What goes around, comes around (Or how my kids are just as messy as I was)

I remember quite clearly the mess we made of our playroom as kids.  The entire third floor attic of the house was given over to a mass of toys.  I have a picture in my mind of us wading through a sea of toys dumped out carelessly on the floor.  It was not a place for parents, it was a place for kids.  However, a few times a year my mom would venture into the attic, ziplocks in hand, to clean up the mess and get things organized.  I am sure that all the hard work to clean was soon returned to it's more "natural" messy space.

My kids (mostly Iain) are no different.  The toy room is quickly turned from clean to disaster after each weeks game night when Iain and friends attack.  Each week I take to the room to try and get it cleaned up.  I know that it is going to get messy again as soon as the kids get back in there, but I clean anyway.

To make things a bit easier, we took a trip to IKEA this past weekend to get a few things to help organize all of the toys. I bet my mom would have preferred a system like this to the ziplocks and tubs she used 30 years ago.

Buckets, shelves, and a hanging frog.

Hanging wall organizers, and more buckets

Dear Amazon Kindle Team:

Please stop making all of these platform specific applications!  I don't want to install the Kindle application on all of my devices.  Please, please make an amazing web application for reading my Kindle content.  Take a look at what Gmail has done for e-mail and replicate that for reading e-books.  Give me a web interface to my library with a nice, rich HTML (not Flash) reading experience. Give me a great full screen reading environment that takes advantage of touch screens and keyboards to navigate pages.  Make an application that works great on my laptop, but also scales down to my netbook and to my phone.  You only have to look at what Gmail has done on the Android and iPhone platforms to get an idea of how much functionality you can bring to a mobile device.

I just have to think that we would have one amazing web application by now if the effort was not being wasted on getting bare bones functionality through a dozen platform specific apps.

Was Stickybits the best name?

Stickybits is the newest social media thing.  Everyone at SXSW this year got a pack of stickers (I am not there unfortunately) and I decided to check out what the buzz was all about. The idea is interesting, scan any barcode (or download and stick one to anything) and leave a picture, audio file or comment about whatever it was you scanned. Anyone can see (or hear) the other attachments left on barcodes. Stickybits sells barcode stickers ($9.95 for 20) that you can attach to anything, cards and shirts, and they also allow you to download barcodes. The Stickywiki has some interesting ideas for how to use your barcodes.  I think that the Geocaching option is a good one, as is the idea to scan a box of food and share a recipe.

An application for Android and the iPhone is available.  The Android app seems a bit flaky on my Nexus One, it says it is processing a lot, but it works.  Stickybits lets you login using Facebook Connect which makes account creation easy for Facebook users.

I created a barcode to attach to this site.  You can scan it and add anything you want.  :)