Simple - just reserve conference rooms with doors for the entire day. Get two developers each who are working on the same project so "it's a meeting." Close doors. Repeat daily.
There's no reason to be immature when you leave a company, whether it's your choice or not. Behave with class even if you're truly pissed, and don't bitch about how pissed off you are/were when you're interviewing either - nobody wants a whiner.
If you leave on good terms, you may be able to use those folks as a reference beyond "Yes, Joe was employed here from 2005 to 2009." If you leave people dealing with a festering pile of crap because you were being pissy, that time range is the *best* you should expect to get, and you may get worse. Remember, just because you're jumping to a new job doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to last. Odds are fair that once you're established in an industry you're going to stay in that industry or a related one because that's where many of your networking contacts are and they'll help you find future jobs. That means you're going to run into people you've worked with in the past.
A friend has closed product development consulting contracts because he did a favor for someone 10 years ago and that now-senior-executive remembered him. Be that remembered person.
If you're being laid off, this is even more important. When a site I was at was closed years back (and I declined the opportunity to relocate), I got thanks for being professional and helpful with closing things down, documenting, etc. I had no problems at all with listing those folks as references, because *they were happy with me.*
Basically if the payoff for being pissy is to make you feel good for 15 minutes, just go have a beer with friends instead. You'll feel just as good, and it may cost you less in the long run.
Interestingly, I was getting a small number of Farmville-related items even though I'd hidden it. Attempting to set the option to block all access (at the bottom of the message I received) gave me an error every time I tried it.
The same thing worked for other applications though.
If you're using that printer for photo printing, you may be paying twice as much to print your photos at home as it would cost to have them printed at a store (upload, order, pick up) or to have them printed by a service (upload, order, get in mail).
The quality from the store will probably be better as well.
Of course, if you're printing out nekkid photos that you don't want anyone else to ever see, print them yourself.
I've taken to pretty much completely skipping the tuna when I'm getting sushi - not because of concerns about which fish I'm getting, but because of mercury levels. Since commercial tuna are very large pinnacle fish, they tend to accumulate significant amounts of mercury - much higher than is found in smaller fish such as salmon.
There's a nice little article about mercury levels in tuna sushi in NYC from early 2008: High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi (NYTimes January 23, 2008)
Years ago I had a mouse designed for CAD work that had probably twice the buttons on it that this has. Pulled it out of a closet at the office. Unfortunately, I was never able to actually use it ("Because it was there"), because the manufacturer went under before they ever finished the Windows 95 drivers for it.
Even now you'll find folks doing CAD work who want many programmable buttons on their pointing devices.
You're talking about dropping from 100W down to 30, but what if you're really only consuming 45 regularly right now? Is it worth it for a 15W drop in consumption?
There are a huge number of posts in here talking about the Mac Mini and peak vs normal draw, but they're missing the point that *YOUR* normal draw may be much lower than you think, and there may be power saving features that you're not using that could lower it further. For example, if you're running DD-WRT or another aftermarket firmware on your router, you may be able to set things up to power your system down and use Wake On LAN to wake the system up remotely when you need it.
Of course, if you're using one of those routers with USB support you may be able to attach your external storage to it, though you may actually lose some power management features depending on how you do it and expect to have a much more limited range of capabilities.
A Kill-A-Watt or a good UPS should both be able to give you some idea of your current draw.
I've been experimenting with the voicemail-to-text transcription services out there, and compared to both GotVoice and PhoneTag the quality of transcription from Google Voice is something of a bad joke.
I understand that currently it's free (as opposed to $10+/month from the commercial services), and I have hopes that it will improve, but "quite nice" seems like a heck of a stretch at this point.
Anecdotally, here's an edited for privacy transcription from PhoneTag: "Hi, Alan. It's Nancy at Village Surgeons. My number is 123-456-7890. I'm following up on my e-mail that I sent you last week with regard to backup of our (quicken?) system here. (Paul Oddlastname?) was, had a concern that it wasn't backing up. So, I just kinda wants to touch base with you about that. When you have a chance. Give me a call. Thank you. Bye."
