I had a bunch of Louis Vuitton gift boxes lying around the house from last Christmas that I decided to recycle them into something a little more useful.  These gift boxes are pretty nice so it seemed like a waste to just throw them out.  Stacking them on their sides and suddenly — instant stylish mini-drawer for your desk.

I didn’t want to glue them together so I just tied them together with the original ribbon they came with.

This works with other gift boxes too of course, assuming they’re appropriate dimensions.

I’ve reviewed Mozy before and found it to be the best back-up solution.  2.5 gigabytes isn’t much space by today’s standards but it’s more than enough to store important documents and files offsite.  Backing up everything to an external hard drive is a good idea but if some sort of accident (e.g. fire, earthquake) damages your computer, chances are, your external hard drive will be lost too! That’s why it’s also important to keep at least one extra copy of your back-up offsite.

Not to mention, it’s one of the only online back-up services available for Mac OS

Enter referral code T3DN37 to get the bonus 512 megs of space (full disclosure: I’ll get a 512 meg bonus as well).  This offer ends January 10, 2010.

‘;UPDATE TAXRATE SET RATE = 0 WHERE NAME = ‘EDVIN SYSE’

That’s right! Their new company name is an SQL injection attack!  Luckily for the Norwegian industry, they took the appropriate steps to prevent SQL injection attacks so it didn’t affect them directly.  I’m sure the funny guys over at Syse Data weren’t legitimately trying to evade paying taxes, but just wanted to have some fun.

They were asked to change that name though since their little charade caused a lot of buzz and generated too much traffic to the Norwegian registry and they weren’t able to handle it.

Dual Screen Madness
First, Lenovo announced an option for a secondary 10.6″ 768×1280 monitor to their line of W700 workstation/desktop replacement laptops.

Dual monitor on a laptop! That is a dream come true for me and workplaces all around the world since adding a secondary monitor is the biggest productivity booster!

Weighing in at 10 lbs, it’ll be quite a workout to move this around day to day but the tradeoff is well worth it if you only move your laptop once in a while.

Thinner and Lighter than Air
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Dell mentioned that their new line of computers, the Dell Adamo will be coming soon and may be thinner and lighter than the Macbook Air and as much as $400 cheaper!

No other details are available at this point but I have a feeling it’s going to be an exciting 2009 for technology!

What do you think? Dual screen on a laptop too much?  Thinner than Macbook Air unnecessary? Can’t be too thin or have too much monitor real estate in my opinion!

It won’t completely eliminate all unsolicited calls however.  The following organizations will still be able to call you:

• Registered charities asking for donations
• Newspapers selling subscriptions
• Political parties and their candidates
• Companies that you have dealt with in the previous 18 months (i.e. to follow up on an order)

Aside from those exceptions, you can expect all other telemarketing calls to stop.  If you don’t want the above calls either, you can ask them to put you on their own do not call list whenever they first call.

I was a little weary about this at first but having gone to the site, it is a legitimate site owned by the Government of Canada so I do think it will work and will be enforced.

United States
If you’re from the US, you guys are a little bit ahead.  You’ve had the Do Not Call Registry since February 2008 which works in much the same way.

Basically, he is trying to raise $1000 for the skydive.  Anyone that donates at least a $1 to his cause will be entered in a draw for a whole bunch of sponsored prizes (including mine!).

Currently, the prize pool is worth over $2500 and you only need to donate $1 for a chance to win!

You can contact Sean if you want to sponsor a prize for his competition.  Not only will you get a few backlinks from his blog, he will even print your logo/URL on the shirt that he’s going to wear while skydiving!

Go over to smemon.com and check it out!

With the Beijing 2008 Olympics coming to a close, it was also nice to see that the closing ceremonies were almost as spectacular as the opening ceremonies!

Many people were there including many world leaders, celebrities and of course the athletes.  And it looks like the dark lord Sauron (from Lord of the Rings) was watching as well!

Lets see if our athletes are brave enough to try some of Beijing’s delicacies… go Team Canada!

If all you need a data plan for is to check your e-mail, then maybe there is a free alternative.

