Like what was mentioned earlier, free directories will only give you landline numbers and not mobile phone numbers. This is because landline numbers are easy to collect and organize since they are public domain property. Mobile numbers on the other hand has to be collated manually and so it costs the services in order to provide such a service to us.

The whole process of signing up with paid services is simple and the search is effortless. All you need to do is to enter the number you are searching for, the area code and 7 digit number and the service will run through its database and return you matched results.

Not all sites are created equal though. Some of the paid services are unable to find the results and yet still charge you for it. But there are of course reputable ones that make it their business and responsibility to offer you a 100% guarantee. Find out from my phone search blog which is the most reliable service to use for reverse cell phone lookup.

Davion does a fair bit of investigative work. Start your reverse cell phone search at his popular phone search blog immediately to discover everything you need to know about the Caller on the Other Line.

It is truly astonishing how many people are looking to run a reverse phone number lookup online today. Visit any popular social networking site or popular discussion forum and you will discover the same question being asked over and over again - how can I run a reverse phone number lookup for free, for cell and residential numbers? What is frustrating is the large number of sites which appear to offer this very service, but in fact once you visit their websites you find they require payment for access. This is a common tactic used by many websites which on the surface offer free services but look more carefully and they do not. What is the true situation with reverse phone number lookups?

A phone number lookup can certainly be very useful, for example where you have noted down a phone number but cannot remember who gave it to you. If the phone number is a residential "landline" phone number it can be possible to use a "reverse lookup" service to find out the owner and address. More difficult however is to perform a similar lookup using a cell phone number. This is because the free directories do not have access to the cell numbers which are controlled independently by the individual cellular carrier companies, and so cannot access this information. Other details such as fax and unlisted numbers can also be impossible to find.

So is it even possible to find this information? On the plus side, there certainly do exist websites which have access to both the residential and cellular carrier number databases, and it is possible to gain access to this information. Unfortunately this information cannot currently be found for free. The phone number records are held by the phone companies who agree to let others access the details for at a price. Third party websites have now appeared which legally gather together huge numbers of different databases and charge users a single one-off membership fee for access, including databases such as cell phone lookups, residential phone lookups, background and people search information, civil and criminal records, and many more. The good news is that once you have access, you can run as many searches and investigations as you want. Information such as phone owner name, address and phone status is included, plus pagers and even unlisted number searches.

One of the advantages of using a paid membership service such as this is the wealth of additional information you can gain access to. For example once you have access you can perform personal background checks and investigations of the sort a private detective would perform. Information to help you find people or family members, lookup business criminal and court records, even birth death and marriage records. In situations where you are suspicious about someone you know you could even run checks for police or sex offender records as part of your membership.

As you may have read in forum discussions and social networking sites when people ask about a reverse phone number lookup, some people provide links which they claim offer this information for free. However having followed these links many times I have still to find one which was real for both cell and residential. In my experience they all lead eventually to the same paid sites. Some may offer a free search, but will then charge for access to the results. Unfortunately in my opinion the only way to access legitimate reverse phone records online is by paying for access to the paid directories, but it is worth remembering that the legitimate lookup sites all offer money back guarantees, so you can be sure they are not scams. It is worth paying a small fee to a professional organisation for that peace of mind.

For the definitive list of the best reverse phone number lookup sites visit Cell-Phone-Pages.com. Cell Phone Pages also contains hundreds of phone and telecommunications articles and resources covering all aspects of cell and residential phone safety, security, accessories and shopping.

Thursday, February 28, 2008 - Long Time No See

It's been a while since the last time I posted, been pretty busy with stuff. AND I managed to sell my Blackberry. Now, I'm waiting for my NEW Blackberry to arrive.

Anyway, here's news for this week: Festival for Mobile Phone Films in Japan

Films made entirely on mobile phones are competing in Japan's First Pocket Film Festival this weekend, with 48 titles in the running for the first prize of 500,000 yen (£2,200).

More than 150 films will be screened at the festival, organised by the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, which is being held in neighbouring Yokohama, said spokesman Yuko Mori.

The longest entry lasts 45 minutes and the briefest less than 60 seconds. The competition entries come from film-makers in 18 countries, mostly in Asia, and cover a wide range of topics, Miss Mori added.

One entry, by a group of school children, was filmed inside a fridge.

"It is really easy to shoot images on a mobile phone, but it's not so easy to make them into a coherent movie," said Miss Mori.

The festival includes workshops for young children by professional movie-makers and there is a wide difference in the quality of the entries.
 

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/12/08/dljapan108.xml

I guess Japanese love their phones so much they use it for pretty much anything. Maybe our society will evolve to something like that soon too... We'll see...

Saturday, February 16, 2008 - Still no Offer...

Well, I got some offer from the ad I put down on Craigslist, but none from the one I put on this blog. I guess, I'm gonna sell it to the highest offer I got on Craigslist then.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - Hmm...

I haven't got any offer on my Blackberry, it's been a week. No one left a comment, nor sent an email to me.  I'm not sure why. Nobody is interested in a Blackberry 8100? It's still working perfectly, no scratch whatsoever... Or maybe, I've been talking to no one all these time, because no one read this blog? Man, this is sad.  

Well, for anyone that reads this blog, and is interested in Blackberry 8100, just leave a comment, and I'll get back to you.

I'm out for now.