Josh Eastburn.com

I was a member of BMG’s mail-order music service for a couple of years and then decided to cancel. After an eerie silence for a few weeks, the calls started coming. I saw “BMG” in the callerID, so I ignored the calls for a few weeks. This clearly was not working. Then I started answering the calls and stated that I was no longer interested in the service and that they should stop calling me. The calls kept coming until I had the following conversation:

BMG Rep: Hello, I am calling to present you with a special offer since you have been such a valued customer.
Me: Sure, how do I sign up?
BMG (startled disbelief): Great, let me just confirm your address of . . .
Me: Actually, I have a new address now (might as well get rid of those pesky mailings while I’m at it)
BMG: OK, go ahead with the new address.
Me: 201 North Main Street, Barrow, Alaska
BMG: B-A-R-R-O-W?
Me: That is correct. It is actually the northernmost town in the United States.
BMG: Wow, it must be beautiful there.
Me: No. It is just very cold and dark right now.
BMG: Oh, (long pause) I’m sorry. Well, I have you set up to receive 12 free CDs. . .
Me: Wait, these are CDs I am getting? I don’t have a CD player anymore.
BMG: (longer pause) I see. Well, did you know that you can also play CDs on your computer?
Me: I don’t have a computer either. We only have power for 1 hour a day.
BMG: Oh. . .OK. Well, if you ever get a CD player. . .or computer, please be sure to give us a call.
Me: I certainly will. Good-bye.

It has been over a month now and not a single call or mailing.
My sincere apologies to the kind residents of Barrow, Alaska. I hope I have the opportunity to visit your town some day. Until then, please hold my mail.

Half-skiing, half-parachuting down Mount Eiger, Francois Bon and Antoine Montant recorded footage of their extreme sport, dubbed “speedflying.” Watching these videos makes my palms sweat.

Here is an excellent collection of images taken by the Hubble Telescope.

Today TiVo unveiled the long-awaited Series3 DVR. It has most of the features that were promised: record 2 shows at once, HD support, CableCard slots, and an upgraded remote. Sadly, several features are “disabled” for now–the external hard drive port and TiVoToGo–most likely at the request of the Cable Labs group which hands out CableCard certifications. As much as I’d love to swap out my DirecTV TiVo for the Series3, I’m not ready to spend $799 plus subscription costs. Read the full review here.

I have always gotten a kick out of misused quotation marks. For example, at lunch the other day, the back of the menu read: The “best” pizza in Lake County!
Here is a great collection of unnecessary quotation marks. Link

For a long time I have been in search of the perfect backup program.  Necessary features include: remote backup via FTP, compression, and encryption.  Cobian Backup is the best free backup program I’ve seen.  It includes all the important features and it lets you customize just about everything. Link

This page is 9 quadrillion pixels wide by 9 quadrillion pixels tall. Thus it contains a large number of pixels: 8,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 otherwise known as 8.1 nonillion.

Futhermore, at 77 pixels to the inch, this page takes up 3.4e18 square miles and is 1.844 billion miles on a side– an area roughly equivalent to a section of the plane of our Solar System with the sun at the center and the orbit of Saturn on the outside edge (a square 22 AU on a side).

FutureLab has a free service that lets you remove people and other moving objects from your photos. It compares multiple pictures and leaves you with empty cityscapes and tourist-free vacation photos. Link

Netflix is hosting a nationwide screening of classic American movies at locations made famous by the films. Watch Jaws on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard or see Escape from Alcatraz on Alcatraz Island. Link

Here is a great illustration for imagining the 10th dimension. See if you can comprehend it all the first time through.