A couple people have asked me to review Palm's newest entry into the smartphone market, the Pre. Not only has Palm introduced a new an innovative hardware form factor, but they have also given the world an entirely new mobile operating system called WebOS. It's a pretty big deal. Bigger-than-Ron-Burgundy big.

When talking about the Palm's new phone, it's impossible not to talk about the current reigning champion in the smartphone space: iPhone. The best way to start out my review would be to tell you why I chose the Pre over Apple's more mature offering.

There are a few reasons, but the biggest sticking point for me about iPhone (this is how Apple refers to it - "iPhone" rather than "the iPhone") is their attitude towards developers. For a very interesting insight into the issue, I highly recommend reading The Future of The Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. It's available for free download here. If nothing else, just read the introduction.

In the book, Zittrain compares iPhone to the original Apple II computer. When you bought an Apple II and turned it on, you got a prompt. The machine was waiting for you to tell it what to do. If you could imagine it, you could make the computer do it (within reason, of course). One enterprising company came up with the World's first spreadsheet software VisiCalc. Not only was the software revolutionary, but it started selling a lot of computers.

Here's the important thing: Apple didn't know that VisiCalc even existed until they started noticing a lot more computers going out the door. It was software that was beyond the scope of their vision. The Apple II became great because developers made it so, and this relationship between developers and computer makers is what is responsible for the current state of computers now. Give someone a sandbox, and they will create something great.

So bringing this all back to iPhone, the problem is that the platform can never fully become something beyond Apple's narrow vision for it. Evidence of this turns up every day when you hear about yet another app being rejected from the app store. You are so restricted in what you can do - no messing with the core OS, no interpreted code (that means no flash, no emulators, etc.), and nothing outside of Apple's as-of-yet undefined arbitrary moral code. iPhone is an appliance. It's a really nice typerwriter with lots of gee-whiz applications, but it's stagnant in that Apple choose a window of past technology and said "Here, you can make things within these limits and within these limits only." I don't see how the groundbreaking mobile technologies of the future can be born on such a platform.

So why is Apple winning? Why is iPhone the leading smartphone? I'm not ashamed to say it: it has been the best. Despite it's very fundamental flaws, it introduced a new generation of mobile computing. Until very recently there has been nothing like it on the market. With iPhone, Apple spurred the entire industry into a whole new generation. If it wasn't for them, I might now be reviewing a boring Palm OS phone or a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone.

So my argument would be that Apple is now winning not because they have the best phone NOW, but that they've had it for the last couple years. They have a head start - and the deserve it for the innovation that they've introduced and the bar they've raised in the industry. But, like the line of early Apple computers, a more open, more approachable, and more innovation friendly competitor has shown up. Unless Apple changes its ways (and quick), the same thing will happen to their phone that happened to their computers - they'll become second place.

There are two promising competitors on the market: Android and Palm's WebOS. I'm not going to talk about Android here, but I think it's awesome and am excited to see what will be done with it.

WebOS is a breath of fresh air. I'll say it right now: it's the best mobile operating system there is. Yes, it has its flaws but it's young and has a bright future ahead of it. Although their developer ecosystem is not in full swing, all indications show that it will be much more open (and innovation-friendly) than Apple.

The greatness of WebOS was really driven home for me a few days after I got the Pre. I was sitting there talking to my little brother over IM, as well as another friend who likes to send me lots of links to things he finds humorous or entertaining. The WebOS built-in IM program is more than adequate at keeping up with multiple conversations. My little brother was sending me links to mockups he had created for a website he was working on. I would click on the links and a new "card" would open within WebOS. I could view, rotate, zoom in and out on his mockups, then flip right back to the conversation and give him my feedback. When I was done viewing a mockup, I could simply flick it off the top of the screen.

