Enter Tokbox.  Yesterday I initiated a video chat with a friend on IM.  When I start it on Tokbox/Digsby, it sends him a link to a webpage where the chat is fully hosted.  He doesn't have a webcam but no matter, he was able to view mine within a web browser session - WITHOUT having to log in anywhere or install any program.  We were easily able to add more people to the chat - across multiple IM clients - because it actually just redirects you to the Tokbox page where everyone is chatting.  We had 7 in the chat room, 2 with webcams - and it has the ability to share video, images, links, etc.  For example, my son was in my office so everyone was forced to watch "Cars" when I played it for him through YouTube.  Pretty awesome.

Tokbox was poorly represented on Lifehacker's High Five Best Video Chat Application poll, but I think if people realized how easy it was to use, it would have received more votes.  It wasn't the greatest video quality, I'll grant that - but the ease of use, not having to log in for more users, and just some of the cool features makes it something you should check out.

Summary/Tips

• Price out insurance every 2 years.  Rates change, violations roll off, etc.
• Go with the higher collision deductible, lower comprehensive deductible.   That was for my case, could be different.
• Amica, USAA and Erie seemed to be the favorite insurers.
• Don't be afraid to switch companies and shop around.  Or even call your existing insurer to reprice.

I've been with Liberty Mutual for awhile now and always thought I
was paying ridiculous rates.  Well finally, I decided to do something
about it and shop around.   I surfed around on various forums on auto
insurance to refresh my memory on what I should be looking for.  Things
I was trying to figure out were what companies should I be looking for,
what kinds of premiums I should be getting, the ratings for various
insurers and the types of coverage I needed.

Types of Coverage

Now that I look back at the coverage I used to have, it was pretty
low.  And although it was low, my premium was high and understanding
deductibles made it clear to me why that is the case.  Let's talk
coverage first.  I used to have a 100/300/100 coverage - which means
that if I was in an accident, I would be covered for bodily-injury
liability claims up to 100k per person in an accident up to a max of
300k for the accident.  The 3rd number there is for property damage, so
again, if I was at fault for an accident, then my coverage for property
damage such as the car or anything else I hit like.. say, a house...
would be covered up to 100k.  So the story there is don't hit a house
or a Ferrari.  And if you are going to - then look into having an
umbrella policy when you do it.  I bumped my coverage up to 250/500/100
in preparation for an umbrella policy.  That's typically the minimum in
order to qualify for an umbrella.  I kept the same for Uninsured
Motorist coverage - which covers you in the event that you are in an
accident with someone who doesn't have enough insurance to cover the
bills or is even uninsured.

Medical expense I didn't spend much time researching and did 5k. 
Income loss I declined because I'm assuming my short-term disability
would cover me there.  Perhaps I should check.

On to the collision and comprehensive coverage.  As opposed to the
liability coverage, these are the coverages on your own vehicle.  Here,
the numbers to look at are the collision and the comprehensive ("other
than collision") deductibles.  Collision covers you for just that - an
accident involving another car or crashing into a tree.  Comprehensive
covers accidents such as a deer hitting or theft or a rock shattering
your windshield.  So in deciding what coverages to take - I decided
that collision repairs will be far more expensive and typically you
want to take as high a deductible as you can afford out of pocket.  I
feel like if I'm in an accident, I can cover up to $1000 so that's what
I chose as my deductible.  Plus collision claims really affect your
insurance, thus why most people try to avoid filing claims.  For
comprehensive, you would think similarly however the price difference
in lowering your deductible is much less than if you were to lower it
for collision.  Also, according to a few agents I've spoken to,
comprehensive claims don't count as significantly towards your
insurance premium - obviously don't abuse it but don't be afraid of it
either.  Finally, the cost to repair something for comprehensive - say
a broken windshield - may be more than paying for the lower deductible
anyways, so why not use that insurance.  Here, I went with $100
deductible - and it worked out that I would need to be claim free for
about 2.5 years to start seeing the benefit of a higher deductible on
my premium vs say a $50 deductible.  In other words, I'll pay $25 for
example on my $100 deductible vs $50 on my $50 deductible.  After 2
years I'm ahead on my $100 deductible policy.  Many claims within 2
years, I'm screwed.  You get the point.

