Daniel Dessinger

Month: March 2007

  • Pegasus News: The Coolest Thing to Hit Local Dallas News

    If you haven’t jumped on the Pegasus bandwagon, you’re likely to be one of those poor, pitiful souls who wishes they had. For anyone interested in local news, this is your one-stop shop. But don’t just read! Write!

    Pegasus News is the future of local news. It is largely user generated content, which means that you submit the stories, and you can learn from those in the know what is happening near you.

    And after reabsorbing EPpy Award winning Texasgigs.com, Pegasus News is now a major player in the local arts and culture scene. And then there’s me, of course! While not an official member of the Pegasus News team, you will start to see more of me around the site with comments, stories, etc. What else could you ask for?

    Pegasus News has the potential of becoming THE Dallas / Fort Worth website. It all depends on how they sell it, whether you buy it, and how often you contribute to it. Do you realize that you can become the leading expert on your neighborhood? Or your company? Or you school? Or your coffee shop? You can be the fair and biased voice of reason (like our beloved friend, Mr. Randy Galloway) in your community.

    That’s the hook. The influence. The power of influence will draw people every time. Just sell it right, Pegasus News, and they will come. You’ve already built it… now give them a reason to use it.

  • Searching for Free Wifi in DFW

    Two months ago, I thought I was a genius when I thought of buying the domain name: freethewifi.com. By partnering with T-Mobile HotSpots, Starbucks has become the enemy of all wifi users. As a copywriter and search marketer, I work from my home office. I don’t have to tell you how boring that gets.

    So I decide to work from local coffee shops. After all, you can just order a drink and stay as long as you want, right? Right, except that the most popular coffee shop chain doesn’t offer free Internet access to its patrons. Decidedly NOT okay.

    Panera Bread offers free wifi. The problem with Panera is that there are only a few stores in the DFW metroplex and the one by my house has a whopping total of three power outlets for patrons to use. Yeah… picture ten people trying to use three outlets. Not a pretty picture.

    Today, for example, I have a doctor’s appointment in North Dallas. I’m talking way up, north of 635 on Dallas Parkway near Addison. Every time I have a meeting or appointment in North Dallas, I inevitably get sucked into psychotic traffic. No more. I am determined to find free wifi access somewhere nearby and wait it out if necessary.

    So I go online and google “free wifi in dfw”. The stars were aligned, for once, and the very first search result provided the exact information I needed – ilovefreewifi.com.

    It’s a site of user-generated content where anyone can share their favorite free wifi spots all around the country. I mean, how rarely does anyone search for information and find exactly what they want on the first try and first click? It’s practically unheard of.

    On ilovefreewifi.com, there are currently 276 hotspots listed for Austin, 146 hotspots for Dallas / Fort Worth, 219 for Houston, and 76 for San Antonio. Of course, you can find results here for almost every state in the union (sorry, no wifi tips for the North Central US.

    The only downside is that I only took note of one free wifi spot in North Dallas before I left my house. I drove to Dunn Bros. Coffee in Addison only to find that despite a “perfect” signal, I couldn’t even get my homepage to open up. Pooh on Dunn Bros.!

    I was in a rush, so I didn’t complain to the management. I was hoping to check email in between doctor’s appointments. Still, I’m glad I found ilovefreewifi.com. This site will save my butt in the future.

    Webmaster of ilovefreewifi.com, if you’re reading this, the only thing your site needs to be the total bomb is smart search functionality. I wanted wifi spots in a specific town, street, a zip code, or an intersection, you should be able to provide refined results. Do that, and I will toot your horn all over town.

  • Tarrant County Prays More than Dallas

    I don’t know if it’s in the water or what, but my personal experience has proven that people in Tarrant County pray over meals more than people in Dallas County. We can’t really include Collin and Denton Counties in this comparison. Denton County is perhaps the most bizarre in Texas, and Collin County is full of overachieving business types – we all know they don’t pray ;).

    To the point, I cannot count how many people pray before their meal in restaurants all over Hurst, Euless, Bedford, Arlingtonn, Fort Worth, Grapevine, Southlake, Colleyville, etc. As we speak, I’ve seen two of four tables nearest me pray before their meal.

