This year I used Google Maps to plan my trick or treating route. This way we won’t forget to hit any sweet spots, and we can more efficiently rake in the treats.

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One of our crack designers, Nik, no doubt hard at work in PhotoShop.

This is our VP of Creative, Jess, who came to work dressed as a cactus. He wins the prize for most realistic costume, hands down.

Happy Halloween from everyone here at ArcStone.

This is Annie Picken, part of our courageous support staff that works tirelessly to improve our products, help customers with problems, and just get things done in general.

She definitely has a “we can do it!” attitude.

Eventually every computer becomes old and decrepit, losing its once coveted status as cutting edge. When this happens, a choice needs to be made: retire or upgrade. When the latter makes sense, it can be hard to find just the right parts needed to breathe new life into an aging system.

Here are some resources to help you on your hunt:

www.macsales.com – Find any part you could ever want for any Mac system and hard to find upgrades. Excellent service.

www.memory4less.com – All manner of memory and processors, even really old memory types and rare laptop memory. Well-categorized.

www.servercase.com – Lots of upgrades and parts for rack mount machines, small form factor machines, specialty power supplies and RAID components.

www.pricewatch.com – Aggregator of other online retailers, easy drill down search engine, store ratings. It’s a sure bet for common parts.

Good luck and Godspeed with your quest!

America’s obsession with all things gargantuan continues, and I will be here to document it. In this installment I highlight some food related items of truly ridiculous proportions.

64 Ounce Coffee Mug – that’s an entire pot of coffee, people, and at ninety-nine cents to fill it, it’s quite a value!

400-Inch Frying Pan – make omelettes for two hundred people, or a sixty pound pancake, or cook my five-year-old son whole.

120 lbs. of Treats – this has to be the biggest trick-or-treat bucket ever made. How is a kid even going to carry that around?

Millions of people have iPods, and the majority of them use iTunes to manage their music. As I have mentioned before, iTunes lacks some truly useful features, many of which users are pining for.

One major feature absent is the ability to copy music from an iPod to iTunes. This, no doubtingly, was left out of the feature set to keep users from sharing their entire music collection with everyone they know, and to keep Apple from being sued into oblivion.

Unfortunately, there are many legitimate uses for being able to copy music back and forth freely. Fear not gentle readers, because third party developers have come to the rescue.

I personally use Senuti, which has an interface almost identical to iTunes, except file syncing works in reverse (from iPod to iTunes). Senuti is Mac only, but there are many other options, and many are cross platform.

Enjoy your newfound freedom, but use it wisely.

The explosive growth of Americans’ interest in gadgets has not escaped the notice of other industries. Everyone wants a piece of this lucrative pie. The proof lies in some of the strangest retail combinations I have ever seen.

Headphones and Razors: because everyone likes to rock out while they shave.

Laptop Memory and Fresh Bread: because nothing goes better with warm bread than a warm laptop with new memory.

This bizarre trend is so prevalent, Gizmodo has dedicated an entire page to these weird combination deals. What’s next? Peanut butter and a Bluetooth headset? Socks and USB thumb drive? At this point I wouldn’t be surprised.

Every Monday I post a list of the best links from the previous week’s posts. As my posts are usually garnished with quite a few links, this service is essential for getting the maximum value from Technology Translated.

EveryTrail.com
Outdoor Exploration and Planning Tools

Google Press Center
Information and Statistics About Google Usage and Trends

Oobject.com
Forum for Gadget Lovers to Explore the Strange and Beautiful

Website Optimization Tools
Test the Speed of Your Site and Check Key Performance Indicators

Woot.com
One Item Per Day at a Crazy Good Price

List Of Social Networking Sites
Detailed Information About Just About Every SNS Out There

With so many to choose from, it’s getting harder to settle down with just one social networking site. Most of us are SNS polygamists, spreading the love around to a few.

The first one is always special though, and says something about who you are. For instance:

LiveJournal
You are old school and were blogging before there was even a name for it. A select number of friends read your long thoughtful posts over warm spiced chi.

Twitter
You have way tOo many friends, and they have tOo many friends. The constant beeping of your cell phone keeps you in the loop to what your friends are up to when you should be concentrating on the road.

LinkedIn
You are power-lunching outgoing socialite with a resume as long as my arm. Your friends (connections) keep you abreast of their upcoming IPOs.

FaceBook
You are well-educated and have multiple Gmail accounts. When bored in company meetings, you update your status from a Blackberry Perl.

Comcast can’t seem to do anything right. Between disrupting user traffic, sleeping on the job, and angering Congress, Comcast is getting one black eye after another. They should take some pointers from Woot, who recently recovered from an inventory glitch beautifully.

Excerpts from an email to customers:

A decision has been made without you on your recent Brown Zune order from the 22nd. I will be transparent about this-I can only hope it meets your approval.

Yesterday, as our warehouse wrapped up the Zune shipments, an unexpected shortage of brown Zunes was reported…
We made the emergency call to substitute BLACK Zunes to complete your shipment.

We have included a bonus: A Microsoft Zune Travel Pack has been shipped with your order…These are new retail boxed and carry a Microsoft MSRP of $99.99.

Not only is Woot making good on orders at their expense, they are also including a gift worth $100. Way to turn lemons into lemonade, Woot — I have a feeling you just gained some customers for life.