The whole experience was exactly what I've wanted from a mobile device. I don't just want to be able to make calls - I want to be able to communicate - and the phone abilities are only a small portion of how I communicate with people. The conversation with my brother, and how it integrated with the mobile web experience, and how the whole thing was wrapped into the WebOS multi-tasking "cards" philosophy was so seamless and awesome that I was sold right there on WebOS. It's exactly what I've been wanting. Exactly.

Contrast that experience with the other leading mobile platform, and such an experience would have been a lot more frustrating. With every link I would have to sign out of IM, close the program, open up the web browser, manually type in the URL (having written it down on a piece of paper or something due to lack of copy and paste), look at the image, close out of the browser, re-open the IM program, sign in, and give my feedback. At that point, the experience is so cumbersome that it's not even worth it. The experience is outweighed by the amount of work involved and you just say "I'll have to check it later when I get to a computer."

My main fear with the Pre was that it would not be stable. Palm OS was always notoriously buggy and crashy. From my original Palm Pilot, the my Palm II, to my Palm V, to my Visor to my Treo, I never had a Palm device that didn't crash often and a lot of time take ALL OF MY DATA with it. I am happy to say that after a few weeks with the Pre, it has not crashed once, frozen, or become overly sluggish. It's solid as a rock and fast enough that I don't find myself sitting around waiting for programs to open or webpages to load.

Launching apps does take some time. It's comparable with Windows Mobile, and a lot slower than Palm OS and iPhone OS. But the benefit is that once it's loaded, it's loaded. You can keep it running for as long as you want and with as many other applications as you want. I'd rather open a WebOS app once at 5 seconds then 5 times at 2 seconds each on a platform that isn't capable of multi-tasking. Plus, once the app is loaded, it runs at full speed, regardless of how many other apps you have open in the background (I've had about 20 at the most).

With Synergy, all of my contacts are sync'd automagically from the cloud. Both Google contacts and Facebook are used as sources. Overall, the concept and execution are awesome, but it does leave a bit to be desired. Most of this is due to the fact that Google's contact application is in its infancy and advanced contact management is just not possible. The Pre also does not yet give you the ability to choose which groups from Google contacts to sync with, so you get EVERYTHING. If you're going to use this feature, expect taking some time to clean up your Google contacts address book.

Once everything it up and running, though, it's great. If someone changes their Facebook picture I see the update in my very own address book. If someone updates their contact info with a new phone number or email address, I have it without ever having to do anything. I think THIS is the future. Everyone manages their own contact information and what you have is never out of date.

There are a few other shortcomings with WebOS (lack of applications, for example), but most - if not all - are due to the platform's infancy. There are some features missing and a lot of things I'd like to see improved, but as is Palm has delivered a very impressive experience for a first generation operating system, and the updates are coming fast (4 revisions to date). I think it will take 6 months or a year for things to get really, really good to the point where people used to the number of applications on iPhone OS will start seeing WebOS as an alternative. The fact that WebOS will be available on multiple devices in a variety of form factors and on multiple carriers will only help things.

Will the Pre dethrone the iPhone? As I said, it's a better platform, but more important than the platform is what is done with it. WebOS opens a lot more possibilities than iPhone. However, a three generation head start is hard to catch up to. Then again, Apple did it. They went up against industry leaders like Palm, Microsoft, and Blackberry and destroyed them all within two years. It's not impossible that WebOS could do the same. My guess is that it will take a bit longer (given that the jump between previous generation smartphones and the iPhone was a lot bigger than the iPhone to the Palm Pre) and that both platforms will enjoy success for the next several years. That said, had iPhone and the Pre launched on the same day, I am confident that the Pre would have the larger market share today. Hopefully Apple ups their game and relaxes a little bit with their developers. Then things are really going to get interesting.

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk when a film crew rolled in to the office and started setting up their cameras and everything RIGHT BEHIND ME. Apparently I was supposed to be the backdrop for this commercial they were filming. Interesting how nobody told me...

The spokeswoman came up and stood directly behind my chair and started talking to the cameras, doing her lines. Nobody this entire time said anything to me, but it was clear that I was on camera and that my triple monitor desk was the main backdrop for the commercial.

