“It was almost instinct — off training,” Petry said of his response to the situation. “It was probably going to kill all three of us. I had time to visually see the hand grenade. And I figure it’s got about a four-and-half second fuse, depending on how long it has been in the elements and the weather and everything and how long the pin has been pulled. I figure if you have time to see it you have time to kick it, throw it, just get it out there.”

That’s when Petry picked up the grenade and threw it away from him and his buddies. As it turns out, he did have the time to save all three of their lives — but not time to save his hand.

The grenade exploded as he threw it — destroying his throwing arm.

Via Gizmodo / Army

[Edit: Some disagree with my opinion above. To reiterate, I believe that internet access is a right, and an essential utility that’s needed in today’s life. That’s not supported in any legal definition in the US (though Finland recently made it a point of law, and the United Nations believes broadband access is a basic human right), but I do believe that most people would intuitively agree. Put another way, internet access long ago passed the stage of “new tech that’s interesting” to “something everyone uses and assumes you have”. Hence my electricity and water points – I believe internet falls in the same vein, and also think the current battles/discussions over the ability to control the internet are emblematic of that.]

Personally, I would be going crazy if this happened to me! This just isn’t acceptable by any standards. This needs to change.

Read more over at Ozymandias.com and Kotaku.com

Installed and working here!

The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. (Rhapsody in Grey?)

This new software update for tablet pc’s may be the deciding factor for myself to get a tablet, as I’ve been holding off as I didn’t see the tablet as a “useful enough” tool for everyday whatever.

Also may have been easily overlooked, introducing The New Web Based Android Market, which in turn makes me a happier android user.

The New Web Based Android Market

Yes, I know. Too cute to pass up.
First pic for the photo blogging portion of my blog.

Sooner or later a new WordPress theme will come, along with a post with resources on where to look for a new one.

Feel free to comment your suggestions and links!

This is soo true in more than one way!

He’s got a book coming out soon.

Source: Care2

Also the new Macbook Air - Wow!

When it comes to graphic design, Adobe Photoshop is usually the first option to consider. However, the software itself is a quite tough nut to crack — and definitely extremely hard to master. For instance, the concepts are not always intuitive and it’s not always clear when to use what tool and how to use it effectively. In fact, in Photoshop it usually takes pretty much time to achieve something you have never done before.

However, you don’t need to muddle through numerous Photoshop features and extensions for every design problem. You can use professional suggestions instead, e.g. professional step-by-step tutorials which provide excellent results and thus can save you a lot of time.

View list of Adobe Photoshop Tutorials (Best Of)

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Here’s a great tune being played on a single guitar with 2 musicians.

Apparently this woman (the blonde in the video) scammed 2 people into thinking they were buying 2 cell phones and received 2 photos of cell phones instead. Then the scammer opts to go on Judge Judy!
Beware of eBay scammers!

Jott™ is a revolutionary new service that automatically converts your voice into e-mail and text messages—anytime, anywhere, with any cell phone. Jott™ makes you more productive and efficient by capturing your ideas, notes to self, tasks, and more without using your keypad.

I’ve found Jott to be extremely helpful in a couple different situations:

• It’s much easier to Jott someone a response instead of texting when you’re in the middle of driving / riding / running around.
• You are out and about and need to remind yourself of something for later.
• It’s great to track expenses with Xpenser using Jott!
• You can use it to blog a post!!
• You can use it with Twitter, Jaiku, Blogs, Zillow, Yahoo Groups, 30 Boxes, Remember the milk, Tumblr, and the list goes on and on! Look here!

If you are like me, it takes me way too long to text someone a response or have conversations using texting on a cell phone, Jott makes it easy, and that I can appreciate!

Did I already mention that it’s FREE?
Check out Jott for your everyday use!

We were fed up with how painful expense reports and tracking were. After many experiments we found a workable solution: record expenses as soon as they happen and forget about them.

Xpenser lets you do just that – record expenses via whatever means are available to you quickly and painlessly. Send them in via Email, SMS, IM, or voice (call a number and say your expense). Use the Web interface to edit and finalize them, and be done with them. No more forgetting your cash expenses, no more half-day expense entry sessions.

