Life is getting in the way of my blogging

March 17, 2009 By 2 Comments

Things have gotten seriously busy lately. I’ll try to re-cap some highlights:

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I’ve just joined the Ridgewood chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society after being a guest at their meetings for the past few weeks. This is a great complimentary activity to my singing in my church choir. We meet on Monday nights in Wyckoff, NJ, and it is a lot of fun.

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We survived the girls’ birthdays again, this year we celebrated at Skylands Ice World up in Stockholm, NJ. Everyone had lots of fun and it just felt good to be out on the ice again. You aren’t allowed to bring in outside food, so I was nervous about the quality of the in-house catering as you effectively have no other choice, but it was surprisingly good! If you or your kids like to skate, this is definitely a place I’d recommend for a party.

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Work has been keeping me busy and engaged as usual, working on developing products that will generate serious revenue. I really wish I could talk about them in more detail, but I can’t. Perhaps I’ll be able to link to a press release or two, soon.

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I recently decided that I’d had enough of the annoying markup that ecto 3 generated and went looking for an alternative. A few people recommended MarsEdit 2 so I gave it a try. Let me put it this way: after 10 minutes of playing with it in my trial period, I bought it. It’s somewhat unfortunate as ecto was so close to being just right, but the few annoyances really got on my nerves after all this time. I think I would have hung in there except it seems like ecto’s development has pretty much stopped, but when I registered my copy of MarsEdit, I got an email from Daniel Jalkut, thanking me. That seemed like a good sign, you know?

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I’ve probably forgotten a bunch of things that I wanted to mention, but at least this is a start.

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Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy! 2 Comments

Fragile Vastness: biological destiny to be hopeful

February 24, 2009 By 10 Comments

I normally don’t bother with these memes, but this one was just too awesome to pass up. The results are astounding … So, on with the goodness:

1 – Go to a random page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations”: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your album.

3 – Go to Flickr and explore the last seven days: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it and invite your friends to join in.

Here’s mine:

Fragile Vastness: biological destiny to be hopeful

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Filed Under: Blogging 10 Comments

Blackbird 0.5 is now available for download

February 8, 2009 By 38 Comments

Blackbird 0.5 is out of beta and is now available. Help spread the word and let your BlackBerry-owning friends know about it!

What’s new in this release?

  • Tweet detail view now shows the user’s avatar.
  • @usernames are now active links to the Twitter user’s URL.
  • Timeline data is now cached in persistent storage.

Here are a few features I’m going to try to implement for 0.6:

  • Cache avatars in persistent storage to speed up the UI and reduce bandwidth usage.
  • Add key accelerators “t” and “b” to jump to the top and bottom of the message list, and “n” and “p” to go to the next and previous messages, respectively.
  • Add an option to automatically refresh data in the background or continue to manually refresh data from the Twitter API.

Are there any specific features you’d like to see implemented in 0.6? Have any bugs to report? Let me know about them in the comment for this entry.

UPDATE: Beta build 0.5.23 is now up, where ALT-click on 71xx-series BlackBerry handsets should bring up the context menu on timeline views, so that they can be refreshed, etc. Everyone who has a 71xx handset, can you please test the build out and let me know if this solves your problem? Thanks!

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Filed Under: BlackBerry Tagged With: 38 Comments

I fail at retail therapy

February 1, 2009 By 10 Comments

If someone handed you $100 right now, could you spend it? How long would it take you to decide what to buy?

Not long at all, right?

Well, I seriously fail at retail therapy. I was given a $100 Visa gift card as a Giftmas 2008 present, and I can’t think of a single thing I want to buy with it. Is that pathetic, or what?

I thought about picking up a video game or two, but I really don’t have the time nor motivation to play them. Modern video games totally lack the necessary charm and appeal of older games. They use advanced graphics and cinematic sequences to “wow” people, but the gameplay is empty. You can’t compensate for a boring game with eye candy alone, at least for me.

I thought about movies or music, but there hasn’t been music released in the last 5 years that I thought was good enough to own except for a few songs which I picked up on iTunes or through Amazon MP3. Same goes for movies — the ones I care to watch, I’ve already seen and I haven’t seen a movie in years that was good enough to be worth watching twice.