And here's an edited for privacy transcription from Google Voice today: "Hi Alan, it's gia Craig over at Northeastern collagen help topped and my computer is dead. It's definitely not working or managers on my phone's working. I checked the lines it doesn't look like. Anything's Unplugged, but I've pushed in any way you push the button to turn it on. There's no white that goes on movie then Maher of a machine starting. It's just absolutely dead and so could you do call me back and and come today. I do have to run over to delivery of the office for a few minutes this morning and then but I did not half hour. I might be at Colin's desk and that is extension 251. If I'm not at my own here and I'm 253. Thanks a lot. Bye bye."
Two good examples jump right out at me, albeit with different approaches to the problem.
O'Reilly handles this with Safari - you get access to electronic formats of their books (which you want), they get ongoing subscription revenue from you. Want more books? Pay a little more each month. Want to download chapters or the whole book? They have a system for that which will let you download a limited number of books per year as part of the subscription, and you can do so faster by paying what amounts to a per-chapter charge. Sure a lot of people pirate the books, but many of those pirated copies are in the hands of people who never would have purchased a paper copy and (I could be wrong here) many of those who have pirated books will make it a point to actually purchase other books from O'Reilly.
Baen has a different approach: they give away a fair amount of content in the Baen Free Library - generally older books from their authors, frequently the early books in a series that's still ongoing. They also give away similar content on the CDs included with some of their books; those CDs can be distributed freely and are available as ISOs from multiple sources. You can get electronic copies of everything they're publishing within a given month for $15, generally 4 new books and a couple of "backlist" titles - frequently things that are now coming out in paperback after an original hardcover release. You get a variety of formats with no copy protection - HTML, Palm/Mobipocket/Kindle, Rocketbook, EPUB/Stanza, Sony LRF, RTF and MS Reader (.LIT). If you subscribe before the month in question, you get access to the book 25% at a time starting months before the release date. And of course you can purchase an electronic copy of any of the books for prices around $5 (a few are less, some are a dollar or two more).
How do they make money? The same way publishers always have, with new content. How do they keep people from ripping them off? They use the honor system. They have loyal customers who are happy to spend a relatively small amount of money on their books. Do people bootleg the books? Sure, and I'm sure a lot of them then go on to become loyal customers. As an outsider, I'd say that Baen is less concerned about their readers stealing from them than they are about expanding their number of readers. If someday they become the Sole Publisher On The Planet then every bootlegged book is lost revenue, but right now they're trying to grow their readership paid and unpaid while making sure that a large percentage of it is paying customers.
And of course, I'm sure you can't buy most Baen books for the Kindle through Amazon's store - that's why Baen has instructions on their site for how to load the books onto your Kindle or other ebook reader. After all, why pay Amazon $9-10 when you can buy from the publisher for half that and know that more of the money's going to them and the authors?
Most of the long distance in the country dropped that day, triggered by 4ESS switches hitting a bug, detecting, it, going offline (with load shifted to other switches). Increased load made the bug in question more likely to be hit, so those switches would in turn drop and shift load away (sometimes back to the originator). 9 hours of basically no long-distance service.
And just think, it was a year and a half before Berners-Lee announced the "World Wide Web" and Linus announced that he was working on this "Linux" thing.
It's worth noting that many laptops now have "active drive protection" by some name - basically accelerometers detect drops and immediately park the heads of the drive - hopefully before the end of the fall.
The advantage of roads is that the vast majority of roads are uncovered most of the time. Parking lots, not so much so - they get covered with cars that just sit there.
The site also talks about transmission of power from areas receiving sunlight to areas not receiving it, but that's complete nonsense - transcontinental transmission of power would be a hugely wasteful joke.
I think the only Segway that I've ever seen out in the real world is at one of my customers - a neurology practice. One of their patients uses a Segway to get around; I know nothing about her condition except that she sees a neurologist and presumably doesn't have balance/stability issues that cause problems with it.
