Today I received a phone call from the phone number 305-503-8068 but when I picked up, the call ended. I tried calling the number back but received a pre-recorded menu in Spanish. I hit “9” for the operator and was greeted by a Spanish speaking one. Not knowing enough Spanish to have a full conversation I tried to convey that they should not call me again (this has happened before).

After getting off of the phone I looked up the number by simply typing it into Blingo. I came upon this. It gives some useful information and I will probably follow through and report the number to the provider.

This is just frustrating, having to pay for a 1 second call on my cellphone. Spam was once a problem but that’s easy to filter, it is much more difficult to filter phone calls, just because it is so easy to get a phone number and use it for something like this. The way it works is that these scams wait for your answering machine to pick up, then they leave a pre-recorded message (usually in Spanish). It is illegal to do this but most people do not know this or how to go about handling it.

To put it simply, report the number using Telcodata.us

I am reading Michael Crichton’s new book, State of Fear and I can’t put it down.

It is a story about global warming and Crichton’s personal beliefs that it does not exsist. More specifically he believes that humans have a much smaller impact on the climate than scientists give credit for.

The book is well written and has some interesting footnotes with information about global warming and research papers/documents that point to cyclic climate.

I have finally trekked my way back from Dallas this morning and am glad to report that I found a place to live.

We (my mom, my brother, and I) were pressed for time near the end of our trip just because none of the apartment offices were going to be open today because of Easter. Nonetheless, at the last minute I came to a decision and signed a lease. Stephan: 1 Stress Level: 0

I will be living near where the Cowboys practice, which I guess is alright, I’m not a big pro football fan so it doesn’t really matter to me.

It is definitely a nice area of town and there is a nice amount of scenery, including hills, something that we lack in Lubbock and Houston.

Definitely a stress reliever to have all of that settled and taken care of. Now to just focus on school and moving.

As promised, I have a picture of my arm after the shotgun mishap.

To everyone that has contacted me in the last couple of weeks, I get the message. I need to redesign, open up comments, and work on the feed(s). The reason for lack of new design or comments is the fact that I am graduating in about a month so things have been a little hectic.

As far as the feeds go, I have been asked to provide full text feeds as well as summaries. I still have not decided what route I want to go on these and I will probably play with a few different formats to see what works best and gets the most use.

There are a lot of things I would like to enhance in my design, including reader friendly URLs and a tagging/category based system for archives. Making the time to do these things has just been difficult. My apologies. Hopefully soon there will be a lull in the excitement and I can this stuff done.

I spent my Saturday afternoon at the local gun range doing some trap shooting. Everything was going great until near the end of the day when I, in the process of taking a second shot at one of the clay pigeons, accidentally let the shot gun slip slightly off of my shoulder.

Usually I would have taken the time to correct the position of the gun but being in a hurry to get the target before it came down I let the shot fly. Big mistake. I now have a baseball sized bruise on my bicep. It looks like I took a beating.

Take the time to correct the gun on your shoulder if it should slip, otherwise you could end up like me. I’ll post a picture of the damage as soon as I have a moment to do so.

Definitely an interesting read about Alex King’s and Scott Sanders’ product, FeedLounge.

The interview has some good insights into when bootstrapping and organic growth are the right thing to do.

I personally wonder if this is the way I want to go with some things that I have been planning. If I can raise the capital myself without using outside investment then there is no reason to depend on others. I think the main problem I would face would be growth, and hardware costs, kind of like Alex mentioned in the interview. Hardware, while slowly going down in price, still isn’t “cheap” and that would be the main investment that I would have to make.

That’s right, Apple Boot Camp is now in session. Though this will be included in the Leopard release of OS X you can test it now by downloading the beta.

The Google Maps API has been overhauled and has plenty of new features. Two of the coolest are custom overlays and a debugging log.

I am going to play with it some more tonight and hopefully have some examples up by tomorrow.

I have been reflecting a lot on the last four years here in school. When I graduate in a month there are things that I will just miss being around. The skipping class to eat lunch with a bunch of friends, the “dates” every week to watch a TV show, and the ability to hop in my car and be five minutes away from seeing my friends.

All of these sentimental reflections have led me to think about what would truly be my dream job.

I want to travel the world, even to places no one really wants to go, like the most impoverished areas of Africa. I want to make some kind of difference in any way I can. The only jobs that I could think of that would allow me to do those things are journalist, Peace Corps worker, or a photographer.

I have never had formal photography training but I love it. If I could do one thing, it would be to take pictures all over the world of events that are affecting the area.