Ah, what about books? Goodness, there’s that free time issue again! I still have books sitting on my shelf that I want to read that I haven’t read yet. Buying more just seems wasteful, at this point.

Surprisingly, as a technology geek, I’m not a big gadget junkie. I went through the phase of collecting shiny doo-dads and frankly, I got tired of throwing them out when they lost their shine. Is there really such a thing as a must-have item? I haven’t found one, yet.

About the only thing that I still really like is food. I love to eat! I guess the best way to spend this money is to take the family out and enjoy a nice meal. Oh, but then the dilemma of deciding where to go sets in …

I guess there are worse problems to have than not knowing how to spend $100, but it really bothers me that I don’t have a go-to list of reasonably inexpensive things that I’d want to buy. This is why I’m such a hard person to buy gifts for: I truly don’t want anything. I don’t mean this in the polite “oh, it’s okay, don’t worry” sort of way, but in the “oh, please, not another thing that I have to find a place for and hold onto until I get tired of it and throw it out” kind of way.

Maybe I’m truly able to find happiness with what I already have. But, a part of me — probably conditioned and programmed through advertising as I was growing up — feels like I’m “incomplete” without more material possessions. Part of me asks “what’s wrong with me?” because I don’t already know what I’d go out and buy with this money. Do you know what I’m talking about?

What would you go and buy with $100 right now? Or, are you like me, without any clue what you’d do with it?

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Filed Under: Dossy, Dossy and more Dossy!, Product placement 10 Comments

False alarm on that subscriber mass-exodus

January 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

As the ironic gods of synchronicity would have it, my recent inflammatory post didn’t actually trigger a mass-exodus of subscribers. What really happened was either FeedBurner under-reported my subscriber count or Google had some issues starting January 17th through January 22nd. The entry for “Google Feedfetcher” disappeared from the “Feed Readers and Aggregators” list, which accounted for a significant portion of my subscriber count–almost half of it.

FeedBurner’s description of Google Feedfetcher reads as follows:

Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle. Subscriber counts include Google Reader and the iGoogle. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services.

So, I don’t know if Google’s Feedfetcher didn’t poll my feed for those days, or if FeedBurner simply failed to account for them. Either way, my subscriber count appears to be back to normal.

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Filed Under: Blogging Leave a Comment

Saying goodbye is hard to do

January 19, 2009 By 6 Comments

All it took was this unpopular post, and I lost half of my feed subscribers, going from around 180 down to 90 …

feed-subscribers-20090119.png

The irony is, it was probably the most active post on my blog for quite a long time, gathering a lot of interesting comments from several different people.

I guess the typical blogger would be devastated by losing half his audience in one day, but the sad truth of my blog is that most of my traffic comes from search engine referrals. While it makes me sad to see them go, if it was so easy to unsubscribe after one post, I wonder how much value they were getting out of my blog in the first place.

I guess this is one way to start off blogging in 2009 with a bang, huh?

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Filed Under: Blogging 6 Comments

Can we flush $150M down the toilet in 5 days? YES WE CAN!

January 17, 2009 By 25 Comments

What happens when you give ultimate power and unlimited wealth to a black man? He invites all his homies to his crib and pops open the Cristal and throws a huge party, that’s what:

Obama’s inauguration set to be the most expensive in US history

President Barack Obama’s inauguration next week is set to be the most expensive ever, predicted to reach over $150m (£102m). This dwarfs the $42.3m spent on George Bush’s inauguration in 2005 and the $33m spent on Bill Clinton’s in 1993.

$150M dollars. Just let that sink in for a moment. That’s the salaries of roughly 3,500 jobs that pay $35k a year plus benefits, pissed away in 5 days.

Obama today issued a statement calling on people across the nation to participate by holding their own neighbourhood events, including their own balls. [...]

Did Obama just call on me to hold my own balls? We, the tax-paying public, don’t even get a reach-around?

Now I’ve heard enough.

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Filed Under: Piss and moan (Rants) Tagged With: , , , , 25 Comments
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