They're not far from Coburn Gore which has a border crossing, and they're putting the turbines in on the western edge of the mountains. Looking at the terrain and roads on Google Maps, it looks like the Canadian side of the border is much flatter and has much straighter roads (because it's not mountainous)You might even be able to bring them in closer on barges to cut down the truck distance, though that would depend on the port facilities.
I stopped trusting Symantec/Norton for much of anything when one of my customers couldn't resolve names because Norton had decided that outbound DNS queries (or the responses to them) were malicious and needed to be blocked.
There may be a widening gap between what people understand and what they're facing, but I didn't see any sign that Norton was addressing that gap appropriately.
You can't calculate tax just by zip code - if you could, it'd be simple. You have to account for states, counties and municipalities, and zip codes don't line up completely with at least the last two. Zip+4 might, but that in itself is a nightmare (Zip+4 can be down to 10 or fewer individual addresses).
A couple of examples: I live in a suburb of Chicago that gets much of its revenue from sales taxes on malls, etc. within the city limits. Its tax rate is different from the next municipality over, but my zip code overlaps that suburb. Another example: my office is in a town that straddles the border between Cook County, IL and Lake County, IL. The Zip code at my office (in Cook) and at the hospital where I have customers (in Lake) are the same, but the tax rates differ by 3% (Cook has among the highest sales taxes in the nation, if not the highest).
Since JungleDisk was purchased by RackSpace, they've added support for RackSpace Cloud Files. Storage pricing is $0.15/GB the same as S3 in the US, but there's no charge for data transfer.
On the other hand, Amazon has importing in beta - you ship them a disk or disk pack, they import it into S3 for you. $80/device plus $2.49 per import hour, no bandwidth charges. eSATA or USB, up to 8U, up to 50 pounds, up to 2000 watts.
With exporting coming soon, solutions built around or including S3 will get more appealing as an offsite backup option. I'd have considered it for some customers, but who wants to back up several hundred gig then have to restore it via T1 line? Heck, it's the kind of thing where you go get a cable modem just for the faster restore speed, because they'll have installers out before you make a significant dent in your data to transfer.
Right now Amazon just has my personal files and wedding photos. Bad to lose, but not fatal.
Perhaps your boss doesn't regard you as worthy of pacification. Have you tried leaving part of the carcass of something you've killed with your bare hands on your desk?
You complain about how all of your AOL-hosted links ceased to work and how you're unable to update all the places they were used to point to your (currently) Verizon-hosted content. Do you see the problem with this?
The solution to this is to get your own domain, so you retain the ability to move it at will. I started out with my primary domain (http://www.fencepost.net/) because I wanted a reliable email address after two successive ISPs were bought out. I would never use a carrier-provided email address as my primary, though I probably do have an @sbcglobal.net address that will continue to exist until AT&T decides to kill off the last of that Baby Bell.
As I see it, if you want a "permanent" online presence then you have two options: 1) control it yourself with a domain of your own, or 2) find an entity that you are positive will not cease to exist or restructure your presence out of existence.
Your best bet for #2 is probably an email address through your college (assuming you're a college grad) if your college's Alumni Relations office has set something like that up. Generally these are "forwarder" addresses (@alumni.mycollege.edu) that simply pass mail along to another address that you've provided them with, and sending email with that as your return address may be problematic depending on who your actual mailbox is hosted with. It's also not unheard of for colleges (particularly small/poorly funded ones) to go under. GMail does not qualify for #2. Some associations could be considered to qualify for #2 (e.g. ACM, IEEE) but if you're not using their other services then you're paying several hundred dollars a year just for an email address - a domain is cheaper.
For #1, sure it's going to cost you a few dollars and a little time each year, but anyone who's reading Slashdot should be able to register a domain and set up hosting. Simple registration is under $10/year, and depending on your needs hosting might even be available "free" from your registrar. You can also look at services such as NearlyFreeSpeech.net, with hosting prices dependent on your traffic and a minimum deposit of $0.25. If all you're doing is email and a small static website that nobody ever goes to, throw a $10 deposit at them and you're probably set for years. (Disclaimer: I've never used these folks, but they're an example of how little it can take to get things started).