I couldn't exactly have client data up on my screen, so I just started messing around. First I pulled up this on my far left monitor (Thanks, Dean). It's basically a countdown timer that flies by really fast with Arabic writing right above it. Innocuous enough, right?

On my main monitor I pulled up a rolling demo of one of the coolest looking games ever, Defcon. It looks a little something like this:

I also pulled up a satellite photo zoomed in on the White House and another map of the world that shows all my server traffic over the last several minutes (with lines all connecting to my server which happens to be in Washington D.C.).

On my far right monitor I pulled up a Windows virtual machine and put a BSOD on it. Then in my display preferences I flipped the monitor image 180 degrees so the whole thing was upside down. After all that, my desktop looked a little something like this:

I toyed with the idea of running MILF308, which is a program that shoots up TONS of ridiculous novelty popup windows that advertise all sorts of ridiculous internet warez, but I thought it would get too obvious - and some of them are a bit NSFW.

They filmed for an hour or two, me in the background the whole time hitting refresh on my Arabic countdown timer every time they said "action!" Nobody said a word to me the entire time. Finally at the end one of the film crew came up to me and said "So, uhh .... what are you working on over here?" I just told him I was keeping busy with some client reports and he walked off. Those are some pretty interesting client reports!

I can't wait to see the commercial. If I find it (I think it will be posted online), I'll definitely link to it here so you can see the evil genius in the background conducting thermonuclear war.

This morning I received the following text message on my phone:

FRM: VISA

MSG: VISA ALERT. Unusual Activity - Call now at 1-(623)398-0539

Since I receive SMS alerts from my bank regularly my first though was "holy crap, what's going on with my card?" I almost started dialing the number before I decided to google the number first. I don't normally take things at face value - if someone from my bank calls me I always verify their number or ask to call them back. But I'll get to that in a minute.

A secure call to the number began with a recorded voice telling me my credit card had been compromised. A robotic woman computer voice then came on and asked me to key in my credit card number. I entered a fake (but valid) Visa number at which point it asked for my pin, which I made up. The woman's voice said "thanks for attending to this matter" and hung up.

Pretty much the worst scam ever. I can't imagine too many people falling for it, and the fact that the system gives you no further information after entering your CC number is just going to make people curious and attract attention to them. Whoever is behind the scam is clearly an amateur.

A quick Google search for the number resulted in a whois page for benham.net. The phone number is listed as the contact number for Darren Banham, the guy who registered and runs the domain.

It should be noted up front that the fact that his number is on his domain doesn't necessarily mean he's behind the scam, but it does point a finger at him. His website appears to be down, meaning this could be some kind of elaborate hack or identity theft. His is number could have changed since he input his domain's whois info as well. However, this seems unlikely as the domain was last renewed only two months ago. Furthermore, given the amateurish nature of the scam, it would be no surprise to find out the scammer left his personal information in the first Google result for the number.

Occam's razor would suggest that Benham is behind the scam. Therefore, I'm going to post here on my blog everything I know about him as I continue my investigation.

Name: Darren Benham
Age: 40
Address: PO Box 605 Wickenburg AZ 85390 US
Address: 161 N. Madison St., Wickenburg, AZ 85390
Email: Darren@benham.net

Here are some snapshots of different versions of his website:

Circa July 2003

Circa May 2008

Now (May 2009) Raw SQL queries? Note that this is not some kind of error, this appears to be the actual text published to the page.

A lot of pages are still up at the ols.benham.net as seen here.

Interests:

Unix Administrator (There goes the 'he got hacked' theory)
Experience: Solaris, HPUX, AIX, OS/400, Linux, C/C++, Pascal, Basic, Cobol, Assembly, Perl, Python. (Capable of putting this scam together). Could he be using asterisk?
The Bible (I'll let that speak for itself)
Married
Father of nine, 3 of them step children. (Could one of his kids be the scammer?)

