Halloween In August + Friday Fun + Software Giveaways

I wasn’t going to say anything but, it was two weeks ago when I first noticed Halloween paraphernalia for sale in some local stores. Now, it is in all the stores I’ve seen, even the hardware store. And the little kids are already excited and eager. (Well.. the little girl whose mom was ahead of me in line at the hardware store yesterday was certainly eager. [She wants to be a witch.][Because of the kewel hat.])

Two weeks ago it was August. Yesterday, it was early September.
The way I remember it.. Halloween happens the last day of OCTOBER. Or thereabouts.
In other words, retailers trotted out their holiday specialty wares ten weeks (which I think is more than two months’ time) early.

If you are a retailer and you did this, I, for one, say shame on you. It’s still summer, and this is a fall holiday. And you reek of greed and crass commercialism. Have you no decorum? No class? Is the dollar all you think about? What’s next, Christmas in July? “Everyone else is doing it” is never good reasoning, IMHO.

I sometimes wonder if I am all alone in my thinking, so.. a quick poll, please.

Bah! Humbug! I know we’re in a rough economy, but, sheeze!

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you some Friday Fun

Please.. if you have to try that, try it outdoors? Um, nowhere near any digital devices, please? (Or you may need to read How To Rescue A Drowned Device*)

Bonus For Reading All The Way Down To Here

• For a limited time, Digiarty Software, Inc is giving away free copies of WinX Blu-ray Decrypter ($50 retail.)

“WinX Blu-ray Decrypter is able to decrypt any Blu-ray video disc, even encrypted with recent AACS MKB v25, BD+ and BD-Live, etc., and transform 3D Blu-ray to 2D video. It comes with 2 copy methods – Full Disc Backup and Main Title copy modes. You can get decrypted Blu-ray folder or HD M2TS videos on the hard drive.” Read more.. (get your copy)

• For a limited time, BDlot is giving away, free, All-in-one BDlot Video Media Suite Giveaway

Competently make all your SD/HD videos playable everywhere

Make your DIY movie/music from YouTube with one-click

Create DVDs from Camcorder, Portable Gadgets or any video clips

(You need to scroll down a bit.) Read more.. (get your copy)

A reading reco: A Stylus for Your Tablet PC or Touchscreen Phone

“Following the purchase of my tablet PC (Toshiba Thrive – see review), the one tool I went for to make my tablet computer experience more enjoyable (and cleaner) was an omni-directional” capacitive stylus.” Read more..

Today’s quote: “A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” ~ Roald Dahl

Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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Fools Rush In… (aka "Let’s Go Slate-boarding!")

Those who know me personally, know that a little thing like last week’s predictions setback (25% accuracy) is not going to stop me from continuing to post my Playoff Picks…

And Now For The Tech:
It has been published that sales of PC’s was better than expected this holiday season – Intel and Acer doing particularly well.

Yes. I said Acer. The big sellers were a relative newcomer to the PC market, the category of small, portable, “netbooks” (see, It’s Time We Talked About Netbooks) of which the Acer models seemed to be preferred. It seems everybody wants a netbook.

And Then Came Apple.. And CES

More predictions: But netbooks and Christmas sales are ancient history already, and everybody’s looking ahead. And the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is where we get to see what the manufacturers will be bringing us soon.

It seems our future is something called a “slate”.

Photo source: Gizmodo.com

* Apple’s next “big thing” is supposed to be something named “iSlate”.
* Microsoft is hyping Windows 7’s “touchscreen” features.
* iPhone sales were ginormous, and everyone figured it was the ‘touchscreen’ that explained it.
* “gestures” and “multitouch” are seen as replacing the mouse and eventually the keyboard…

In spite of the fact that this all is vaguely reminiscent of the “voice recognition” and text-to-speech of Windows XP (that was supposed to give us “hands free computing“), you add up those bullet points, and you are not surprised when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer uses his CES Keynote Address to show us a tablet PC.. and refer to it as a “slate”. (As well he could, it was an HP prototype named “the Slate”.)

Reaction?
“The HP Slate was underwhelming, to say the least. Hailed by Ballmer as “something that’s almost as portable as a phone and that’s as powerful as a PC running Windows 7“, the demonstration showed a flat panel computing device that seemed more equivalent to a color Kindle than to a Windows 7 wonder-tablet.”

Yes.. the utter prior failure of tablet PC’s in the marketplace was simply due to the fact that touchscreen and gestures weren’t here yet. Windows 7 changes that, so… touch tablets. Oops. Excuse me. Touch slates.

For those of you who read this far, this article: HP Slate Lowers the Bar for Apple’s Tablet PC.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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