    My parents would probably say how sad it is that so few people pray in comparison to when they were my age. I, on the other hand, do not expect to see people pray in public ever, and it continues to startle me and make me feel oddly uncomfortable.

    When did this become a problem for me? I realize now that I have slipped out of the habit of praying over every meal. It is a habit I kept for ten years, and only in the past year have started forgetting. The discomfort of public prayer for me has been largely that of making public something that is very personal. Despite the fact that I blog, which is an extroverted activity to say the least, I do not like having my personal details aired in front of everyone.

    I admit it – I am still self-conscious and concerned about what others think.

    But this article isn’t about me. Or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to be. Maybe Christians just gravitate towards Starbucks and Panera Bread. Whatever the case, I am amazed that so many people still pray. I don’t know why I am so pessimistic, but I tend to assume that most people attending church are Sunday Christians only, and any expression of faith throughout the week is unintentional.

    Keep praying, Tarrant County. I don’t mind being wrong.

  • German Scientists Scan Brains to Predict Decision Making

    If you thought that the uses of technology couldn’t get any creepier, you would be wrong. With a “donut shaped” MRI machine, German scientists are scanning people’s brains during the process of decision making. The subjects are given a choice between two options: to add or subtract, or to push this button or that. The MRI shows the scientists what is going on in the brain as the people go through the process of making a decision. Scientists are hoping to be able to predict the outcome of an individual’s decision with greater accuracy.

    These experiments are phase one. Let’s be real. Whatever is made will be abused. Imagine the implications. Accurately predicting a person’s decisions before they are made or before the outcomes have been announced could shape world events.

    But scientists are making enough progress to make ethicists nervous, since the research has already progressed from identifying the regions of the brain where certain thoughts occur to identifying the very content of those thoughts.

    “These technologies, for the first time, give us a real possibility of going straight to the source to see what somebody is thinking or feeling, without them having any ability to stop us,” said Dr. Hank Greely, director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.

    “The concept of keeping your thoughts private could be profoundly altered in the future,” he said.

    Security is the excuse for most major poor ethical decisions these days. Sad as I am to say it, George W. Bush has participated in paving the way for the future of legal privacy invasion. I cannot fathom what would be his or any other president’s ulterior motive for the advancement of privacy invading technologies, but that doesn’t mean the motives don’t exist or even abound.

    It’s interesting how we’ve allowed ethics committees to exist, yet we rarely pay them more than lip service. As a species, humans do not stop to consider the consequences of industrial and technological development. We appear to be driven to pursue the furthest reaches of possibility regardless of the consequences.

    When do we ever stop? When will enough be enough?

  • Blogs are Security Risks

    For anyone out there with even an ounce of conspiracy theory in their blood, the idea of blogging should terrify you. We live in the age of Homeland Security, legal wire tapping, library card monitoring, internet and email monitoring…. you name it, it’s happening. You don’t even have to believe in the Illuminati or stress out about the World Bank. You’ve got bigger problems. You are intentionally divulging your personal preferences, attitudes, quirks, and traits. If they ever want you, they’ve got you.

    Think about it. If you are a blogger and mention anything not completely divorced from who you are, you have just posted yourself out there for the world to see. This could make for a sensational tv series, but a horrifying reality.

    What if someone wanted to frame you for a crime you didn’t commit? What if “they” wanted to plan a crime and pin it on a scapegoat? Or what if you belong to any type of racial, religious, or socioeconomic group that someone wants to remove?

    If you’re a blogger, you’ve shown them how you think, what you like, what you dislike, what you believe, where you shop, what you eat… the list goes on. Every post is another sample of who you are. And you are willingly making yourself public. Sure, you wouldn’t mind making a little money from it, or getting a little fame. But what if your words can be used against you? I’m not just talking about lawsuits, I’m talking about psychological profiling. Write enough blogs and any psychologist or keen observer could begin to predict your behavior based on the information you have provided.

    I think about Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, or Taye Diggs in Day Break. In any conspiratorial situation, public information is used against the victim. If you haven’t seen Day Break, I recommend you visit ABC today and watch the full season, half of which didn’t even make it on television.