Other info:

Attended Clark, Ed HS in Las Vegas, NV (Grad. 1987)
Air Force Brat

That's all for now.

Update 1:

I have seen one other report of someone getting the same scam from a person with a number very close to mine. I received the text at 10:26am according to my phone and this person received the same text at the same time. It would appear it is a script running on numbers in sequential order. This probably means he doesn't have a phone book, but is just incrementing sets of phone numbers.

The text was sent via email. I'm going to try to figure out if I can find some headers or something.

Time to start working on his voicemail system.

Update 2:

The number appears to just be ringing endlessly now, no answer by the robot woman.

Update 3:

Contacted Benham via Myspace, waiting for response. Haven't pointed him at this blog post yet, but he might find it through my Myspace profile or if he has google alerts on his name.

Filed complaint with Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard against Benham. Waiting for response.

Update 4:

I was contacted by the Crime Fraud and Victim Resource center for the Arizona State attorney general. The number has been reported to the Attorney General.

Benham has apparently not logged into his Myspace for some time, so it is unlikely he will get my message. If anyone finds alternate contact info, I will call or email him and find out what's up.

Update 5:

Multiple reports have come in to the Attorney General's office and they are now being forwarded to his local (Wickenburg) police department. I have contacted them directly as well. Will keep you posted on updates.

Many more reports coming in here.

More info on the phone number:

Type: Land Line
Provider: XO
Location: Phoenix, AZ

County: MARICOPA
Carrier: T-MOBILE USA, INC.
Phone Type: PHOENIX TEMPAZNR1MD
Rate Center: PHOENIX

Update 6:

Found a twitter page - actually updated recently. Apparently he just had a kid, so maybe he's been offline for a while. http://twitter.com/father0fnine

Correction: He didn't just have a kid, he is involved in the opening of a new ER somehow. It is looking less likely that he is involved in this scam.

Took a closer look at old.benham.net. Apparently he's having a rough time in this economy, and he's got a new baby to pay for to boot. Hmmmmm... Also, his family photos all consist of wolves. That's right, he was raised by wolves.

Update 7

Radio License:
Call Sign: KC7YAQ, Licensee ID: L00327807
Grant Date: 06/27/2008, Expiration Date: 06/27/2018
Registrant: Darren O Benham, 161 N. Madison St., Wickenburg, AZ 85390
Maybe someone could rouse him on the old ham radio?

(If anyone else has information about this, please contact me here or use the chat badge in the right sidebar of this site.)

10. Dilbert Principle

The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

The Takeaway: If you suck are your job, you're probably going to get fired ... unless there's a spot open in management.

9. Wirth's Law

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Sam's law: Hardware gets faster faster than your wallet gets bigger.

8. Skitt's Law

The Likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.

The takeaway: If you're posting a comment in a forum or on a blog in which you attempt to correct someone else's spelling or grammar, be sure to triple check for errors.

7. Occam's Razor

When two explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable. Never multiply causes without necessity.

The Takeaway: How does electricity work? Magic.

6. Stugeon's Law

Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crap.

The Takeaway: Just because you read book one of the Goosebumps series and hated it doesn't mean reading is a waste of time, you just need to find the 10% of books that are actually good.

5. Murphy's Law

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Finagle's law - "... and at the worst possible moment."

The Takeaway: Don't row boats below flying piano factories.

4. Clarke's 3 Laws

First law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Okay, I know three laws in one is cheating, but it's Arthur C. Clarke we're talking about - he gets to have three for one. A closely related adage is Shermer's law which states; "Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from god." But since god created the planet and was therefore not born on it, I'd say god is an alien.

3. Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

2. Dollo's Law

"An organism is unable to return, even partially, to a previous stage already realized in the ranks of its ancestors." Simply put this law states that evolution is not reversible.

The Takeaway: Sorry guys, it was a thought provoking movie but it's not our future.

1. Godwin's Law

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

The Takeaway: Nazi's are bound to show up at some point.