There are several kinds of things we get from them: New equipment, particularly stuff with a) no moving parts and b) that they don't actually carry in their stores. That's because there's a store not quite between my home and office, and if they don't have it in the store they'll ship it to you free. That generally means free overnight shipping from their warehouse about 25 miles away.
Also cheap stuff like a quick grab of a small unmanaged switch or a replacement power supply if I don't have one on hand. Where else am I going to get something same-day - Best Buy or an office supply place?
Third is a bunch of refurbed IBM desktops for use as terminals. Sure they're crappy little boxes but they're fine for simple use, and as one of my coworkers commented on the pricing "So what you're saying is that you get a free PC with your copy of XP Pro?"
While you probably don't live in Miami, talk with your child about the possible future issues he'll face. Were he to kill said girlfriend, the odds are good that in 10-15 years he'd be just another member of society (though perhaps unable to vote or own guns depending on where he lived). If he produces a nude drawing of her and it gets out (lost sketchbook?), chances are fair that he's going to have problems that will just continue to increase over time - after all, who wants to defend the sex offenders? Just ask the Miami sex offenders still living under bridge.
If I had kids and one ended up with criminal charges like the currently-fashionable "sexting" ones, I'd do anything possible to fight any outcome that ended up including a "sex offender" status.
I'll trust your figures, but I think you (and Forbes) were looking at the wrong thing. The absolute size of the porn market may be low, but availability of porn drives adoption of devices that can play/display it. In the early days of VCRs, I might not have paid $500 for a VCR just to watch a popular movie of the time, but I might buy one to be able to watch porn in the privacy of my own home - possibly with only a few movies. But, now that I have the VCR I might as well get some regular movies as well - after all, I've already got the equipment. Besides, I have to buy at least a few regular movies.
"Bob, want to see my new VCR?"
"Sure Jim, what movies do you have?"
"Oh, I don't have any movies for it."
"Ah, just porn eh?"
Gotta wonder what percentage of movies watched on PCs with DVD-ROM drives were porn. It's not like there was a lot of PC content available on DVD for the early years of those drives; even now most retail-channel software is distributed on CDs because it's just not that big.
Assuming that your ebooks are in PalmDoc format, MobiPocket's free reader does read them on the blackberry. It has some problems (dictionary issues with the decoding, I suspect) but I'd expect those to get worked out in time. Similarly, I expect that someone will develop a PalmDoc reader for the blackberry - the format is available.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple - just reserve conference rooms with doors for the entire day. Get two developers each who are working on the same project so "it's a meeting." Close doors. Repeat daily.
There's no reason to be immature when you leave a company, whether it's your choice or not. Behave with class even if you're truly pissed, and don't bitch about how pissed off you are/were when you're interviewing either - nobody wants a whiner.
If you leave on good terms, you may be able to use those folks as a reference beyond "Yes, Joe was employed here from 2005 to 2009." If you leave people dealing with a festering pile of crap because you were being pissy, that time range is the *best* you should expect to get, and you may get worse. Remember, just because you're jumping to a new job doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to last. Odds are fair that once you're established in an industry you're going to stay in that industry or a related one because that's where many of your networking contacts are and they'll help you find future jobs. That means you're going to run into people you've worked with in the past.
A friend has closed product development consulting contracts because he did a favor for someone 10 years ago and that now-senior-executive remembered him. Be that remembered person.
If you're being laid off, this is even more important. When a site I was at was closed years back (and I declined the opportunity to relocate), I got thanks for being professional and helpful with closing things down, documenting, etc. I had no problems at all with listing those folks as references, because *they were happy with me.*
Basically if the payoff for being pissy is to make you feel good for 15 minutes, just go have a beer with friends instead. You'll feel just as good, and it may cost you less in the long run.
Interestingly, I was getting a small number of Farmville-related items even though I'd hidden it. Attempting to set the option to block all access (at the bottom of the message I received) gave me an error every time I tried it.
The same thing worked for other applications though.
If you're using that printer for photo printing, you may be paying twice as much to print your photos at home as it would cost to have them printed at a store (upload, order, pick up) or to have them printed by a service (upload, order, get in mail).
