Michael L. - ACME Widgets Rep

If you're addicted to your blackberry... - This is my favorite site dedicated to all things blackberry. It was started by one of my best friend's childhood schoolmates and has grown into the premiere destination for blackberry users. The site publishes the latest news and updates in the smartphone market, and supports a vibrant forum community. I particularly like their reviews.

Kevin, the community manager, was one of the first people to get his hands on the highly anticipated Blackberry Bold, which should be coming out later this year. Apparently, he paid an arm and a leg on eBay to purchase one of the three that were available. You can read the review here:

http://crackberry.com/blackberry9000

This phone looks incredible and in my opinion will be hands down the best phone out in the market! I'm not sure when it will be released to the public, but in the meantime, I'll just have to keep getting my crackberry fix by reading about it on this site.

Great way to tour around Napa Valley without having to drive - I used this company a few months ago and the service was spectacular. The chauffeur was fun to talk with and extremely accommodating. We rented a 16-person limo bus, which was great because it doesn't feel as cramped and the bench seating allows you to face your friends the whole time. They let you to put in your own CDs into the speaker system and also provide unlimited bottles of water (which comes in handy when you are doing a lot of drinking, or if it's really hot outside). They also gave us three FREE bottles of very nice champagne, which we drank throughout the day between wineries. Overall, a great service that truly makes you feel special while you're using them.

California Wine Tours charges by the hour, so if you want, they'll pick you up from San Francisco, but remember that you'll be paying for the commute. We got a discounted rate at $125/hour and maximized our time by having the limo meet us in the morning at the V. Sattui winery. Then we spent the rest of the day doing our own tour by having the limo simply drive us around to the wineries we had mapped out for ourselves.

I highly recommend this service for birthdays, bachelorette parties, or just something different to do with your friends. And for the environmentally-conscious, they just rolled out their new hybrid fleet, so you can feel responsible while getting your wine fix.

Hypermiling website that provides tips to double your gas mileage! - Wayne Gerdes, who leads the current hypermiling movement to curb fuel consumption, started and runs this website with lots of tips on how to save gas. Some of the techniques, however, are not for the feint of heart. Wayne is able to get up to 50 mpg on his Honda Accord, but it involves stuff like shutting down your engine on the freeway and coasting at low speeds!

The site also has a lot of practical content, as well as a loyal and active community of fellow "environmentalists" (read: people tired of paying $4.50 for a gallon of gas).

Best customizable online cards - This website has the coolest online card offering on the web today. While the selection is not huge, they allow you to put in the faces of your friends and family directly into the cards! It's hilarious! And it's super easy to use -- the interface is very clean and simple for uploading faces from pictures and putting them into really funny cards.

I just created the Snowball Fight card for my family and it took me only 10 minutes. They got a huge kick out of it when they saw it. I absolutely love the application and will use this site for all my online cards in the future.

Best celebrity gossip site! - always has the most recent breaking news that no other news site can get! This site is as good as it gets... i love it!

The best list for electronic music - this site is the best place to look at who's hot on the dj charts. I am a big trance fan and i think it's great that year in and year out, the trance djs top the list. Will anybody unseat the dutch masters?

I am also a house fan, so i appreciate the presence of sasha. Another favorite of mine is his protege, james zabiela.

Anybody out there know of any other good dj lists?

Greatest online video offering today - CNN has done it once again with CNN Pipeline, a great video product that offers three concurrent streams of video content. It is offered in both a downloadable or web-based package and boasts one of the easiest, most intuitive video interfaces out today. Watch out YouTube! If CNN starts offering user-generated content, your kitten video days are numbered...

A website that discusses technology for baby boomers seems like a great idea, but ElderGadget falls well short of executing on that vision. I am assuming that this site is modeled after engadget, based on its name and layout, but after a few minutes browsing the site, I was very disappointed by the quality of the content and the depth of the reviews. Most of the product reviews simply list out specs and product features, with no commentary on how it might be particularly well suited for seniors. The site also offers brain games and cartoons for the elderly, but I find them a bit patronizing. Perhaps the most useful features are the how-to guides which explain things like getting on to the internet or changing your computer settings. All-in-all, a very poorly designed website which doesn't do a good job of truly catering to the audience for which it was made.

I just went through the free trial of Carbonite to see if it was any good compared to my current online backup service, Mozy. Online storage and online backup solutions have come a long way over the past few years and there are a lot of new players in the field. So when Mozy decided to up their prices, I started looking for a new alternative.

The interface for the Carbonite product is pretty neat -- it's very simple and it puts a little icon on each folder or file to tell whether it is backed up, waiting to be backed up, or not set to be backed up. I also like their scheduling options, which lets you set as many scheduling rules as you want. Lastly, this is one of the few online backup services that still supports unlimited storage.