I noticed today that some moron was hotlinking one of my images. That means he was posting an image from my server all over myspace rather than hosting the image himself. The bottom line is he was posting an image that I have control over.

Since I don't like other people eating up all my bandwidth, I decided to pull a little switcheroo on the image. So instead of serving up the image he intended, I made a new image. Check out the before and after.

Before:

After:

If you've ever tried to include a logo in your Apple Mail signatures, you know it can be a pain. Mail wants to add a space above and a space below the image, which can make your sig look all retarded instead of super professional.

There doesn't appear to be any consistent way of fixing this, but here's a few things to try.

Start by removing the line below the image first. To do that delete all the spaces between the image and the text so the text sits to the right of the image. To finalize this change, click on another tab within mail prefs and then back onto the signatures tab.

Once you've confirmed that changes by doing the tab dance, place your cursor between the image and text and hit return once. Do the tab dance again to see if the changes stuck and worked. You should have this now:

Now move onto the top line, place your cursor at the end of the line of text above your image ("towel boy") and hit delete (fn+delete for forward delete) until the image is sitting to the right of your text thusly:

Now do the tab dance to confirm your changes. If you're lucky, you'll now have this:

Note that you may need to try this a few times to get it to work. I know that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, but in this case you will get different results. I'm pretty sure Mail is the insane one here.

(Hint: Try deleting the white space in different ways - i.e. using forward delete vs. backwards delete or some combination of the two).

Once you can do the tab dance and still have your signature looking the way you want it, go start a new message and see if it's okay there. This seems to show up okay in Outlook and gmail so you should be good to go but YMMV.

If you just can't get it to work, there is one more trick you can try. Place a period on the side of the image that is giving you trouble (left side=top space, right side=bottom space). Using the Format/Alignment Menu, float the image left, and align the period(s) left as well. If this works, then you can color the periods white with the Format/Show Colors menu.

Sometimes I hear people complaining about how De Beers or someone has a world monopoly on diamonds and how horrible it is. "Diamonds are actually quite common," they say, "if the price wasn't artificially inflated they would be so cheap!"

Maybe that's true, but here's my point: who cares?

So pretend someone breaks up the De Beers cartel and floods the country with cheap diamonds. Kids are getting free diamonds in their cereal boxes and now all those fake rolexes are coming with real diamonds instead of fake plastic ones. So what are you going to do? Now that diamonds are cheap you're going to buy up a bunch and diamond stud your tennis shoes?

The reason I don't care about how much diamonds are is because they're stupid and useless. It's like if someone had a world monopoly on dog crap. The fact that they have a monopoly doesn't make me suddenly care about the availability of canine excrement.

The only reason I will ever ever buy a diamond is if (heaven forbid) I marry someone someday. But why do we give women diamonds when we get engaged? It's to show that we're willing to spend a bunch of money on useless crap for them. "Hey look how much I love you, I just spent two grand on the most worthless thing ever! But I did it for YOU!" Dog crap could have the same effect except it doesn't look pretty and you wouldn't want to put it on your finger unless you're some kind of sicko (in which case congratulations finding someone willing to marry you.)

So if the price of diamonds suddenly came down, the only effect it would have is making girls think you're cheap if you buy them one. They would just want some other stupid pointless crap instead. So you've solved the problem of diamonds being so expensive, but you've really just created a new problem - not to mention the fact that there was never really a problem to begin with so really you just reacted to nothing and ended up getting yourself in a mess.

Not as if you could single handedly control the price of diamonds, but I think you get my point.

So the fact that diamonds are pointless and stupid AND expensive is fine. If a girl wants some pointless expensive crap that's fine - I'm sure she'll have to endure lots of stupid pointless crap that a guy wants to (big screen TVs and big trucks and whatnot). The point is "show me how much you love me by how much money you're willing to flush down the toilet while simultaneously giving me a pointless thing that is shiny and I can show off my friends." Fine. A diamond serves thats purpose perfectly and it wouldn't be able to if it cost what it was actually worth.

