Monthly Archives: March 2007

Done Getting Things

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I recently bought and am currently reading through David Allen’s book, getting things done. So far I am very intrigued with what he has to say, and I more or less subscribe with his line of reasoning. Several of the things he talks about and suggests, are things I have seen myself, only I haven’t really been able to explain or perhaps even notice it. Over the past few weeks I have been partially following his steps and I think for the most part his advice has really helped.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. If you re-arrange the words of his books title, you get “Done Getting Things” (Or, Getting Done Things, Things Getting Done, Things Done Getting, and Done Things Getting… but that’s not my point either.)

In the high tech gadget society in which we live, it is very tempting to get everything. We want, we want, we want. My theory here is that at the same time we need to start getting things done, we need to stop getting things. This will virtually ruin our economy. This too, is not what I want to talk about.

What I really want to focus on is me. I’m a person, and as a result, I am thrilled to talk about myself, what I think, and how I feel. I do not want to talk about this aspect of human nature… at the moment.

So what exactly, am I trying to say? I need to start getting things done and I need to stop getting things that I don’t really need… And I guess I really don’t have a whole lot more to say on this subject. At least for the moment. I’ve been brewing over it all day and I thought maybe I was getting somewhere, but alas, I was not.

Image Boarders

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I just noticed something intersting on my site today. It’s something most of you won’t care about, but I figured it is Thursday, so… whatever, I don’t care.

Anyway, I opened up my website in 8 browsers and took a look at them. It looked great in all 8 browsers, which made me happy, but there was one discrepency. In Firefox, Camino and Mozilla, the image in the post below this one, had an image boarder around it.

The image boarder was caused by the link tag in my style sheet. If you hovered over the image, the boarder changed to a red color, just like my links do. Now I thought this was interesting, because the Mozilla browsers, all based off of the Gecko framework, all applied the link styling to the images, while Safari and the other browsers built off of the webkit framework, do not.

A simple line of code fixed the issue, so I didn’t have any boxes, but I thought it was interesting.

Have a great day all!

My M&M Addiction

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I have come to the conculsion, and not very lightly mind you, that I have a problem. This problem is namely an M&M addiction. While alcoholics can’t wait to get home from work to have a drink, I can’t wait to get to my dorm room for a handful of M&Ms. It usually doesn’t stop at one handful either. I usually haev two or three. Sometimes, I even have as many as four or five. Today I have been particularly… …hungry… and am getting down to the last few handfuls of M&Ms. At my current rate of consumption, they will probably not live past Tuesday.

The problem is now becoming, “where can I get more M&Ms?” I would suppose that the store is a good place to start, but I’m not at a store right now, so this causes the problem. Going to the store, to buy M&Ms, is also a problem, because I don’t have time and I don’t have money to go and buy M&Ms.

I hate to think about it, but I may have to go cold turkey to pull myself out of this one. It could be a harsh week. Fortunately, I have 24 bottles of Lipton Green Tea with Citrus that I can use to help nurse me off my M&Ms. Now I will need to get some more M&Ms eventually, because when my Green Tea runs out, I’ll be pretty addicted to that, so I’ll need something to help me get over my Green Tea Addiction.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Annoyance

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Sorry, everyone, but I just need to rant.

So, I’m having some issues with one of my blogs, issues that look like it might require a complete deletion of wordpress and a re-installation. No, biggie, right? Bethany has a 5 MB up 5MB down connection, it’s the weekend, so most of the students are gone or sleeping or doing homework. This should take an hour, tops.

Well, from my room, when connected to the student network, it’s taken three hours, and it’s still not done. That’s right. Three hours.

Bethany, takes the liberty of limiting the bandwidth that people logged into “student” can use. For most web browser, people won’t notice. Downloading large files, people might begin to see something. Trying to upload a 29 kb file? Isn’t going to happen folks!

That’s right. I kept getting timeout errors, while uploading 29 kb files. Think that’s bad? Try uploading a 300byte file and get the same error.

This is rediculous. I finally, gave up. I grabbed my computer and took it to the computer lab. I threw a copy of WordPress on my flash drive and logged into a Lab computer. To upload the 2.2 MB of WordPress files took roughly four minutes. Maybe less, I didn’t time it.

