Hyatt offering complimentary Platinum elite status and Clear© membership airport security

Last Feb when I stayed at Hyatt, I found that a new Hyatt Gold Passport member can enroll for Instant Platinum elite, and without even staying at a Hyatt hotel, use Hyatt elite status for free membership in Clear©.

Hyatt offers you a two-for-one fast-track to hotel status and airport status. Only one Hyatt stay is needed to extend your Platinum elite membership through February 2009. This promotion may be combined with the “Stays Count Double” promotion, but as a new member you may want to register for Instant Platinum first

A benefit of Hyatt Platinum elite membership is complimentary membership in the Clear© airport security pre-screened passengers program. This allows members to use their card to access security fast lanes at participating airports.

http://www.flyclear.com/about/clear_howclearworks.html

First year membership is normally $100 and there is also a $28 TSA fee. These first-year fees are waived for Hyatt Platinum elite members enrolling in Clear©.

Measure your Twitter Mojo with Twitter Grader

I was amazed to see that my blog was ranked top 5% on Twitter space. You can check you Twitter Mojo too using Twitter Grader. Twitter Grade is nothing but your rank on Twitterspace. Your grade is calculated using a combination of factors including:

-The number of followers you have
-The power of this network of followers
-The pace of your updates
-The completeness of your profile
...a few others

You can also connect to @Grader on Twitter! If so, please follow @grader on Twitter. The benefit is that you can get updates when important things happen in Grader.com land. Like when they post an important update.Right now they can only accept a limited number of users at a time. Currently there are only 100 spots left (Replenished by Twitter about every hour).

First iPod of the United States has a pirated Beatles' track?

Last week a blogger was arrested and released on $10,000 bail after being accused of streaming songs from the unreleased Guns N’ Roses album "Chinese Democracy" on his web site without permission. This reminded me of the hilarious video of President George W. Bush discussing his iPod after a recorded interview with Fox news. In a supposedly informal post-interview chat, the President lists the songs he has on his iPod, (at least one of which must have been “illegally??” ripped from a CD, as you’ll see).

Here’s some text from the interview:

“Beach Boys..
Beatles…
Alan Jackson..
Aretha Fraklin..
…
Dan Maclean…. (Paz: but of course he meant Don Maclean of American Pie fame).
….”

“It has a shuffle…. so it plays them in a random order… it’s pretty high tech stuff!”; explains a beaming President Bush.

Here’s the catch though. The Beatles have famously refused to allow Apple Computer to feature any of their music in their official, iPod download catalogue. This is a consequence of an acrimonious split over Apple Computer’s alleged infringement of the Beatles’ Apple Corps trademark and logo. As a consequence of this battle, you won’t find a single Beatles track legally available from Apple Computer’s Music Store.

So how did the Beatle’s track get on the President’s computer? Well he MAY have copied the music from cassette or vinyl, which is fair usage as far as the RIAA are concerned because these media are considered obsolete!

See the interesting video below:

FREE Twitter badge for Blogger platform

Many people have asked my how to publish thier twitts on blogger platform. Well this post caters to the question now. Our Twitter friends have released a nifty new web badge, which you can use to easily display your Twitter updates in your blog's sidebar:

http://twitter.com/badges/blogger

Now you can add Twitter to your Blogger blog in two quick steps.

1) Select title for your Twitter badge and customize the number of updates you wish to see on your blog

2) If you're using new Blogger Layouts (or are not sure), just click the button to install the Twitter code. If you're not using new Blogger layouts, just grab the ready to install code and insert it into the sidebar of your blog template.

Hot tip! To ensure loading of your page even in the case of twitter.com non-loading, move the two lines that start with < script type="text/javascript"... to the bottom of your page (just above < /body>).

FREE website evaluation for creating attractive web design package

I am too busy to build my own website and so I let experts do it for me. If you are looking for state of the art web design service, then you should turn to none other than Network Solutions. They have successfully designed over 2,000 web sites and have expert graphic designers who use the latest web design techniques. And since their designers are all U.S. based, they provide dedicated full-time professional customer service to deliver on time, within budget, and charge less than most design agencies. I was trying to make a choice between standard or premium web design portfolios Additional Web design options and flexibility to transform your ideas into reality and I liked the premium portfolio not because it offers a more unique web site design that can be tailored to my business needs, but because it has been packaged and built with the latest multimedia tools and web site design techniques. This portfolio is ideal for creating new web sites or for revamping the look and feel of existing sites and can definitely be an edge over your current web site hosting provider with their reliable Web hosting service. I suggest that you try the free web site evaluation form on their website so that the expert designers will evaluate your current Web site and provide you with feedback for improving its design and functionality. This is abosultely free service that is being the most talked about feature in the hosting space.

Top incentive for Abilene freshmen with free iPhone gigs

The iPhone and iPod Touch are the most wanted devices among young people and and seeing the young crowd at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2008, I knew a free iPhone was coming at an university. They had mentioned about this Texas university developing around 15 web applications for these iPhone and iPod to help students receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances among other things. These apps are based on highly specialized version of the Cocoa framework tweaked just for the iPhone and rechristened as Cocoa Touch, and it looks like the iPhone's just-announced SDK sounds like a winner. If you are the lucky freshmen attending Abilene Christian University this fall, a free iPhone or iPod Touch will be given to you as part of their learning experience. If you develop a commercial app you get to keep 70% of the revenues from the sales and 30% is Apple revenue share, also note that free apps are allowable. The part I liked the most was bashing of Microsoft Task Manager and showcasing their promising push notification service for the iPhone that'll provide a scalable alternative to multitasking. It'll maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone and let a 3rd party server ping Apple's notification service in order to push out notifications your device, which can be in the form of badges, sounds or custom textual alerts. According to Apple, the service will preserve battery life and maintain performance, not to mention work over WiFi or cellular. I am really looking for some cool apps to roll out next month in September, as the seeding to developers has been started already.

Unlimited and reliable hosting for a large scale blog

I consider a large scale blog if it has more than 1000 posts. My blog still has around 650 posts now and is a medium scale blog. I have been using the free blogger platform for a while but according to the SEO experts, its recommended to move to a powerful and reliable web hosting if you own a large scale blog. As I have been reviewing several hosting platform, there is one platform that caught my eyes recently. In fact I stumbled acorss WHR when I was searching for tips for choosing a domain and their article's blog landed me there. I was glad to find out that their hosting packages supports CMS Web Hosts like Joomla, Wordpress, MODx, PHPbb, and Typo3.

WHR provides a variety of hosting packages in all affordable flovors and is the biggest searchable web hosting directory featuring complete information on all web hosting providers. They have acquired 12 web hosting awards in 2008 and have got independent customer rating of top 10 web hosting companies. They are rated based on the customer satisfaction, affordability, reliability, uptime and techical support. I do like their promotional and discount coupons, and among other things their unedited reviews by real customers.

I encourage you readers to use WHR site if you are looking for a new web hosting service.