It’s one of those easy to use “Fire and Forget” tools that make it a super tool for me. You don’t have to tinker with too much to put down your expense and move on. Xpenser gives you several ways to insert your data quickly and painlessly including Twitter, Aim, Jott, SMS and email!

Now, without going into too much detail, what makes this a ultra cool tool is the fact that I can use Jott to submit my expenses to Xpenser on the run by cell. The combination of these two awesome resources makes it a must have for anyone who wants to track expenses. I’ll get into Jott on my next post.

Keep track of your expenses using Xpenser!

Songza is the brainchild of 23-year-old Aza Raskin — the president of Chicago-based software company Humanized, Inc., and the son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin. Over the course of a month, he and Humanized’s Web/Systems Architect Scott Robbin worked weekends to bring the idea to life. The site launched on November 8, 2007 and instantly generated significant buzz around the world. Hundreds of bloggers and news writers have praised its elegant user interface, beautiful design, and all-around utility.

Like all good ideas, both the concept and design came to Aza while he was in the shower.

Songza lets you search your favorite artists or songs and gives you the ability to actually listen to it right there (imagine that!). For each individual tune, it let’s you share, watch the YouTube video, rate it, and add to playlist along with a few other options. The playlist is saved for when you stop by the website at another time.. no registration required!

I just tried to embed the player on this post, but it totally distorted my page. Maybe they’ll fix that soon? It’s still in beta, so keep that in mind! Overall, I think this is a great service and I’m extremely happy that I can now search for a favorite song and listen on demand.

Check out Songza!

So far, it’s been pretty stable for me, I like the fact that I have an overview of all my social services on the sidebar including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook. It does support additional services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Piczo, and Photobucket. Plus it supports several blogging platforms with a built in blog editor. Let’s not forget a Photo Uploader and Feed reader too!

There’s some interesting features that I’m not used to yet, but I do think it’s neat, like clicking on the “Media Bar” opens a strip across the top showing Flickr photos or any of your choice of media streams available online.

Overall, I’m finding something new to play with everyday and it’s somewhat refreshing dealing with a different browser. I’ve downloaded Flock in the past, but it was just too buggy to continue using, although this time around, it’s more stable.

It’s a free download, feel free to try it yourself.

Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards — no strings attached — for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.

Read more about Android

From YouTube:

Found this in the back room of my old job. It was titled “YO MS Raps!” MS-DOS 5.0 was the first version available in a retail package. Looks like MS spent a few $$$ to produce the effects in this video to promote it.

And wait about 10 secs.. (or until something happens). You won’t be disappointed!

It was brought to my attention by Chris Pirillo, thanks!

This release is not just a revolution for us in Linux, but a revolution for the Skype world at large. No longer are we, the people of Linux, prevented from socializing in the same way as our peers.

Read about the new Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux and download!

Anyway, one of the things that make this little pc so great, is that it comes with a very easy to use linux interface that most people can use. As for people like me who like to be confused more often with more advanced features, there is a way to get a full desktop out of this.

Here are some great instructions on how to give yourself a fully functional linux desktop (Xandros) and use the little bugger the way it was meant to be used.

Now, it won’t be easy for the novice user, but it isn’t impossible either!

We say no, easy way, because it turns out you can pull up a terminal in easy mode and use apt-get. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do in order to enable the full desktop. You could just use apt-get to install all the software your heart desires without ever enabling full desktop mode. It would certainly save you a few MB of precious memory (while the Eee PC has 4GB of solid state storage, only about 1.3GB is available, since the OS eats up a large chunk). But it’s also more of a headache to do everything from the command line if you’re used to graphical user interfaces.

Thanks to Brad Linder at DownloadSquad.com!
Read how to get the most out of your Eee PC.

I’ve added Twitter tools to my blog. I felt this was the better option out of the few that are out there for Twitter junkies like me.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

He makes many good points in this presentation.

read more | digg story

Gerry was also on Jimmy Kimmel Live performing this same song.