By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

Woo Hoo! Received an e-mail earlier today from Amazon.com saying that my pre-ordered Wii Fit had been shipped via FedEx. It’s expected to arrive on May 20 (that’s tomorrow) in my LA chiropractic office. I first wrote about the Wii Fit for chiropractors last summer.

I don’t quite recall when I first ordered this (was likely two months ago) but Amazon had some sort of pre-order price guarantee, which I thought was pretty cool.

E-mail reads… Our Pre-order Price Guarantee covers one or more item(s) in this order. If the Amazon.com price decreases between the time you place your order and the end of the day of the release date, you’ll receive the lowest price.

This shipment was sent to:

Michael Dorausch
12740 Culver Blvd., Suite G
Los Angeles, CA 90066
United States

The initial plan was to set up the Wii Fit in the front office reception area for entertainment purposes. Right now I’m leaning towards giving it away in a contest. I’ll take some photos of it after it arrives and think about potential contest ideas in the meantime.

Excited to try it out!

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

There was a time that I would party five nights a week (Cat Club, Coconut Teaser, The Rainbow, The Troubadour, and The Whiskey) with friends in the clubs of Hollywood. I refer to those times as the rock ‘n roll years. It’s funny how things change, but continue to remain the same, here on the west side of Los Angeles. The parties have never stopped, I suppose I just got involved in another crowd, a group I’d refer to as geeks and gadget holders, web entrepreneurs and online marketers, and social media mavens.

Here it is March of 2008, and there’s been parties and meet ups going on all over the Westside LA area, and it’s the geeks organizing these efforts. They’re taking over clubs, they’re taking over bars, they’re taking up space in places like AOL Beverly Hills, and drinking kegs dry. Not only that, there’s a lot of great social activity going on (not to mention an abundance of sharp people I’ve been pleased to meet).

I’ve never been so happy to call Los Angeles my home. Not only do I get to provide chiropractic care to some of the greatest people in the world, I get to hang out with my gadget carrying friends, and can still enjoy good times in the clubs.

This weekend is a geek fest, and there are three local events worth getting your butts to. Tonight, (Friday night) is a Community Next pre-party, which is hosted at the Air Conditioned Supper Club – 625 Lincoln Blvd., Venice, CA 90291. That’s right in my hood so I won’t be missing out.

Saturday morning is Community Next and The Next Generation of Media and the Web Saturday, March 29, 2008. The event begins at 9 a.m. and speakers include Veronica Belmont (Mahalo Daily), Pete Cashmore (Mashable), Martin Green (Meebo), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Robert Scoble (Scobleizer.com/Fast Company), and many others.

The Community Next event wraps up around 5 p.m. which will be followed by another social media meet up event in Hollywood, California, at Seven in West Hollywood. That event is MashMeet LA 2.0 and it begins at 730 p.m. Seven is located at… 7929 Santa Monica Blvd. West Hollywood, CA 90046.

Since Planet Chiropractic beginnings in the 1990s, we’ve been big supporters of open source, and even bigger beneficiaries. The first server that hosted the early Planet Chiropractic website ran on FreeBSD. We now use a combination of Red Hat Linux servers (for Web applications), Fedora servers (our LA staging server), and Ubuntu desktops (in my office, home office and laptop). I’m also a big advocate of WordPress and other open-source platforms and applications.

These events have provided a great way for me to get my geek on and hang out with other like-minded friends. I’ve been in communication with several via my twitter account and I’m hoping to see them all there at one of these weekends events.

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

BarCampLA-5 is scheduled for next week, March 1 and 2, 2008, at the AOL Beverly Hills Campus in Los Angeles, California.

I’m looking forward to attending my second Los Angeles based Barcamp (see Barcamp LA 4) and getting reconnected with other tech minded folks in the LA area.

The March BarCamp 5 is being partially sponsored by Planet Chiropractic, and I’ll be attending the event both days. If I manage to get my post-it note up on the board early enough, I plan to be speaking on blended search and potentials there are for local businesses.

You may be wondering why would a Chiropractic Company be sponsoring a technology-based event. The first obvious reason (obvious for me) is that everyone should have access to a good chiropractor, regardless of where you live. The other reason (the one most of my tech friends know about) is that Planet Chiropractic was built on the philosophy that drives events like BarCamp.

Since our beginnings in the 1990s, we’ve been big supporters of open source, and even bigger beneficiaries. The first server that hosted the early Planet Chiropractic website ran on FreeBSD. We now use a combination of Red Hat Linux servers (for Web applications), Fedora servers (our LA staging server), and Ubuntu desktops (in my office, home office and laptop). I’m also a big advocate of WordPress and other open-source platforms and applications.