The quality from the store will probably be better as well.
Of course, if you're printing out nekkid photos that you don't want anyone else to ever see, print them yourself.
I've taken to pretty much completely skipping the tuna when I'm getting sushi - not because of concerns about which fish I'm getting, but because of mercury levels. Since commercial tuna are very large pinnacle fish, they tend to accumulate significant amounts of mercury - much higher than is found in smaller fish such as salmon. There's a nice little article about mercury levels in tuna sushi in NYC from early 2008: High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi (NYTimes January 23, 2008)
Years ago I had a mouse designed for CAD work that had probably twice the buttons on it that this has. Pulled it out of a closet at the office. Unfortunately, I was never able to actually use it ("Because it was there"), because the manufacturer went under before they ever finished the Windows 95 drivers for it.
Even now you'll find folks doing CAD work who want many programmable buttons on their pointing devices.
You're talking about dropping from 100W down to 30, but what if you're really only consuming 45 regularly right now? Is it worth it for a 15W drop in consumption?
There are a huge number of posts in here talking about the Mac Mini and peak vs normal draw, but they're missing the point that *YOUR* normal draw may be much lower than you think, and there may be power saving features that you're not using that could lower it further. For example, if you're running DD-WRT or another aftermarket firmware on your router, you may be able to set things up to power your system down and use Wake On LAN to wake the system up remotely when you need it.
Of course, if you're using one of those routers with USB support you may be able to attach your external storage to it, though you may actually lose some power management features depending on how you do it and expect to have a much more limited range of capabilities.
A Kill-A-Watt or a good UPS should both be able to give you some idea of your current draw.
I've been experimenting with the voicemail-to-text transcription services out there, and compared to both GotVoice and PhoneTag the quality of transcription from Google Voice is something of a bad joke.
I understand that currently it's free (as opposed to $10+/month from the commercial services), and I have hopes that it will improve, but "quite nice" seems like a heck of a stretch at this point.
Anecdotally, here's an edited for privacy transcription from PhoneTag: "Hi, Alan. It's Nancy at Village Surgeons. My number is 123-456-7890. I'm following up on my e-mail that I sent you last week with regard to backup of our (quicken?) system here. (Paul Oddlastname?) was, had a concern that it wasn't backing up. So, I just kinda wants to touch base with you about that. When you have a chance. Give me a call. Thank you. Bye."
And here's an edited for privacy transcription from Google Voice today: "Hi Alan, it's gia Craig over at Northeastern collagen help topped and my computer is dead. It's definitely not working or managers on my phone's working. I checked the lines it doesn't look like. Anything's Unplugged, but I've pushed in any way you push the button to turn it on. There's no white that goes on movie then Maher of a machine starting. It's just absolutely dead and so could you do call me back and and come today. I do have to run over to delivery of the office for a few minutes this morning and then but I did not half hour. I might be at Colin's desk and that is extension 251. If I'm not at my own here and I'm 253. Thanks a lot. Bye bye."
Two good examples jump right out at me, albeit with different approaches to the problem.
O'Reilly handles this with Safari - you get access to electronic formats of their books (which you want), they get ongoing subscription revenue from you. Want more books? Pay a little more each month. Want to download chapters or the whole book? They have a system for that which will let you download a limited number of books per year as part of the subscription, and you can do so faster by paying what amounts to a per-chapter charge. Sure a lot of people pirate the books, but many of those pirated copies are in the hands of people who never would have purchased a paper copy and (I could be wrong here) many of those who have pirated books will make it a point to actually purchase other books from O'Reilly.
Baen has a different approach: they give away a fair amount of content in the Baen Free Library - generally older books from their authors, frequently the early books in a series that's still ongoing. They also give away similar content on the CDs included with some of their books; those CDs can be distributed freely and are available as ISOs from multiple sources. You can get electronic copies of everything they're publishing within a given month for $15, generally 4 new books and a couple of "backlist" titles - frequently things that are now coming out in paperback after an original hardcover release. You get a variety of formats with no copy protection - HTML, Palm/Mobipocket/Kindle, Rocketbook, EPUB/Stanza, Sony LRF, RTF and MS Reader (.LIT). If you subscribe before the month in question, you get access to the book 25% at a time starting months before the release date. And of course you can purchase an electronic copy of any of the books for prices around $5 (a few are less, some are a dollar or two more).