As I was going through my Google Reader RSS feeds today, I noticed this little gem at the bottom of one of the articles from TUAW:

My immediate thought was that it was interesting how they have terms of use for their RSS feed, but you don't know that until you've already accessed their RSS feed. I decided to check out these terms to see what I had agreed to without knowing I had agreed to it.

The emphasis is mine. By accessing TUAW's feed, I am agreeing to the terms in this contract. Not only that, but I'm agreeing electronically, which is I guess different than agreeing organically or agreeing whole-heartedly. I guess I'm supposed to act like a robot while I made this agreement.

I shouldn't have been so quick to unknowingly agree in my electronic voice to these terms! Apparently I am prohibited from using any robot, spider, or other device to monitor the content from their RSS feeds. That pretty much eliminates news aggregators, feed readers, search engines, or anything else that is not a "manual process." Oh wait, monitoring the feed through a manual process is also prohibited, so I'm not even allowed to open the feed in my browser or text editor and look at the raw XML.

By the way, RSS stand for "Really Simple Syndication."

I just wanted to mention that.

What does it mean by "use" the RSS service? Does reading the RSS feed count as "using it?" That's the only way I know of that media is supposed to be consumed. How can I know I'm not supposed to "use" the content until after I've already read it and therefore "used it?" These are all questions I'd love to have answered. Furthermore, logic dictates that if there is some content on their website that fits the above criteria, it is also in their RSS feed. How am I to filter out such content? Why was that content on their website in the first place? Why am I held responsible for their poor choice in subject matter?

They're essentially saying "We can have hateful content on our site, but you can't use it."

This is saying that they own the RSS service. Since there were no definitions in this contract, I must assume that they are talking about the RSS format. They own the whole thing, at least I'm agreeing that they do by accessing their feed which, by the way, I'm not allowed to do through any automatic or manual process.

"We can take back our content at any time, and you have to stop evening thinking about it. We reserve the right to lobotomize you so that you stop 'using' our content by thinking about it."

"If our RSS feed comes to life, jumps from the computer screen and kills you, it's not our fault." I think we've all seen that scenario played out. I'm glad they made that clear.

Apparently we all have to "transact" with Weblogs, Inc. That sounds like nefarious robot speak for some kind of sexual congress. I'm just thinking that if I have to agree electronically, they might be wanting me to do other things electronically as well. Sorry Weblogs, I just don't feel that way about you.

Apparently we're agreeing to some other document by accessing the RSS feed that we're not allowed to access. I'm not even going to look at that to find out how many other agreements I might have made.

My favorite part of the contract is where they tell you they can change it at any time without notice and that you automatically agree to it. If they want you to agree to being Bill Gates' towel boy, they simply have to write it into their next revision and there you go - YOU AGREED TO IT ALREADY!

Then that last sentence doesn't seem to make any grammatical sense, but maybe I've been staring at a computer screen for too long.

By the way, I just want to note that by posting a screenshot of the terms notice from their RSS feed, I have broken the agreement in several places. I invite the Weblogs, Inc. legal team of monkey's who wrote this thing to try to sue me for all I'm worth.

This is part three in my ongoing quest to find shirts that fit my freakishly tall frame and humorously elongated torso. Through some website or another I came to learn of Thin Lojic, a new company that focuses on making fashionable (and eco-friendly) clothing for tall dudes like myself.

Alex Kingi, the proprietor of Thin Lojic was kind enough to provide me with a long sleeved shirt for review. I received the shirt about three months ago and have been putting it through the paces - wearing it, washing it, wearing it some more, washing it some more, drying it, sleeping in it, and on and on - you get the idea. The thing is - I don't just want a shirt that fits, I want a shirt that fits and lasts for some period of time after the first wash.

