Today's telemarketer call...

(caller ID name: Unknown Caller; number: 1) -- 2nd time calling today.

Me: beep! please leave a message.
Caller: (call center static starts to kick in)
Me: Hello, hello?
Caller: (in his muted Indian accent) Hello, is this Adam Howard?
Me: Why, who is this?
Caller: This is Michael. How are you?
Me: Good, how are you?
Michael: Good.
Me: Oh, good, I had been wondering.
Michael: The purpose of this call is to inform you your name and number have been selected to receive a $7,000 dollar grant.
Me: Oh, will that affect my taxes?
Michael: Excuse me?
Me: Will this affect my taxes?
Michael: Yes, you can use this money to pay your bills, or your taxes, or buy a car.
Me: $7000 isn't going to be enough for the car I want. Can you increase the grant?
Michael: What was that?
Me: I'm not going to be able to buy the car I want for just $7,000.
Michael: (catching on that this call is going nowhere) Ok...
(1:40 into the call)

I guess I didn't play along for long enough to keep Michael interested...

You're free, cheesy bread!

Glad to see this commercial's still available...

Dominos - Free Cheesy Bread (2002) - 0:30 (USA)

Android Prank App reviews

Looking to use your Android phone to get more productive? Then these are not the reviews for you. I've reviewed a few apps that will let you play some practical jokes on your friends. 

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Prank - U Broke My Screen! / Droid Smash!

Price: $0.99

The setup: You tell your friend you've found this addictive new game for your phone, so you hand over your phone so they can play it. They tap the phone several times, and then all the sudden, the screen is broken!

Review: Image looks real but isn't full-screen on a Droid. The app disables the Back, Menu and Search buttons. Home button brings up an app chooser list: is that because I have ADW Launcher installed, or what?

Rating: 3 stars

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Shavester

Price: Free

The setup: You sneak up behind your friend and fool them into thinking you're taking an electric razor to their head.

Review: App has a picture of a razor with a spring-loaded switch - when you press the button the phone vibrates and makes a buzzing sound, when you release the button it stops. Points for style, but for ease of use it would be best to let you press anywhere on the screen. I don't think my phone's vibrator is strong enough to fool anybody into thinking it's a razor, though. But if you prep for this prank by making someone think you're going to get them  and shave their head when they least expect it, I think it will do the trick.

Rating: 3 stars

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Smell Scanner

Price: Free (ads)

The setup: You tell your friends your phone has a smell scanner, then wave it around over their body until it detects some stinky odors.

Review: If your friends think there's a smell sensor in your phone, they're gullible indeed. This app basically [pretends to] work as advertised, but it's obnoxious that you're forced to look at ads before and after you run the app.

Rating: 1 star

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Christmas Naughty or Nice

Price: $0.99

The setup: Your phone can detect if someone's naughty or nice

Review: I wouldn't call this a prank app exactly, but I can see it being mildly entertaining for young kids. Would be better if the "full body scanner" actually used the phone's camera to show a picture of who it's scanning. The fingerprint scanner gives your phone a quick buzz to let you know when it detects your finger on the screen. Relevant for the holidays, but the app doesn't really do much.

Rating: 2 stars

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TSA X-Ray Scanner

Price: $0.99

The setup: You tell your friends the TSA made a mobile airport security backscatter imaging app, and a hacker friend broke into their systems and got a copy. Input some settings, point the phone at your friend, it takes a picture then "processes" it into a backscatter X-ray image.

Review: One of the more convincing prank apps I've seen so far, as long as your friend's body type matches one of the available options. The backscatter image isn't *too* revealing, but then, who would expect a handheld device to work as well as the big machines at the airport? Now if the backscatter image revealed something embarrassing/funny, or you could email the backscatter image to your friend, that would certainly be a great addition.

Rating: 4 stars

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Caller ID Faker

Price: Free (audio ads)

The setup: Your friend receives a call from the Whitehouse switchboard. Or the phone company. Or his mom. Or at least, that's what the caller ID says on his end...

Review:  This app gives you access to a service that will spoof your caller ID to whatever number you want to appear on your friend's phone. Enter your friends number, the caller ID to spoof, then sit through a few audio ads before you're connected to your friend. The app requires a lot of permissions to install (and asks for your email address too), but promises that they don't share your personal info.

Rating: 4 stars

Lego Droid Dock

I happened across this forum thread about people who created docks for their Droid phones using Legos. In particular, I liked this one by HoboDroid:

So I pulled my Rubbermaid tub of Legos out of the cellar and found all the pieces to make something pretty similar:

Same basic design, but mine has a channel for the charger cord to run to the back, plus I discovered I had actual Lego magnets, so I used one of those.

Now I just need to find the pieces to make a second one for at work...

How many full moons does it take to fill the sky?

Go outside and take a look at how big the moon is. If you don't, you'll probably overestimate how big the moon is. How many moons do you think it takes to fill the sky?

For the answer, skip ahead to page 203 of this article. How close was your guess?

Hello, Gmail calling...

Yesterday, the Google Voice team announced a cool integration with Gmail: the ability to place and receive phone calls in your web browser. Just install the latest voice and video plugin, and viola! Free (for now?) phone calls from your browser.

But why Gmail? Wouldn't it be logical to have put the ability to do voice calls inside the Google Voice webapp, not the Gmail webapp?