So BarCamp is a great place for me to get my geek on and hang out with other like-minded friends. I’ve invited a number of technically minded people to next weekend’s event, and I’m hoping they can all attend. If you’re in the Los Angeles area (even if you have to drive a couple of hundred miles) it’s a trip well worth it.

Here are more details…

BarCampLA-5
Saturday and Sunday, March 1-2, 2008
AOL Beverly Hills Campus
331 N. Maple Dr., Los Angeles, California 90210

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

I came home from the office tonight and on the table there was this new 8 Gb USB memory stick I had ordered last week. It’s about that time of year that people start thinking about gifts, and personally, I think this is something most tech geeks would just love (I know I would).

A USB memory stick is one of those items that you can’t have too many of. I probably have around a dozen ranging from 256 Mb up to this latest one at eight gigs.

When I broke it out of the plastic I loaded it up on a Windows XP system. I love that there was no craplet software preinstalled on the stick. I copied over a couple of gigs of movie files over to the USB stick and launched them from there. Files played smoothly with no sign of slowness.

Looking at the packaging it appears that Patriot Memory has corporate headquarters on Benicia Street in Fremont, California. Of course I had to check if there were any chiropractors in that area. Looks like the city is not far from Life Chiropractic College West, which is north in Hayward, California.

Memory sticks like these make great tools for chiropractors and other small-business owners. I have found they are a great way to do quick backups of office data. I typically recommend people get a few of these so they can rotate backups on the sticks. You may even want to label your memory sticks for designated days of the week.

I picked up an iPod Touch a few weeks ago, and that was a cool gadget is well, but it’s certainly not as practical or affordable as a memory stick. I believe this one cost me around 80 bucks.

If you’re thinking about gift giving ideas for your friends that have iPhones and/or iPods, consider shopping for some accessories, as they are more affordable than the original products and I’m betting most people would love such gadget add-ons.

This memory stick is a bit thicker than the others I have, but it has a nice and solid rubber casing. The particular one I got flashes with a blue LED when its active. I’m assuming all the sticks of this model use the same color LED.

I’ll be putting together a list of cool gadgets I think would be great for chiropractors and chiropractic offices (and other small businesses) for the holiday season. You can definitely count this item on the list.

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

I went camping this past weekend in downtown Los Angeles at an event called Barcamp. Actually, there was a dog related emergency I had to attend to Saturday night which resulted in missing the sleep over sessions and Sundays pizza (darn). Either way, Saturday was great and I got to see lots of fellow techies from around the state of California (and some that drove in from Vegas).

One of the coolest things for me with events like Barcamp is the commonalities we have that brings us all together. I spent much of Saturday morning sharing some Ubuntu install tweaks with a few folks that needed assistance. Most everyone had their laptops and I brought along my newest toy plus my ubuntu powered dell. I was planning to talk about local search but found myself more having one-on-one discussions and attending other peoples sessions.

Thanks to the event, I’m now producing a film with Stephen Colbert, along with about 60,000 other people. I thought the idea for the 1 Second Film was very cool.

There were a number of folks from July’s 2007 Wordcamp and it was great to see everyone again. While the Swedish hall had some fancy chairs, the venue at Barcamp rocked, what a great location!

It was also great to have so many people taking photos at the event. Thanks to Declan, who’s got a bunch of photos on his blog, and to Dan Tentler and Lisa. It looks like the San Diego folks took the best photos.

Crystal Williams and Jason Cosper did spectacular jobs making sure everything was running along smoothly and that the event turned out to be a huge success.

Great to see everyone, already looking forward to the next meet up!

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

While I was in San Francisco this past Saturday, checking out the Nike Women’s Marathon Preview, I had some time to visit the Adidas store in Union Square. On the ground level of the store was a new foot scanning system that allows people to get custom orthotic fitting analysis while in the store. Talking to a sales representative I was told that scanning analysis was done on Saturdays and Sundays and the process was free.

Three reasons to have a custom foot analysis done include creation of athletic shoes that offer better control (for those that need additional support), athletic shoes that provide greater cushion (oftentimes needed in the heel region or area of the first toe), and improved fit for competitive shoes (such as racing flats).

Computerized foot scanning technology has been around for several years and some chiropractors offer various types of computerized foot analysis in their practices. What’s nice about having these scans done at an Adidas store is that they are free, and the results of scans can be used to create individualized Adidas athletic shoes, if desired.

I didn’t get a chance to get a scan performed, but I’ll be checking out the Adidas store in Santa Monica to get a scan done during an upcoming weekend. Time for some new running shoes.