Suggested companies/Ratings

Now that I picked the coverages, who should I go with?  I searched
around and found a few links.  In reading, there were bound to be
people that were happy and unhappy with a particular insurer.  I did
find that some of the top ones were Amica, USAA (only for military and
relatives), Erie Insurance, and Wawanesa (in California) also seemed to
be popular.  Those findings were backed up by a JD Powers auto insurer
ratings link that I had previously posted.  Geico came out cheap to and
seems to work for many people.  Ameriprise comes out cheap also but
they seem to have a tendency to jack prices up after the first year. 
I'm currently with Liberty Mutual and will be with them for a little
bit until a claim is closed and an accident rolls off my record.  But
when I do, I'm going Erie or Amica.  Amica can come out more expensive
than most - but it didn't turn out that way when I was just pricing it
out.  But again, my accident is really hurting me so I just have to
wait it out.  I took notes on people's opinions of various companies so
if you want more - just let me know in comments and I'll try to back it
up.

Miscellaenous Thoughts

My insurance is going to get so much better in a few years.  Most
insurers charge for accidents/violations within the last 3 years,
meaning the premiums will be higher.  After 5 years, they can start
giving you the discounts, like safe driver discounts,
preferred/platinum statuses.  So once my wife's accident comes past 3
years next year, my insurance apparently will go down by 300 a year.

Don't be afraid to switch companies.  It's not always good to stay
with the same company in the hopes that your loyalty to them will lower
your rates.

First up: Naked Eyes

...who had two recognizable hits that they(he?) used to bookend his set. After opening up with "Always Something There To Remind Me", they settled in to play some other random hits and try out some new material for a new album! YAY! That gave me some time to read the playbill to get more info on who these people were. One interesting fact I pulled out about Naked Eyes is that they actually started out as 4 guys in a band and then disbanded. Then two of those guys, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, went on to form Tears for Fears (!) while the guy last night, Pete Byrne, started Naked Eyes with the last guy, Rob Fisher, who is now deceased. Tears for Fears v. Naked Eyes... Can you say Andrew Ridgely? Back to the show - so two girls in the front are starting to do this weird dance with their arms, very tempted to get up and start dancing. Of course, Mr. Byrne sees this and motions them to stand up, which one of the girls took as "come up on stage". So she bolted up on stage and started doing this weird ballroom solo dancing - the kind of dance that ballroom dancers do on "So You Think You Can Dance". People were laughing but also no one was complaining because she was leggy and was wearing a pretty skimpy skirt, with slits all the way above her thighs. Pretty impressive skirt though because for as much moving as she did, there were no "malfunctions". She even bent over, spun around, tripped on her own high heels, and then turned it into a bow. All in all, pretty impressive. When asked her name, she said it was Lily Batini. Sounds like a stage dancer name to me.  (The YouTube below is not her... but similar odd switch step.)

More songs I didn't know until the final song, which was "Promises, Promises". Good tune, finished it out. Mr. Byrne goes over to shake Lily's hand and thank her for rocking out. She takes his hand and kisses it. Lily is clearly sauced.

Second up: Flock of Seagulls

We walked away from our seats to walk around the Wolf Trap grounds, but from what I heard, I didn't miss anything. Of course, I thought it was ABC since I didn't know any of the songs... until. I Ran. Still sounded great, just like I remember it, but without the OJ Simpson lyrics.

(continued...)

Third up: ABC

Now after FoS, I was not so excited for ABC.  But everyone around me,
many-a bad dancing 80s fools, clearly bought their tickets only for
ABC, because people were immediately out of their seats for songs that
I had never even heard before.  But the band was great and the sound
and songs were actually pretty good too.  Susan said she had heard of Poison Arrow" before and they also played "Be Near Me",
which is the one song I knew. (side note: I came home right after and
looked in my iTunes library, and I actually had 4 songs by ABC, thanks
to an 80s collection I had loaded into iTunes. Who knew?) The lead guy
was also dressed in a pretty dapper suit, which I thought was a nice
touch. I'll also add at this point that there were many things in the
concert to this point that reminded me of Hugh Grant in Music & Lyrics. Take that for what you want.