I suspect they did it for a couple reasons. First, the plugin was already built into Gmail, which could do voice and video chat. So perhaps it was less work to do the integration this way than to build a chat plugin into Google Voice.

Second, Gmail has a much larger user base than Google Voice. Tease all the Gmail users with free phone calls from your computer, and maybe you can build up the GV user base too. Especially if you can get people who make paid international calls on board, you can use that revenue to fund free calls in the contiguous USA.

Third, this gives Google the flexibility to completely fold Google Voice into Gmail. Rather than maintain two separate interfaces, Google could in time merge them into a single interface. I mean, they're already doing realtime chat, text messaging, AOL instant messenger, voice chat, video chat and email in one place. If they can keep it easy to use, why not add phone calls too?

Will this attract enough users to keep GV viable? I hope so. Google seems to be betting a lot on it, giving the GV team access to a pretty prominent spot in one of their most widely-used services.

Office plant

I think this may be the first time in my career that I've had a plant in my office at work. 

Can you reuse check numbers?

The short answer is Yes, you can write multiple checks with the same check number.

A slightly longer answer is that my bank lets me, and so I'm guessing probably yours will let you too.

Fewer and fewer people use checks to pay for things nowadays, but the other day I got to wondering what happens if you use the same check number more than once. For example, maybe your last check was 1249, and you order new checks starting at 1200. What happens when you write checks with numbers you've already used before?

At least where I bank, the stuff that's normally supposed to happen happens -- the money goes out of your account and to whomever cashed the check. They don't care if you use the same check number more than once. The only warning they had for me is that while they let you download the image of cashed checks from their online banking website, if you reuse a number, only the image of whichever of that number was cashed first will be available to download. 

Tacky license plate frame idea

The other day I saw a license plate frame that said:

Photographers

Do it in a dark room

Today I came up with a frame idea for libertarians:

Libertarians

Do it in the free market

And capitalists:

Capitalists

Do it for mutual benefit

Neither of those is listed in this 'Do It' Professional Trades Guide, so I'm assuming I'm the first one to come up with these new additions to the list of potential tacky license plate frames. I apologize in advance for making the internet just a little more tacky.

Cones

But do you think they used enough cones?

I swear I'm not a crazy cat person...

But check out this crazy thing I did for my cat.

Madison's litter box was being evicted from what will soon be Paige's bathroom, so we needed a new place to put it. With our dog constantly on the lookout for some tasty morsels (eew), options were limited. The litter box had previously been off-limits to Molly the beagle using a pet gate. Finding a new location wouldn't be easy. But I like a good challenge.

The solution turned out to be perfect -- put the litter box in our bathroom cabinet! Out of the way where the dog can't reach it, out of sight, and as an added bonus I'd get to cut a big hole in the wall. And run electrical.

For access, Madison goes through a tunnel in the wall (boxed in and framed with wood trim). The motion-activated LED night light turns on if it's dark enough, and off again after 90 seconds of inactivity. It's wired through the GFCI outlet, so Madison doesn't need to worry about splashing the outlet (but I hope she doesn't).

How does she like it? A lot! It's fun to climb through wall tunnels.

The only downside? You don't want to open the drawer above right after she's done her business, it lets all the STINK out!

Someday when we move, someone's gonna wonder why there's a hole in the bathroom wall. Already got that one covered: I'll put the shelf back in the cabinet, which happens to be right at the level of the bottom of the tunnel. Stick a couple rolls of toilet paper there, and voila! It's a super convenient place to store extra TP so you don't need to worry about running out.

Blogger now lets you post to your blog by txt msg. Neat. ...

Eau de Eeewww

Who gets their lotion out of a sewer? Gross.

My Public Facebook Profile

Here's what Facebook tells the world about Adam Howard. Mostly just who/what I'm a fan of, along with a picture of me:

Fortune

Has Yoda taken a job in China writing for fortune cookies?

Try again.

Error message from an email system to remain nameless:

Or to paraphrase: "You've tried too many times, but not too many enough."

UPDATE: So I tried again:

Or in other words: "Haha, sucker."

BEAR ZUM?

The California DMV website says: "The Department has the right to refuse any combination of letters and/or letters and numbers that may carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency"...I think they didn't exercise their right this time.

Evil Megabytes

If I were on the Google Gmail team, I would have tweaked the algorithm that assigns storage space to skip from 6,659 MB to 6,670 MB of storage space. I wonder how many superstitious people would avoid using Gmail if they knew it had the number of the beast in the storage space on the site?

Can you identify this face?

Hint: It's somewhere in Orange County.

Renting Beer

"You can never buy beer, you just rent it." -- Archie Bunker

You have probably heard this saying or some variation of it, right? Well I got to thinking this evening...has any bar, pub or tavern ever made a gimmick out of this? I'm thinking something to the effect of charging you a "deposit" for each beer you order, which gets returned to you after you visit the bathroom.

I can think of at least a couple variations on this: maybe your deposit isn't paid back to you, but you get credits toward a free beer. Or maybe the deposit could go towards your tip, if you prefer. Maybe the flushing mechanism for the toilet/urinal triggers a ticket to spit out of a machine (like skeeball at Chucky Cheese's).

Anyone visited a bar that does something like this? If so, let me know!