Posted 9:42 PM by Creditwrench

This is a very small file but it is in dvf format so you may have to download a special player for it if you don't have one.




There are many new things happening with blogs these days. One of them is known as RSS and you can see what that is like by going to Jaccuse Rss feed and once you do that you may see what appears to be mostly garbage with some readable content. Your first reaction will probably be "What good is that?"

The value of the RSS feed is that you can read it in what is known as an AGGREGATOR. So your next question will probably be "What the heck is an AGGREGATOR" and if you go to YAHOO.com and sign in to your Yahoo account you will find a tab at the top which says "MY YAHOO" and you click on that and you will see a lot of news clips. CNN, Sports, Stock market news and lots of other good stuff. And you can delete the feeds you don't want and you can add new feeds from many sources. All you have to do is find one of the links which says "ADD A FEED" and click on that. Follow the links until you come to the one that says "url to add" and you type in http://j-accuse.blogspot.com/atom.xml and submit that and go back to your aggregator page and you will see the j-accuse feed. You can add feeds from any blog you want to subscribe to. For instance you can add in my blog which is http://creditwrench.blogspot.com/atom.xml and keep up with what I am writing about.

But the real advantage is that you can use your Yahoo aggregator to keep up to date on the latest headlines and news clips from around the world and do it much, much quicker than you can surf and get the same thing. What would take you all day to read if you can even find it all will only take you a few minutes. It is the wave of the future and where the internet is going.

Today, only about 8 million people use Aggregators and subscribe to feeds of various kinds. That number is growing rapidly. But the bad news is that Yahoo is a very primitive aggregator. The good news is that there are an awful lot of excellent aggregators out there that do a lot better job than Yahoo does and do it a lot faster.

Another bit of good news is that if you have a fully web enabled cell phone you can pick up the RSS feeds on your cell phone. You can also subscribe to music channels, TV channels and more and play them on your computer or your cell phone and finally surf the web on your cell phone and it won't be a bad news way of surfing as it is the way you are used to surfing on your cell phone if you do it at all.

You can burn the music to CD and play it on your car stereo too. And if you are on vacation you can take pictures with your cell phone and upload those to the internet too. If you set up your own blog at www.blogger.com you can send your vacation or other photos to your blog and you can also use your cellphone to upload your narrations of what you are seeing while on vacation or while at some happening that is of interest to you and it will be posted to your blog while you are speaking.

You can also view movies on your cell phone and you can make your own movies with your camcorder and upload those to your blog as well.

There is a lot more coming to the internet very rapidly and to your cellphones too The technology is now in place that will allow you to take credit cards via cellphone and have the cash deposited to your bank account immediately.

We are rapidly moving towards a cashless society. December, 2004 marked the first time in history that plastic transactions outpaced written checks and that trend is increasing every month. The time will soon come when nobody will write checks anymore.

Once everybody has cellphones and uses plastic we probably won't ever see much cash. After all, who wants to carry heavy pocket change when all you need is your cellphone? And yes, within maybe 5 years there won't be any more of the credit card terminals as we know them today. There won't even be any more plastic either. All you will need to do is wave your cellphone at the cash register and the transaction will be done. No signing slips or nothing. Even the vending machines will operate that way instead of by coins. Our great grandchildren will probably never know what money is. At least not the way we know it today.

What is this world coming to, eh???? Well, like all other things there are both a good and a bad side to the cashless society. It might be convenient but the bad side is, among other things, the fact that people want to be proud of their money. We Americans have always been very proud of the American Dollar as a status symbol among nations. Americans spending American dollars abroad were always more than welcomed with open arms but who can be that proud of a doggone cellphone? So an American status symbol will soon be no longer.

But that is happening anyway as the Euro is rapidly becoming the standard of currency rather than the American Dollar. Brave new world anyone???





And

Posted 9:10 PM by Creditwrench

Here are the tapes from the Vinny Tecchio call for Tuesday May 10, 2005.

As usual, there are some pretty good topics being discussed here.