Toktumi, Inc., the company behind the popular mobile communication app Line2, has signed a deal with former JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater to be the official spokesperson for the company’s “Mile High Text Club” Contest, which celebrates Line2’s in-flight texting capability on Wi-Fi-equipped airplanes. Slater is the ex-JetBlue flight attendant who was so fed up with rude passengers that he decided to exit his airline career on an emergency slide.

The Mile High Text Club Contest invites travelers to text their “craziest” (i.e. most outrageous) flight stories to 222-222-2222 to enter to win prizes, including iPod touches, free Line2 service, and a Grand Prize of a weekend holiday shopping trip for two to New York City. Texts must be sent from the Line2 app, which can be downloaded for a 30-day free trial from the iTunes App store. The texted stories will appear on the www.milehightextclub.com website, where anyone can read them and vote on their favorites. As an expert on crazy flight stories, Steven Slater is a natural fit as the spokesperson and as one of the judges for the contest.

“In order to spread the word that Line2 allows airline passengers to text from the sky, we hired one of the most famous guys in the airline business today, Steven Slater,” explained Peter Sisson, Founder and CEO of Toktumi. “After talking with Steven, I realized that despite his dramatic approach – which he regrets – he was making a statement about the need to return civility and common courtesy to flying. He’s a perfect judge for a contest concerning the current state of air travel.” He was a flight attendant for 20 years, and both his parents had long careers in the airline business.

Toktumi’s Mile High Text Club Contest, which runs November 16 through December 3, will be a wickedly funny forum where entrants share their craziest flight stories by texting about them using Line2. The texts will be displayed at the contest website www.milehightextclub.com, where voting for the best stories takes place. The top 21 vote getters will get points that count towards winning the contest. A panel of judges including Mr. Slater will select all prize winners based on criteria including originality and humor. Mr. Slater will advise the grand prize winner and 7 second prize winners during a conference call with them using Line2’s conferencing system.

The grand prize in the Mile High Text Club Contest is a weekend holiday shopping trip for two to New York City, including air travel and hotel for the winner and a companion. 7 second prize winners will win an Apple iPod Touch. Thirteen third prize winners will each win a gift card for six months of free Line2 service.

The “Mile High Text Club” champions the cause of communicating in flight via texting rather than talking so that other passengers are not disturbed by loud voice calls. Traveler surveys consistently show opposition to voice calls on planes, which not only disturb fellow passengers but are often prohibited by airlines.

“Line2’s SMS texting is really useful while in flight,” Sisson says. “You can let people know about delays, make plans for the evening, or just pass the time texting with your friends and family while you fly.”

Line2 Texting

Line2 Version 3.0 is the first VoIP calling app to feature carrier-grade SMS texting, allowing customers to exchange unlimited text messages with any SMS-enabled phone on any carrier. The result is a texting experience that is indistinguishable from traditional SMS text capabilities offered by the major cellular carriers. Unlike competing texting-only applications, Line2 combines VoIP calling capabilities and carrier-grade texting in one app, so that customers can use one number for both types of communication. There is no other calling app available on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch that offers the complete calling, call-handling, and texting capabilities available from Line2.

Line2 customers can get unlimited calling and unlimited SMS texting for just $9.95/month, which is less than half of the $20.00/month cost that AT&T charges iPhone users for unlimited texting alone. When calculating the savings achieved by moving to the most affordable AT&T calling plan and using Line2 over Wi-Fi for voice calls, users can reduce their cell phone bill by as much as $50 per month.

We told you about TomTom and Darth Vader teaming up to get you where you need to get – no matter what – last month. Now another Jedi Knight, that didn’t fall away to the Dark Side, tries his little green hand at getting you to Point B. Master Yoda from the Star Wars Universe is now available for all TomTom GPS systems sans the iPhone app. Today, the Yoda VoiceSkin is attainable for download at the mere cost of $12.95 with such instructions as, “Right you should turn, then sharp left…control, control, if a Jedi, you wish to be.” If you’re not confused or killed by that instruction, then Yoda offers, “After 200 yards turn right… then bear left…but not to the darkside.” Upon your safe arrival, Yoda utters, “Your destination you have reached. Powerful you have become. Remember the Force will be with you always.”

Resist the Dark Side and join the Rebel Forces with Yoda and many other Star Wars characters today.

Azure Talon Software has launched version 2.0 of its popular iLaugh jokes database for iPhone and iPod touch users. With iLaugh on-hand, iPhone and iPod Touch users no longer have to rely on their memories to come up with hilarious jokes at the office or social events – or even when needing something clever to say to begin a speech or presentation. iLaugh 2.0 puts a database of over 50,000 jokes at anybody’s fingertips and is loaded with social features such as voting, favorites and sharing via Facebook and Twitter.

With iLaugh, users have complete control over which jokes they want to read. The Categories feature enables users to only read the jokes that are of interest to them. Further, iLaugh 2.0 offers filtering options to screen out adult jokes or jokes voted down by the iLaugh community.