What I don't like about Carbonite is the fact that it will not back up certain types of files. Who are they to tell me which files can and can not be backed up? If I want to back up some random system file on my computer, why can't I? In my opinion, an online backup solution should as closely mimic using an external hard drive as possible, but just be more secure. Otherwise, what's the point and why should I spend so much more money? (You can get a terabyte of external storage for roughly the same price as one year of online storage.)

Another issue is that for the free trial, it does not automatically back up your music files. So I will have to repeat the same days-long tortuous process once I actually sign up for the service. Finally the deal breaker -- in order for Carbonite to back up video files, you have to manually select them one by one. Are you kidding me? I have a ton of tiny video files spread across a bunch of different folders, and that would take me hours. I guess I'll keep looking for another service...

I never really jumped on the LinkedIn bandwagon, but have been using it recently to find "passive" job candidates. The service seemed to work pretty well, except you can't really contact anyone outside of your immediate network unless you pay for that privilege. That is one of the primary ways they get you to upgrade to a "premium" account.

Sadly, LinkedIn is like all the other consumer-unfriendly subscription-based services out there --- they try very hard to get you to subscribe, rely on the fact that you forget about your subscription, and make it *very* difficult to unsubscribe. Subscribing is as easy as clicking a nice, shiny button. But unsubscribing is nearly impossible. After 15 minutes of clicking around the site and researching the issue on the internet, it turns out you have to (1) go to a special page where you must (2) message a member of the customer support staff and (3) request and wait for your subscription to be canceled!

I was successful at getting a response within a few days. But my request for a refund for this month's unused subscription (I explained that I wasn't going to use the service this month and that I had simply forgotten about the subscription) was addressed with a simple copy-and-paste of the terms of service, which states the customer is charged unless he/she cancels ahead of time. Yes, I understand those are the official terms and they are legally protected, but why should a customer be charged for an unused service? LinkedIn really needs to learn a thing or two about customer service, instead of milking each customer for as much money as possible.

Is this working?

This site shows on a map the latest locations where celebrities have been spotted. What a silly and useless idea! Not only is the information fairly out of date, but it also feeds our mindless culture of pop idol worship without providing any interesting information.

Aplus.Net hosting has the WORST customer service ever in the history of all companies - Last night we experienced another nightmare scenario for a small, growing company. We went down again for the THIRD time, starting at 12:45am PT. After reporting the problem, I was told that the failed server would get rebooted within 15min. Things got progressively worse from there. After half an hour, I called back and they had no idea what was going on and refused to give me an ETA at this point. After another hour, all of their customer support goes OFFLINE -- i. E. the hosting company goes completely dark and is completely unreachable. Regular server support is offline, dedicated server support is offline, and worst of all, the dedicated server support hotline (phone) starts playing a 30 second generic message and then HANGS UP ON YOU. I called five times with the same result. After yet another hour, I finally see a support person come online and ping her. She says she can't help me because she isn't a dedicated server support representative. I ask her what happened to dedicated server support at her company and she says LUNCH BREAK. Sweet. Two hours into the ordeal, I realize that there is only one person in the entire company that can help me and he is out eating a sandwich.

Fast forward seven hours later and we are finally back up. There's no knowing how many users we lost or pissed off over that time period. But great news, according to their uptime guarantee policy on http://servers.aplus.net/servers_guarantee.html, we will get 35% off next month's bill. Can't wait to save that $80! Well worth the downtime!

The worst part is not just being down, but not having anybody available to talk with. There's no worse feeling than trying desperately to contact your server provider and not be able to reach ANYONE. When will these companies get a clue about what customer service means? When someone is having a real problem, "I don't know", "I can't help you", and automatic messages that hang up on you, just don't cut it.

Stay away from Aplus.Net! At least until someone from their company cares enough to do something about their customer service.

Terrible, terrible email system - This is the worst email program I have ever seen. The interface is sloppy and confusing. All of the emails from one person are combined into one thread. But they're separate emails! I understand if some of the emails are related, but I don't want all of them together.

Secondly, there are no folders. There is no way of organizing my messages the way I like to organize them. I usually have folders set up for work, friends, etc. but it's just one big mess in Gmail. People say that the search works to alleviate this problem, but I have not found it to be any faster.

These issues, in combination with the privacy issues, make Gmail a terrible web-based email alternative. Much better is the new Yahoo! Mail beta, which functions just like Outlook, but via the web. It's got the slickest interface available (drag-and-drop, real-time sorting) and just added unlimited storage.