Don't ask me why, but I just wrote a song. I don't write songs, but this one just kind of got stuck in my head and I didn't know who to share it with, so i wrote it down - with chords and everything.

It's about evil Starbuck's Coffee and (partly) how it makes me run to the toilet.

I used my little Casio keyboard from like 20 years ago -- if that doesn't date me, what will? It still has all the stickers on the white keys with the little # and b in the corners. I tried to write a song on it last week and I realised it's hard to write a song when you HAVE to... when that happens you should go to the PodSafe Music Network and grab a Swedish pop-punk band instead.

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There are also brand new episodes of Shrink your Ecological Footprint and You can't spell crapface without PFA from this weekend posted. Those are two podcast talkshows I record with my friends, the first over Skype to Arizona, and the second locally in my living room with a sweet echo. (really)

On Sunday, I am getting jazzed up about having our #3 installment of Florida Creatives Happy Hour at the Copper Rocket starting after 3PM. Immediately before that is the Enzian's #2 installment of the Indie Film Slam revival.

Tomorrow John Rife and I are getting together at Dandelion to talk about refreshing his videoblog a bit in anticipation of a major road trip (he will be phoning home every few days with a new video). We are planning on doing some Google Maps mashup stuff as well as the standard blogging/feeds thing. I am hoping to be able to get some microformats in there as well. I would like for John to be discoverable by people outside of Orlando who might happen by. I know YouTube has (some imitation of) geo-identification, but I don't think it gets included in the search results. Tagging and research will help, and reciprocal links (as many as we can get). I hope John meets some bloggers along the way, and makes plenty of MySpace friends.

This will be a fun 3 months of online marketing blitz, especially considering that the location (not virtually, but physically) and focus of the content will be changing almost every day.

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Last but not least, the very talented Damien McKenna has been acting as my second set of hands this week, doing some work on a Drupal 5 site for a client. He just got this very spiffy and finally bug-free system going where you add an image (or several images) to your node (this one's for a single project in a portfolio). Once you save the form, a module called imagecache auto-generates thumbnails for you. Last but not least, these images are munged into links to one of those spiffy AJAX image boxes, like lightbox or in this case thickbox.

The payoff? Instant photo gallery. Pats on the back for Damien.

If you're still reading, thanks for enduring. I haven't written many posts like this since my LiveJournal days. The last two I've done have been videos.

I have a girlfriend who lives in England. I have a Skype account. Hell, I even have a Skype phone in my Sony Mylo, and I got it mostly because I wanted a more telephone-like experience when talking to my girlfriend. I have, however, not been having a fun time with Skype today, nor my Verizon Wireless phone, nor option number 3, the Gizmo Project. I'm not even going to qualify any of these services with a link.

First off, Skype's online store is down. WTF Skype? Did your developers fall asleep at the wheel? I'm sure you're getting ready for some fun pre-Superbowl beefing-up because you'll be running ads or something, but I need to buy more credits! The site has looked like this all day:

skype Hosted on Zooomr

Second, I figure I'll just dial my damn cell phone, it can't cost that much, right? Well Verizon seems to think that there's no reason you'd want to make an international call unless you authorized it! Sure, your phone might get stolen or the kids might get a hold of it, but when I'm in a situation where my mobile is my only phone this starts to get very frustrating. Thank you Wendy at customer service for being so nice, but why don't you people want to take my money? BTW my account is under the control of my business partner and his wife, I can't add the international "Hoo-Ha" to my phone.

Lastly, I remember reading about a number of new VOIP services over on Techcrunch, so I check out the Gizmo Project. OMG they have a Mac version. Create an account, I want to buy some credit, hooray for PayPal, and then my transaction is immediately cancelled!

gizmo Hosted on Zooomr

I have decided against leaving the house for a phone card because I'm afraid that if they don't have any more cards at the store I will throw things at the nice service industry workers.

Update: About 10 minutes after posting this, the Skype store was functioning again and I got my credit. In the interim, I was talking to my friend Emily and she offered to try and get her Verizon international calling turned on. Turns out this will take until sometime on Monday.

The prologue to all of this is a major annoyance with Skype: their international calling rates are some of the cheapest around. To call England is supposedly just 2.1 cents/minute. Apparently this rate doesn't apply to international mobile calls. My calls end up costing more like 22 or 23 cents/minute instead. Why Skype, why? Luckily Kait is getting a landline this week.