The stupidity of local retailers or Why Amazon is my store of choice.

A short rant about local retailers. Today I went to Autozone to pickup a new cabin air filter for my car. I had to search through a 4 inch book to find the product number for the part that I needed and then search through an unorganized shelf to only find that the part I needed wasn't on the shelf. After about five minutes of waiting for assistance someone was able to pull the part from the back. While I was waiting on the employees to assist I pulled up the exact same part on Amazon and found it's price of $14.03 with tax, free shipping. When Autozone rang up the part it was just shy of $20.00 with tax. I asked if they would price match with Amazon. I figured I had a shot at this since Amazon was forced to start collecting sales tax to make a more level playing field with local retailers. The manager had to be called over to do the price match and once he learned I was getting the price from Amazon informed me that they do not price match with online stores. I thanked them for their time and promptly left the store.

Seriously local retailers, if you argued that amazon was kicking your ass because of sales tax they weren't collected I think it's a bit in bad taste to not price match with them. You wanted a level playing field, now act like it. They have better pricing than you on some items. If you want me to go through the inconvenience of coming to your store, searching through unorganized messes, wait for assistance then you better start price matching too. I would have taken a slight discount on the item, but since I don't need the part right away, I'd rather just save the $6 and have it shipped to my house for free with I use my time to do other things.

/rant

Cool Speach

http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-speech-from-1983-foreshadowing-wireless-networking-the-ipad-and-the-app-store/

Let's help Stephanie Curb Stomp Cancer!

Everyone,

As you know, our dear friend, Stephanie Markham Mingehas been curb stomping cancer for quite a while now. And I gotta say, she has been doing an amazing job! As things stand right now, she needs to get an oral chemo pill and ishaving issues with getting insurance approval to cover the cost of the treatment. Since time is of the essence she has decided to pay for the meds out of pocket. It's not a cheap prescription to say the least. Many of y'all have expressed interest in helping out in one way of another. With the Mingie's approval I have set up a paypal account to help defray some of the costs they will be incurring for the treatment. If you are able to contribute I know it will be very well received by them.

The paypal account is chemofund@gmail.com.

Let's work together to help Stephanie curb stomp cancer!

Note the paypal will say you sent me, Bryan Brooks, the money. However,
the money will go directly to the Steph and Sammy, I'm just administering
the account for them. Also, remember any money sent to this account
are gifts and not charitable donations.

Thanks! Please pass this on to anyone you know who would be willing to contribute.

To learn more about Stephanie's story go see her blog:http://minge411.xanga.com/

Thanks!

-b

Give this project some love!

I'm super psyched about this project. I want YOU to be equally as excited about this project!
A fellow Sarcoma survivor is using her creative skills and experience with cancer to inspire and help others, awesome right? Go watch their video and read their project page. If you feel like this is a good
thing, give them some money. They more they get the faster this project can come to life.

Go check it out on Kickstarter!

THIS!

This is pretty much the best explanation I've seen on the subject of cancer, it's treatment, and how you feel afterward.

What I've got on my iDevice

I often get asked what Apps I use on my various devices. Here is a break down based on category. Feel free to share what apps you find awesome in the comments. I'll add more to this post later.

iOS

Look
Hulu.plus
Netflix
Apple Trailers App
TWiT (A video podcast network I watch, it's pretty niche tech oriented)
HDWallpapers: A great app with nice, hires images for your lock and home screen.

Play
Infinity Blade I and II (Jaw dropping Hack / Slash)
Galaxy on Fire 2 HD (Beautiful Space adventure game)
Zenonia (Think SNES RPG)

Reading
Flipboard: This turns RSS feeds into a beautiful magazine type interface. I've tried others but always come back to Flipboard.
Comixology: A great app for reading / buying comics. With the new iPad they have added super high res versions of the comics and they are beautiful.
iBooks and Kindle App for standard books.


Creation
Garageband
Keynote: I mainly use this for presenting keynote presentations I made on my Mac. You can make presentations here but I'm not fully comfortable with that yet.
iPhoto: an iOS version of iPhoto, in my opinion it's much better than the OS X version.
PSTouch: an iOS version of Photoshop
Evernote: I could go on for hours on how much I love evernote. For more on Evernote here are several blog posts I've made about it already. I'm starting to use it even more, to the point to where it's becoming my primary word proc and I use Pages to clean things up if what I'm writing will be used in some professional setting.
MindJet: A good mind mapping program.
Things: A good GTD Productivity app

Utilities
iTAP RDP:  A good remote desktop app. not flashy, gets the job done.
Airport Utility: great for administrating airport devices on your network.

Research
WolframAlpha an iOS version of the WolframAlpha website. I like asking it odd ball questions.

GPS
TomTom: This is my favorite iOS GPS app, it has great voice directions, weekly OTA map updates, and realtime traffic. When traffic is bad in town I'll use it simply to find faster routes.

Hack more time at Panera's WIFI during peak hours

Panera Bread restricts it's free WIFI to 30 minutes during "peak hours". This is an oddity to me sense the purpose of WIFI is to keep the customer in the restaurant longer and buy more foods. However, a little MAC address spoofing gets around this restriction quite easily. In this post I will detail the steps to do this in OS X. It's very possible to also do this in Windows and Linux but I'll leave that to others.

First, this procedure requiers use of the terminal and root access to your machine. You can easily blow up your stuff so proceed with caution.

1. Drop to a terminal
2. Issue the command ifconfig and make note of your WIFI cards interface name. On my Macbook air it was en0. Also, make note of the existing Mac address in case you need to revert.
3. sudo ifconfig (Interface name from step 2) ether . I personally just incremented the last letter by 1. 
4. reset your wifi radio in the GUI or by issuing the terminal commands: sudo ifconfig down and then sudo ifconfig up.

You should may have to restart your browser at this point. But the WIFI APs at Panera Bread will think you are a new computer and give you another 30 minutes of time. Enjoy.