Requirements

• Cell phone capable of receiving text messages (pretty much all cellphones)
• Free unlimited (or very many) incoming text messages
• A carrier that offers E-mail to SMS messaging
• An e-mail account with forwarding capabilities (pretty much all e-mail services)

WIth most cellular service carriers, receiving text messages is free and only outgoing text messages cost money.  And if your provider offers E-mail to SMS, then you can take advantage of these two facts to get your e-mail on your cell phone for free!

In fact, you’ll be receiving a notification almost instantaneously (much like push e-mail) so you don’t need to be actively checking your e-mail!

Step 1: Find your carrier’s E-mail to SMS Gateway address
Most carriers offer this service which allows e-mails sent to a special e-mail address to be forwarded as a text message to your phone.  For example, with Verizon, if you send an e-mail to:

9876543210@vtext.com

The e-mail will be forwarded as a text message to (987) 654-3210.

To find what e-mail address your carrier uses, check out this extensive list on Wikipedia.

Step 2: Forward your E-mail to the Gateway address

Set up your personal e-mail account to forward a copy of your e-mails to the gateway address from step 1. In Gmail, you can find the setting under Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Forwarding.

Alternatively, if you’re using Gmail, you can also set up a filter to forward only specific e-mails to your cell phone.  That way you won’t get bombarded with text messages if your daily volume of e-mails is large.

And that’s it! Just two simple steps to get your e-mails on your cell phone.

Things to Note
My carrier is Rogers and they offer 1000 free incoming text messages but E-mail to SMS isn’t free.  Instead, what happens is they only inform me who is sending me an email and I need to reply ‘read’ to get the content of the actual email.  If I had unlimited outgoing text messages then this would essentially be free but instead it costs of 15 cents to read a message.  Nonetheless, I’m happy with just knowing that I’ve received an email and who sent it.

Also, I had to send a reply of ‘Yes’ upon the delivery of the first message to subscribe to the service (subscription is free, minus the cost of sending the reply of ‘Yes’).

Finally, some carriers let you reply to e-mails or send e-mails through text messages by formatting the message in a certain way.  I’ve personally never tried it but there are some basic instructions here.

Anyway, in North America, you can find hot dog stands on almost every corner in metropolitan areas — also affectionately known as “street meat”.

I had the opportunity to visit Beijing for a week and got to experience their version of street meat… this is not for the faint of heart!

In Beijing, there is a popular street full of vendors that sell various types of street meat. Disclaimer: I took pictures of this myself but my pictures weren’t complete nor as clear so the following pictures are taken off an e-mail forward I received.

This is the street I mentioned. All the vendors wear the same uniform and they all sell different foods. Most of the stuff was surprisingly inexpensive. Most skewers were between $1 to $5 USD.

Let’s start off with some seafood… we have some deep fried star fish, baby sharks and sea urchins.

Who would have thought my first time seeing a seahorse would be on a skewer.

The meat popsicle on the top left is actually vulture meat. Lower left we have some sea snakes. Top right we have lobsters on a stick (I think) and on the lower right, we have silk worm cocoons. I’ve been told sillk worm cocoons are pretty tasty since they’re deep fried — its just like eating a potato chip.

Here we have one of the vendors trying to entice passing customers into eating a snake on a stick.

These tiny scorpions on a stick look kind of sweet actually — I wonder if their tails are still poisonous…

This delicious looking stew is actually made from horse meat!

Here, dog liver is served on a stick with vegetables to make it look more colorful and appetizing.

Apparently, this is goat lung and red pepper skewer.

The above is described as dog brain soup. I’m not sure how correct that statement is.

Much larger black scorpions as well as beetles on a stick.

Lizard legs… looks more like baked cheese on spaghetti to me.

Before anyone starts saying how gross and disgusting some of this stuff is, there really is no difference eating say… salmon and eating a sea snake. They’re both just animals of the ocean. The real difference comes from what types of food we’re used to and what animals we put on a pedestal in our society. For example, we keep dogs as pets so it seems despicable to eat them for food… aside from that, is eating a dog that different from eating a cow?

That being said, I didn’t dare eat a SINGLE thing from there… I didn’t have the guts (nor stomach) for it. So I can’t give a fair assessment of the taste.

Anyway, most of the above are NOT things that the Chinese eat on a day to day basis. In fact, I consider this street to be more of a tourist attraction than anything. If you ever visit Beijing, be sure to visit it for the shock factor.