Although I was intrigued by Thin Lojic's style and the fact that they made tall clothes - I was a bit put back by the "eco-friendly" thing. I'm no hippy and my perception of "eco-friendly" clothing is that I'm sacrificing some amount of comfort or style just to save some dye from being dumped intro natural waterways killing millions of fish and furry creatures and messing up local ecosystems. My comfort is more important than all the natural waterways and wildlife in the world!

(Don't send me hate mail, I was only kidding.)

The closest thing I could compare to the Thin Lojic shirt is a Medium Tall shirt I ordered from J. Crew. The J. Crew shirt fits very well and is one of the more comfortable shirts I've owned - the fabric is great and I can really feel the woodland creature body count every time I put it on. I was surprised when I got the Thin Lojic shirt to find that the fabric is MUCH nicer - it makes the J. Crew shirt feel like an over-washed thick cotton shirt from the thrift store. It instantly put my eco-friendly fears to rest.

Not only is the fabric light and comfortable, but the shirt is very form fitting and warm too. Warmer than the average shirt I would say. In fact, I depended on it to help defend me from the extremely cold temperatures I endured standing outside for hours upon hours at the Obama inauguration. The fact that I'm still alive and not a Sam popsicle is testament to Thin Lojic's thermal abilities.

All of this combined makes it a perfect sleep shirt. It's form fitting enough that it doesn't ride up at all, it's comfortable enough that you can barley feel it, and it's warm enough to keep you nice and toasty all night. I think I've slept in mine more than I've worn it during the day (although it's great for that too).

The body length is optimal. The best shirt I have found so far in this category. That also makes it great for layering if you're into that sort of thing. Even though they're men's shirts I think girls would really like them too for this fact.

The only shortcoming (pun intended!) I would say is in the sleeve length. Although they're longer than your average long sleeved shirt, they come up a bit short (zing!) when compared to the J. Crew shirt. They're acceptable, just not optimal. The fabric of the shirt is also pretty stretchy compared to straight cotton (this is 37% cotton + 58% soy + 5% spandex) and I tried to stretch the arms out every time I wore the shirt but the fabric doesn't seem to have much of a memory and goes back to its original form pretty consistently. This is actually a really good thing - it means the shirt should last for a long time.

I washed the shirt on cold, warm, and hot and tried hang drying as well as machine drying (which I never do to any of my shirts because they shrink so bad). I am happy to report that the fabric held up to all of these tests and is as wearable as the day I got it.

Overall, this is one of my favorite shirts. For anyone looking for a tall shirt that doesn't make you look like a freak it's perfect.

There I was with no job in a bad economy. Everyone was saying "if you have a job, hold onto it!" My problem of course was that I did not have a precious job, but I needed one ... bad. I watched the craigslist postings daily trying to find opportunities. Maybe once a week I would see something that I actually wanted to apply for and maybe once a month I saw a listing for a place I could actually see myself working.

I was looking for an internet marketing job so I thought it would be only natural to apply marketing principles to my job search. The first thing I did was a little competitive research. I created a job listing on craigslist describing the sort of job I wanted and invited people to send in their resumes. What discouraged me most was not the sheer number of resumes I received (probably 40 in 48 hours) but how many of them were far more qualified than me.

I was looking at people who had marketing degrees from good schools, MBAs, and a lot more experience. The one thing I really noticed, though, was that all the resumes looked exactly the same: drab and boring. If I was hiring I would hate to go through all of those. In fact, I didn't even look at them all because I was so bored after the first few.

What I learned from all this was that I was going to need to do something to make me stand out. My experience in the field is pretty good and well rounded, but my higher education and lack of a history of prestigious job titles wasn't going to help at all.

Since I like designing things more than I like looking for jobs, I set out to make a creative resume. Something that would stand out above the rest despite my shortcomings. I needed something that said "I can do this job" (and I can) just by looking at it.

I went through maybe five or six completely different versions before I settled on this:

I sent this out to exactly one place before I got an interview which ultimately landed me a job - a really cool job that I'm actually excited about. I believe that the look of my resume is 100% responsible for landing me that first interview.