How do they make money? The same way publishers always have, with new content. How do they keep people from ripping them off? They use the honor system. They have loyal customers who are happy to spend a relatively small amount of money on their books. Do people bootleg the books? Sure, and I'm sure a lot of them then go on to become loyal customers. As an outsider, I'd say that Baen is less concerned about their readers stealing from them than they are about expanding their number of readers. If someday they become the Sole Publisher On The Planet then every bootlegged book is lost revenue, but right now they're trying to grow their readership paid and unpaid while making sure that a large percentage of it is paying customers.
And of course, I'm sure you can't buy most Baen books for the Kindle through Amazon's store - that's why Baen has instructions on their site for how to load the books onto your Kindle or other ebook reader. After all, why pay Amazon $9-10 when you can buy from the publisher for half that and know that more of the money's going to them and the authors?
Most of the long distance in the country dropped that day, triggered by 4ESS switches hitting a bug, detecting, it, going offline (with load shifted to other switches). Increased load made the bug in question more likely to be hit, so those switches would in turn drop and shift load away (sometimes back to the originator). 9 hours of basically no long-distance service.
And just think, it was a year and a half before Berners-Lee announced the "World Wide Web" and Linus announced that he was working on this "Linux" thing.
It's worth noting that many laptops now have "active drive protection" by some name - basically accelerometers detect drops and immediately park the heads of the drive - hopefully before the end of the fall.
The advantage of roads is that the vast majority of roads are uncovered most of the time. Parking lots, not so much so - they get covered with cars that just sit there.
The site also talks about transmission of power from areas receiving sunlight to areas not receiving it, but that's complete nonsense - transcontinental transmission of power would be a hugely wasteful joke.
I think the only Segway that I've ever seen out in the real world is at one of my customers - a neurology practice. One of their patients uses a Segway to get around; I know nothing about her condition except that she sees a neurologist and presumably doesn't have balance/stability issues that cause problems with it.
They're not far from Coburn Gore which has a border crossing, and they're putting the turbines in on the western edge of the mountains. Looking at the terrain and roads on Google Maps, it looks like the Canadian side of the border is much flatter and has much straighter roads (because it's not mountainous)You might even be able to bring them in closer on barges to cut down the truck distance, though that would depend on the port facilities.
I stopped trusting Symantec/Norton for much of anything when one of my customers couldn't resolve names because Norton had decided that outbound DNS queries (or the responses to them) were malicious and needed to be blocked.
There may be a widening gap between what people understand and what they're facing, but I didn't see any sign that Norton was addressing that gap appropriately.
You can't calculate tax just by zip code - if you could, it'd be simple. You have to account for states, counties and municipalities, and zip codes don't line up completely with at least the last two. Zip+4 might, but that in itself is a nightmare (Zip+4 can be down to 10 or fewer individual addresses).
A couple of examples: I live in a suburb of Chicago that gets much of its revenue from sales taxes on malls, etc. within the city limits. Its tax rate is different from the next municipality over, but my zip code overlaps that suburb. Another example: my office is in a town that straddles the border between Cook County, IL and Lake County, IL. The Zip code at my office (in Cook) and at the hospital where I have customers (in Lake) are the same, but the tax rates differ by 3% (Cook has among the highest sales taxes in the nation, if not the highest).
Since JungleDisk was purchased by RackSpace, they've added support for RackSpace Cloud Files. Storage pricing is $0.15/GB the same as S3 in the US, but there's no charge for data transfer.
On the other hand, Amazon has importing in beta - you ship them a disk or disk pack, they import it into S3 for you. $80/device plus $2.49 per import hour, no bandwidth charges. eSATA or USB, up to 8U, up to 50 pounds, up to 2000 watts.