“People need a good laugh these days, and my hope is that iLaugh will offer the humor our customers need when they need it the most,” said Kenneth Ballenegger, CEO of Azure Talon Software. “With such an enormous collection of jokes combined with features that make it a snap to share your favorites, iLaugh is clearly the most polished jokes application on the market.”

iLaugh comes in two editions: a free yet feature-rich “Lite” edition which is supported through non-intrusive ads, and an advertising-free “Premium” edition which gives users double the voting power on which jokes are jokes are hot and which are not. This version is available for the introductory price of $0.99.

A selection of joke categories includes:

* Bar Jokes
* Chuck Norris Facts
* Yo Mama!
* Pick up lines
* Bash.org IRC quotes

System Requirements:

* iPhone or iPod Touch 2.0 minimum

Pricing and Availability:

iLaugh 2.0 for iPhone is only $0.99 (USD) for a limited time only and available exclusively through Apple’s App Store. iLaugh Lite is free and also available at the App Store. For more information about iLaugh, visit its website at www.ilaughapp.com. Azure Talon Software’s website is www.azuretalon.com.

A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. ‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’ ‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’ A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’ Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definately be of the feminine gender (‘la computadora’), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval; and
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine
(‘el computador’), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves;
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem; and
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

The women won.

Having just finished my PB+J (Jif and grape) sandwich, I had to share this comic Shane sent me months ago. It was on my MacBook Pro and I forgot all about it until I backed it up last week before dusting it and re-installing Leopard on it.

Anyway, this comic totally made me LOL (for real!). You’ll have to be using that thing called the CLI (command line interface) in either UNIX (you OSX users) or Linux to get this. I can’t tell you how many times a day I try to do something on my Mac in Terminal and I get the dreaded “you’re not important enough for me to listen to” error. It’s almost to the point I’m prefacing every command with sudo now. Ya, I know, dangerous, but it still prompts for the password at least.

Enjoy the joke and if you know if more geeky jokes like this, let me know in the comments.

Okay, we usually do not go down this road, but when I saw a little boy doing a Number 1 in a moving clowns face, well, I just couldn’t resist sharing. So the next time you go to Osaka, Japan, you’ll know what to expect when you go to the Little Boys Room. ]]> http://svenontech.com/2008/03/04/clown-urinal/feed/ 0 http://svenontech.com/2007/12/30/olan-mills-moments/ http://svenontech.com/2007/12/30/olan-mills-moments/#comments Mon, 31 Dec 2007 06:26:25 +0000 Sven Rafferty http://svenontech.com/2007/12/30/olan-mills-moments/

The more and more I reflect on the seventies, the more I am glad I was only but a child and have room for excuse for my actions. Others are not so fortunate.

Quinn Martin has found a collection of photos from the seventies as well as some spanning to the early nineties. Apparently, those from the later years have not learned from the mistakes of their forefathers. Tisk, tisk.

Martin’s collection of photos from Olan Mills, Sears, and other mall professional houses of photography will have you cracking up. One of my favorite, shown here for your enjoyment, has the caption reading, “Hiroshima, 1945. The last known photo of Kelli and Senor Loco“. The picture above it is of a young man, maybe a high school senior, with the caption stating, “I got a 20 that says he drives a Camaro.” One look at this kid and you’ll agree!

Take a look at the rest of the photos and enjoy saying goodbye to 2007 with a good chuckle. We’ll be back in full swing January 2nd with our Macworld predictions and CES coverage in the coming week. 2008 is sure to be interesting and I hope you’ll be here with us to experience it together.

See you at Macworld!

Thanks, Fletch, for the link. ]]> http://svenontech.com/2007/12/30/olan-mills-moments/feed/ 1 http://svenontech.com/2007/12/27/sudo-true/ http://svenontech.com/2007/12/27/sudo-true/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:58:22 +0000 Sven Rafferty http://svenontech.com/2007/12/27/sudo-true/
If you’re a command line usin’ sys admin that works with any variant of UNIX, you’ll all get a kick out of this comic.

Thanks, Shane!

What’s being called this centuries Windows ME, Bill Gates will be happy to officially leave the company he co-founded with the award of “Top ten terrible tech products” by CNET. Keen to the fact that Microsoft took six years – SIX YEARS folks! — to develop this operating system upgrade it should have just been so much more than it turned out to be. From incompatibility hardware woes to constant warning boxes that must be acknowledged to the sell-out to Hollywood with DRM-everywhere, Vista is in CNET’s words, “terrible technology”. My favorite quote from the article:

Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

The funniest thing about this is I’ve had customers already perform this on their newly purchased laptops after “a day of hell with Vista”! Even funnier is the various versions you can buy of this horrendous release and just how much they all cost you.

Man, Microsoft, you REALLY missed the boat on this one. Six years!! HAHAHAHA. Put down the X-Box controller and start working!

Hehehe. You’ve got to love what the dollar can buy you. Apple purchased a spot on the main Vista page of CNETs site to place a very amusing Flash advertisement that uses two banner ads that work together. You find PC and Mac in one banner looking up at another a yet to be lit board with some words on it. PC attempt to get all the lights to brighten the message, “Don’t give up on Vista”, yet things just don’t seem to work out that way. Stop by and see for yourself. Pretty funny.

So Microsoft, whatcha gonna put on the Apple page? The gloves are off! ]]> http://svenontech.com/2007/11/21/wisely-placed-apple-ad-on-cnet-vista-page/feed/ 0