Fourth up: Belinda Carlisle

SWEET!
Belinda came out, crowd cheers - but oddly again, not as much as they
did for ABC. Belinda Carlisle looked great from the neck up, but she
was wearing this weird Sprockets like outfit. Her pants were not
flattering, kinda like leggings, but rather baggy. And she was wearing
the microphone battery pack in the front, like it was a Blackberry. So
I'm not sure what look she was going for, but it wasn't working at all.
Still she sounded very much like Belinda Carlisle of old. She treated
the crowd to her own hits along with the requisite Go-Go's songs
(weehoo!). Here's the bullet list of songs that I recognized:

• I Get Weak
• Vacation - written in 1977!
• Circle in the Sand - during the chorus, people around me were drawing air circles with their fingers... wow.
• Mad About You
• We Got The Beat
• Heaven Is A Place On Earth

I'll
say, I did enjoy this part of the show. She sounded really good, hit
all the high notes. I'm not sure the band enjoyed it though - as Susan
pointed out, a bunch of rocker-types backing up a bouncy, pop-py 80s
chick - who just turned 50 on August 17! Happy Birthday Belinda! But
yeah, those guys could not have cared less.

Final Band: Human League

Alas,
we had a kid that we had to come home to and he's been waking up at 5
in the morning lately. At this point, it was already 9:30 at the end of
Belinda Carlisle's set so we headed out. Unfortunate since Human League
has many a good hits, but I don't know how danceable they are so I can
just listen to them on my iPod. "Fascination", "Don't You Want Me Baby" and I think I would've loved to hear "Human". Oh well, I'll catch them again when they revive the tour 10 years from now.

"Lynx?  HAHAHAH"

I know I'm a little late to the game here - but I assure you, at one point I was actually a pioneer.  I was blogging when I was in college, putting up website using a lynx browser, old school graphics, etc.  I even put up the first version of the Patti Labelle website, which has moved on to greater things, I hope...  Ok, I just went to her website and I'm pretty sure I can still do a better job, even with my limited skill set.

Anyways, the point is, I was there, but with the rush of new Internet technologies, new ways to put together websites, all the graphical capabilities of Photoshop, Dreamweaver - being on the web started to look daunting.  So now I hear of different Internet technologies and feel completely lost.

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

Hopefully keeping up with this blog will help me keep up with all the trends, including this one that I'm testing right now - Zemanta.  It's a tool meant to help bloggers with suggestions on links, images, related stories, and it automagically populates your blog entry.   Like some of the wikipedia links above, some of the tags, it suggests all of it and you can select which ones you want to attach.  I'm always a fan of attaching pictures to my blog postings so hopefully this will make it that much faster.  Now to Zemanta-ize this post... 

My challenge is that, I want to write something fresh off my mind.  But by the time I get here, I've already told the story - either once to the wife, or to other friends.  So when I go to blog, I am just not in the mood to do it anymore and all the fun details are already lost.  Vice versa, if I quickly blog it here, I have no desire to rehash the story, thus people just hear/read about it through the blog - subsequently saying to me, "You didn't tell me that!  I had to read it on your blog!"  Aye, there's the dilemma.

Does that mean that lonely people are inherently better bloggers?  They have no one else to share their stories with so they have to put it on a blog?  I guess it can become more of a diary/journal thing after awhile.  Perhaps i'm just looking for an excuse as to why I'm so lazy in blogging and keeping this site up to date.  I did fix the comments section... 

Back to watching Miss America!  Puerto Rico looks busted.  And Carson Kressley must die.  He's terrible. 

What's the ROI on that investment? 

For all those not in the know, Upright Citizen's Brigade is a NYC institution for long form improv and is the place to learn, perform, or just watch long form improvisation.  Well, for those of us for which UCBT is no longer accessible (ahem), we have the pleasure of at least catching some shows where - albeit not the actual Harold teams - but experienced long form improvisers "compete" to be the last improviser standing.

The episodes are fun to watch - partially because of the familiar faces, partially because I love watching improv and learning, and wholly because it's great entertainment and I can watch a Harold online.  Project Improviser takes you through the rehearsals, some challenges, and shows you all the performances which is great.  I'm up to episode 3 now which was painful to watch because of the elimination process.  They were all great and they had to cut someone.  That was not the reason that was given but hopefully that was the nagging blip in the back of their minds when they were making the decision.

It is an elimination show and as such someone had to be eliminated.  Lucky for us - all are good improvisers and the shows will continue to be funny regardless of who continues.  I intend to steal from them as much as possible if I ever start taking classes at Washington Improv Theater (WIT).  There, it's in writing.  So you can't use it against me.