When the iPad is not between sofa cushions, it is our friend’s favorite tool in the media room. Who needs a laptop when you just want to lookup IMDB or Youtube? The obvious complaints are about no Flash and not being able to print. I/O issues were never really part of the conversation as the Internet and the Network provide ample exchange solutions. Blake, who also got his hands on an iPad confided in us… it’s now his favorite bathroom magazine. Ick! He can keep his.

We’re going to pick up some Velcro this weekend and we’re seriously considering a 3G version of the iPad for a wicked road trip we’re planning this summer.

When John Donahoe took over eBay, he started a long term plan to kill off small time sellers. The total number of items listed on eBay fell below 8 million and kept dropping because listing fees were getting so expensive and Fewer and fewer items were being listed.

eBay tried to get the numbers back up by offering listing fee discounts time to time but it wasn’t a permanent solution. The next step in Donahoe’s plan was to start cutting deals with large retailers so they could sell on eBay. Buy.com was one of the first large online retailers to flood eBay with more than 100K items all with free shipping. These companies were basically paying no listing fees which was really an unfair advantage over the little guys.

A large number of small power sellers have gone out of business because of these corporate deals. To sum things up, eBay wants to shed its image as a electronic flea market and now want to be seen as a mainstream shopping mall. Not the eBay we used to know. In fact, seems the revolt has been brewing for some time now …

Take Rory for instance – not his real name of course! – who just arrived here from Halifax last fall. He’s been working very hard developing website for us but also wanted to meet someone special he could spend his leisure time with. After wasting a lot of time with the usual venues, he tried a dating site with hopes of finding someone.

We ribbed him for a few days but since we love to think outside the box, we asked him if we could take a peek at the insides of a dating site, the what and the how of Web 2.0 dating. It only took him a few minutes to sign up and a few days before he was able to hook up with someone with very good compatibility.

What’s amazing with the web’s dating sites is that most of them use some sort of algorithm for optimal compatibility, something we geeks can really relate to. Web 2.0 dating, a great opportunity for meeting new people, making friends and building relationships outside of computer shows, star trek conventions and 2600 meet-ups!

The rest of us here aren’t making fun of Rory anymore, in fact we’ve all opened accounts!

Need to update drivers on your PC? Driver Access (driveraccess) has over 5 million drivers in their database including sound drivers, Windows vista drivers, router drivers and even motherboard drivers!

Driveraccess.com is the one stop place for driver update and driver access tasks. Driveraccess.com has over five million device drivers in an environment that has been tested for safety.

It is clear from their portfolio and testimonials that they do not just produce one graphic style that is then forced on their clients but strive to respect the style of each organization. Search Engine Optimization, E-Commerce, Flash integration and php programming are all available from this team of professionals as well as honed graphic skills.

NGKSoft has produced websites for clients across many fields including services and industries, non-profit and education, e-commerce sites, travel and recreation sites and environmental projects. Among the many resources available from the site, one of the entries is a “Top Reasons Why You Should Engage Our Services” which includes details about their experience, abilities, marketing expertise, client relationships and custom solutions.

NGKSoft also offers a great section of design resources [read here], the history of the internet, web design guides and tutorials and software recommendations. More about NGKSoft including company philosophy and background.

Mailing address: 231 West 29th St., Suite 205. New York, NY 10001 -

Phone: (800) 880-1716

Email: info@ngksoft.com

Flowtown.com is a service that will match an email address with Web 2.0 accounts through a simple search feature. Flowtown also offers an import utility for Gmail accounts, csv files (Outlook Exported contacts) or manual input. When opening your account, you will be provided with your own dashboard for easy management.

Flowtown is also a great tool for social media marketing or Twitter marketing campaigns within your trade or social network. In short, this is a wonderful tool for moving from the lowly email to Web 2.0.

On the web: Flowtown.com

Often times, when copying text from an editor like Word or a Webpage, to Dreamweaver, you also copy a lot of formatting. This can often times be a nuisance, so it becomes necessary to “unformat” the text.

If it’s only a few words, a sentence, copy the content and paste to the URL bar to unformat, select anew and paste to Dreamweaver.

If you’re dealing with a lot more content, paste the text to your favorite email client and changer the format of the message to “text” or un-select “HTML”. Select anew, the content has now lost all formatting.

Error level analysis allows you see to see the difference in quality level, represented by brightness. Things which are very bright have been edited most recently, whilst duller parts have been resaved multiple times. This allows you to see not just which parts of the image have been changed, but in what order the changes occurred.

We wondered, would this card still work? We’ve been burned so many times with gift cards that died, lost their remaining balance or went mysteriously empty after a few months (phone cards are the worst) – so naturally we were skeptical.

So we fired up iTunes, scratched the back of the card – realizing we probably ruined a vintage item… but hey $25 is $25! With trepidation, we entered the 16 character code and discovered within seconds we were now richer by $25!

So there you have it, a six year old iTunes card still works!

UPDATE. Although we’ve managed to redeem this card, we need to let you know there is one small problem: geography. The test was done while we were in Canada and we couldn’t use our Canadian account to redeem the card. Luckily Blake has a US account so he was able to use it, but remember this the next time you buy an iTunes card while you travel: cards come with a specific territory.

So what did we buy with this card? The Last Great Rockabilly Saturday Night …

We still have a balance of $14.02.