I can’t remember seeing a funnier video… David Armand, impressionist, does Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn!

Being a tech-geek and having lived 10 years of my life in Silicon Valley, I also have to give a shout-out to this cool video … How to get a guy in Silicon Valley!

I’m sure my sinuses are pretty screwed up. I tend to get sinus infections once or twice a year. So when I get sick (cold or flu), I really have to watch out for sinus infections. Since Christmas, I’ve been fighting off a bad flu. But today, I determined (due to my intimate familiarity with the symptoms) that I had finally sucuumed to a sinus infection.

Since moving from California, I’ve been dreading finding another doctor. My previous doc was awesome and I really miss her!

I picked a doctor out of my work’s provider directory (simply because he’s close to where I live). So far, I’m impressed: his office has lots of interesting medical gadgets that I’ve never seen before:

• A barcode-scanner-like device that takes your temperature by “swiping” across your forehead. Apparently it’s more accurate than the “traditional” ones that the docs stick in your ear?!
• Some kind of “radar” device that checks for ear infections. They stick it in your ear, you hear some buzzing noise, and then it displays some numbers that “trained professionals” can tell whether you’ve got any ear problems.
• A “breathing treatment” device that administers drugs through vaporization. The drugs they gave me supposedly loosens the mucus in my air passages.

This new doctor seemed very knowledgeable, although being a sinus infection “veteran”, I’d already heard all the advice before (saline irrigation, over-the-counter medications raising blood pressure, etc). Although I’ve historically taken Tequin (antibiotics) for my sinus infections, he prescribed me Levaquin (same family was Tequin) which he said had less side effects.

I guess I’m pretty superficial judging doctors by their “bedside manners” and how cool their medical equipment is. My sister (a doctor) tells me that I should be judging doctors by their “cure rate” (how often their diagnosis and treatment is correct). I don’t know… that swiping thermometer was pretty cool!

On New Years day, I had the opportunity to buy CelebFace, a celebrity gossip site.

Although it is my most recent acquisition, it’s the first one to “go live. I’ve got a few other projects on the boil that is imminently going public, but they’re about 1-2 weeks out.

I’ve got big plans for CelebFace, and have already engaged some people to work on it. For prosperity’s sake here are a few snapshots of the the original format (as I bought it)…

I won’t give away the new design yet, but here’s a teaser with the new logo design…

OK, maybe I’m cheap…
I must be one of the miority in the known-universe that doesn’t have Adobe Photoshop (using Corel Paint Shop Pro instead).

Anyway, I’ve been really getting into looking at all those cool Web 2.0 stuff, but all I could find are Photoshop tutorials on how to make those logos.

So I figured I’d have a shot at doing it in Paint Shop Pro (PSP), and I came up with this:

I’ll also made avaialble the source files for those that want to play around and see what they come up with!
PaintShop Pro format
Photoshop format

I’ve made some pretty crazy “tech” predictions in the past, such as:

• Hard drives? Why wouldn’t a 5 1/4 floppy be enough to store everything you need?
• IBM PC with 640k of memory? No one will ever use so much!
• The mouse will never take off, I can do things faster by typing into a command line!

Luckily, some of my more recent predictions have been a little more on-the-mark, such as:

• 56k modems are still too slow. There must be a cheap way to get faster access.
• NCSA Mosaic is the future. The Internet will finally reach the masses.
• Google is my search engine of choice. Yahoo and Alta Vista will lose market share. 
• Youtube will be the next MySpace.

Here are some predictions for the future. Wonder how close I’ll be :) 

• Everyone will know and use tags as the preferred method of access before the end of 2007.
• Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, etc is the future. Google and traditional search engines will start to lose significant marketshare within the next 2 years.
• Ruby on Rails will become the preferred web development platform (over PHP, for those who were curious) within the next 2 years.