The five Adidas locations that are offering custom foot analysis are:

New York: 610 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
Santa Monica: 1231 3rd St Promenade, Santa Monica, CA 90401
Irvine: Irvine Spectrum Center, 71 Fortune Drive, Irvine, CA 92618
San Francisco: 845 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103
Seattle: 1501 5th Ave, Seattle, WA 98101

I would expect if the program is a success for Adidas they will expand it into other stores. If I get any more information I will include it here.

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

Gotta love those gadgets! I was in Tempe, Arizona this weekend, attending a conference and awards ceremony, along with 300 other chiropractors. When headed out to chiropractic events I typically travel with at least one laptop, a digital camera, maybe a video camera, MP3 player, PDA, some power bricks, and a handful of various USB cables. It’s a wonder I manage to bring any clothing along. I’m not the only one that likes to travel with gadgets as I witnessed several chiropractors attending the event with laptops and other electronics in hand.

I snapped this photo on Saturday afternoon. California chiropractor Russell Kun and Dr. Carl Rafey, a Cincinnati chiropractor (state of Ohio) were gabbing during a break about the many great features of their iPhones. I’m pretty sure they purchased their phones so they could keep up-to-date on the latest mobile RSS feeds for our chiropractic classifieds, but I suspect they like some other features as well.

Dr. Russell’s been really excited about the number of photographs he can display on his phone, and both chiropractors have young children, so you can imagine there are lots of photos of babies being shown by these two. I’d possibly have an iPhone myself but service for AT&T has been so horrible for me in the past (in the Marina del Rey area), I don’t think I could handle the dropouts.

For now, I’ll just have to take pictures of my friends that have cooler gadgets than I do.

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

In the past two days, you’ve likely seen the news regarding the mad scientist creation of Virgil Griffith, his ultra wicked WikiScanner. We posted a Wikipedia manipulation article regarding Virgil and his IP matching, corporate chaos creating, wikipedia anonymous user, can opener type tool. The second article was more about Virgil and the reasons behind why he created his application.

I was excited about the development of WikiScanner because I’ve been working on a project which involved compiling a list of all Wikipedia users that made edits to the page on chiropractic. This tool helps make that work a lot easier.

While many companies that have been “outed” by Virgil’s tool have spent the last 48 hours in damage control, can you imagine how many thousands of companies may potentially be totally unaware that someone’s been making “anonymous” wikipedia edits while using computers with IP addresses that match their home or business accounts? Many people haven’t even begun to think about that.

I’d have to imagine you’d be much better off as a company discovering for yourself first what edits have been made on your company IP addresses. The other alternative is someone else finds it before you, and your company ends up on the homepage of Digg, with egg on your face.

Not long after using the WikiScanner for my own research, I began to wonder how many people even know what their IP address is. Do you? In order to make it easy for someone to check if there’s been any Wikipedia entries using their IP address, I banged out a page today and called it: WikiSleuth

The wikisleuth displays your IP address at the top of the page. Unless you’re using a proxy, the number you’ll see displayed will represent the number that gets recorded for your Internet connection, when someone is editing pages on Wikipedia.

It’s a very simple addition to the WikiScanner that Virgil created, and it relies on the WikiScanner to get its information. It just makes it easier for someone to locate the IP address for the Internet connection there currently using, which is valuable in finding out if it’s been used to edit any data.

Imagine you’re a manager of a small to medium-sized business and you maybe only have one 1-5 static IP addresses. With the wiki sleuth tool, you can easily locate what IP address you are using for Internet access, and potentially check edits for anyone that’s used that connection.

It’s real basic, but it works. Let me know if you find anything interesting. Happy sleuthing!

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

I’ve been doing research for more than a year now on a single Wikipedia entry that I have been particularly interested in. I’ve had some suspicions as to who’s making the edits on the particular page, and if any organizations were involved. Thanks to a new tool created by Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith, known as a wikiscanner, this sort of work is going to get a lot easier for many.

I wrote about it in Planet Chiropractic news earlier today (Web Tool Outs Wikipedia Manipulators) and it’s currently a topic that’s growing hotter by the hour. As of today Virgil’s web site has a PR ranking of 4. It won’t be long before that bumps to about a 7 or 8, thanks to his cool little wiki scanning tool.

The tool helps connect anonymous wikipedia edits to IP addresses belonging to corporations, organizations, and government agencies.

Earlier in the day the tool was showing some database errors likely as a result of Virgil’s web site being struck by tons of traffic from places such as Digg, Wired, Boing Boing, Radar, and even a trickle of users from Planet Chiropractic. The tool, known as a wikiscanner, seems to be functioning much better now but it’s likely to get another wave of heavy traffic this evening.

Save the links above and check it out when you get the time. It’s very cool stuff. Virgil Griffith is indeed the mad scientist and disruptive technologist he claims to be.