With exporting coming soon, solutions built around or including S3 will get more appealing as an offsite backup option. I'd have considered it for some customers, but who wants to back up several hundred gig then have to restore it via T1 line? Heck, it's the kind of thing where you go get a cable modem just for the faster restore speed, because they'll have installers out before you make a significant dent in your data to transfer.
Right now Amazon just has my personal files and wedding photos. Bad to lose, but not fatal.
Perhaps your boss doesn't regard you as worthy of pacification. Have you tried leaving part of the carcass of something you've killed with your bare hands on your desk?
You complain about how all of your AOL-hosted links ceased to work and how you're unable to update all the places they were used to point to your (currently) Verizon-hosted content. Do you see the problem with this?
The solution to this is to get your own domain, so you retain the ability to move it at will. I started out with my primary domain (http://www.fencepost.net/) because I wanted a reliable email address after two successive ISPs were bought out. I would never use a carrier-provided email address as my primary, though I probably do have an @sbcglobal.net address that will continue to exist until AT&T decides to kill off the last of that Baby Bell.
As I see it, if you want a "permanent" online presence then you have two options: 1) control it yourself with a domain of your own, or 2) find an entity that you are positive will not cease to exist or restructure your presence out of existence.
Your best bet for #2 is probably an email address through your college (assuming you're a college grad) if your college's Alumni Relations office has set something like that up. Generally these are "forwarder" addresses (@alumni.mycollege.edu) that simply pass mail along to another address that you've provided them with, and sending email with that as your return address may be problematic depending on who your actual mailbox is hosted with. It's also not unheard of for colleges (particularly small/poorly funded ones) to go under. GMail does not qualify for #2. Some associations could be considered to qualify for #2 (e.g. ACM, IEEE) but if you're not using their other services then you're paying several hundred dollars a year just for an email address - a domain is cheaper.
For #1, sure it's going to cost you a few dollars and a little time each year, but anyone who's reading Slashdot should be able to register a domain and set up hosting. Simple registration is under $10/year, and depending on your needs hosting might even be available "free" from your registrar. You can also look at services such as NearlyFreeSpeech.net, with hosting prices dependent on your traffic and a minimum deposit of $0.25. If all you're doing is email and a small static website that nobody ever goes to, throw a $10 deposit at them and you're probably set for years. (Disclaimer: I've never used these folks, but they're an example of how little it can take to get things started).
There are several kinds of things we get from them: New equipment, particularly stuff with a) no moving parts and b) that they don't actually carry in their stores. That's because there's a store not quite between my home and office, and if they don't have it in the store they'll ship it to you free. That generally means free overnight shipping from their warehouse about 25 miles away.
Also cheap stuff like a quick grab of a small unmanaged switch or a replacement power supply if I don't have one on hand. Where else am I going to get something same-day - Best Buy or an office supply place?
Third is a bunch of refurbed IBM desktops for use as terminals. Sure they're crappy little boxes but they're fine for simple use, and as one of my coworkers commented on the pricing "So what you're saying is that you get a free PC with your copy of XP Pro?"
Mod the parent AC post (#27677421) up, it's from the author of Making Things Happen. Genuineness based on him linking directly to it from his blog.
If I had kids and one ended up with criminal charges like the currently-fashionable "sexting" ones, I'd do anything possible to fight any outcome that ended up including a "sex offender" status.
"Bob, want to see my new VCR?"
"Sure Jim, what movies do you have?"
"Oh, I don't have any movies for it."
"Ah, just porn eh?"
Gotta wonder what percentage of movies watched on PCs with DVD-ROM drives were porn. It's not like there was a lot of PC content available on DVD for the early years of those drives; even now most retail-channel software is distributed on CDs because it's just not that big.
Why waste your money on six inches of air when a half inch will do just fine?
Assuming that your ebooks are in PalmDoc format, MobiPocket's free reader does read them on the blackberry. It has some problems (dictionary issues with the decoding, I suspect) but I'd expect those to get worked out in time. Similarly, I expect that someone will develop a PalmDoc reader for the blackberry - the format is available.