Here’s a dump of various products and companies that I’ve wanted to plug but due to my audience don’t really have places to fit ’em in…

Iridesse: Pearls ditch the PTA

I wanted to get Tamarah a unique necklace for Mothers Day. I set out to Tiffany’s but they close early, so we went cruising around the Valley Fair mall and found Iridesse, a new jewelry company specializing in pearls but with a decidedly 21st century flare. These ain’t your mothers lame strand of pearls. Unique and creative designs to please at an extremely reasonable price point. I’ll definitely be doing more business with them in the future and not look at pearls the same in the future.

This isn’t want Tamarah picked out, but represents the sort of design that draws me toward Iridesse.

Sun StorEdge 2500 Array

Okey, okey… “StorageTek 2500″… but I still like the StorEdge branding so bite me. The 2500 provides 12 SAS drives in the snazy Galaxy look at 4Gbps FC speeds with dual controllers. I’m not sure who designed it, but its a nice box that’ll fit well into the storage lineup. The the product page says that it starts at $5,000 but I imagine thats with only 4 disks. SAS drives are still expensive, ranging between $500 and $1,000 per disk so I expect this guy to be pricey… but still a nice array. Hopefully the management interface is nice.

Navicat: Easy Graphical Management for MySQL and PostgreSQL

At the MySQL Users Conf I picked up a CD for Navicat Lite. I can’t find a downloadable copy of the Lite version, but I’ve found Navicat to be very handy indeed. I’ve never liked phpMyAdmin or other web-based tools, Navicat is easy to use and very handy. Its not as powerful as options like the Embarcadero suite, but perfect for common tasks and performance tuning. Highly recommended. If your using phpMyAdmin and don’t have more than a handful of people accessing it just buy everyone a copy of Navicat and stop messing around.

iSkin evo3: Protect Your iPod Video

I’ve been working from home for about 6 months now. With 2 young children in the house I learned early on to invest in music and portable sound. I ditched my old 20GB iPod when I started noticing that there was no tone, everything sounded flat. I bought a 30GB iPod Video (Black) and a good pair of Sony ear-buds (stethoscope in ear design). The iPod is nice and iTunes makes grabbing new music a breeze but the unit itself seems fragile and easy to scratch. Pandora recommended the iSkin and I definitely agree. I bought an iSkin evo3 Special Edition and am very happy. At $45 its a bit pricy, but I look at it as iPod insurance. The best case I’ve seen on the market thus far.

NetBeans 6.0 M9

NetBeans 6.0 is just awesome. Ruby is now a first class citizen, so if you don’t have TextMate on OS X consider using NetBeans 6.0. Eclipse has really been left in the dust. NetBeans has everything you can want and is super smooth, I still use the C/C++ plugins for my C development on occasion… I just can’t break the vim/makefile habit, but NetBeans is just slick for an IDE. For details see the NetBeans Ruby Editing documentation.