The bandwidth is limited so horribly, it’s almost better for me to do my work at home, where I have 256 Kbps on DSL. However, the internet usually goes down whenever I am doing important web work at home.

So here’s the deal. The world revolves around me. It has too, there’s no other way for this to work. And since the world revolves around me, it decides to stop revolving any time I decide to do web work. This is the only logical explination.

It seems there’s never a good day for web design.

Sorry for the rant. I don’t like to write such incoherent opinions, but sometimes you just need to vent some frustration.

It’s All About the Palindrome

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I don’t know if Bob knows this or not, (or yet), but I’m always trying to compete with him. (In a half hearted, joking, friendly, good budy nature.) So, here’s the thing, I would now like to declare, that I am Officially posting more on my blog, then he is on his blog. I just wanted you all to know that. (I also wanted to send his blog a trackback so he’ll post.) Now, granted, I’m only on post 39, and he is on post 234, but I’m catching up and I’m catching up fast.

I’m back at school and so my webtime is being limited by these annyoing things called “classes”. I don’t really know what to do with them, we’ll see what happens. In theory though, I’ll have a bit more time to start keeping up with my various blogs and projects, you’ll have to stay tuned for more on that.

Also, if there are any good writers in the audience, and would like to help out with some of my projects, let me know. It’s hard for me to keep up with some of my blogs, so it would be nice to have some help.

Anyway, have a good week. Catch you all later!

Pi Day is Coming!

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It has come to my attention that Pi day is coming up! That’s right, 3-14 will be this upcoming Wednesday! But what good is Pi day, if you don’t have an “i 8 Sum Pi” Shirt?

Everybody who is anybody has an “i 8 Sum Pi” Shirt, and you need one, and soon.

For all of those people who have an “i 8 Sum Pi” Shirt, be sure to wear it this coming Wednesday!

Spread the word, Pi out!

Happy Apathetic Thursday!

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I don’t know if I can say that. Happiness defeats the purpose of apathy. From Wikipedia:

Apathy is the lack of emotion, motivation, or enthusiasm. Apathy is a psychological term for a state of indifference

and from some strange non english site which won’t load:

A state of not caring; not wanting to know; complacency; indifference;

So I really can’t say “Happy Apathetic Thursday” without be contradictory. So, the question today is this: “Do I care if I am contradictory?”

Now for today’s answer. “No, not really.”

The thing is, it’s Apathetic Thursday, so I don’t really care if I contradict myself or not.

See, Apathetic Thursday is a paradox, a Catch 22. Do you care enough to celebrate? Do you care enough to remember? Any enforcing, celebrating and remembering contradicts the prospect of actually having the day…

…Wow, my mind hurts again…

Anyway, catch you later.

I Hate Social Networking

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I have this thing about social networking sites. I really don’t like them. I see their use, I understand their appeal, they have some great functionality. I still really don’t like them. The question that then ensues, is Why Not?

Starting off, look at YouTube. YouTube is a great site, anyone can upload videos and anyone can watch videos. The potential of this site is amazing, and as such the site has taken off entirely. However, this is not without drawbacks. One big drawback is that there is a lot of worthless crap being put onto YouTube. I would estimate that 80-95% or the videos on YouTube are a complete waste of time, bandwidth and webspace. Now, there are a lot of good videos being put up on YouTube, but the majority of videos on YouTube are really not worth much in the long run. This however, is a minor complaint on my behalf, and is not by far the reason of my dislike of such social sites.

What irks me the most about YouTube is the format. Flash-based video is the best thing to happen for the web, and it is the worst thing to happen for the web. Embedding video to a website via flash, provides a nice compression and (almost) perfect compatability with any standard web browser. However, it makes these videos very hard to save to your computer. In theory, saving videos to your computer is not nessessary in the world of YouTube, because you can always bookmark any video you want, or add it to your favorites, and come back to watch it whenever you want. The problem I have with this is that you need an internet connection, and a rather fast connection at that. If I want to go home, where we have a 256 kbps DLS internet connection, (on a good day…), it’s going to take awhile to download a 2 minute movie. If I was able to save the video, I would not have to wait for it to reload anytime I wanted to watch it.

And now for a few clarifying remarks. Even though you should be able to go back and watch a video anytime you want, there is always the chance that it will get taken down, for some reason or another. Saving it to your computer can ensure that you can watch it when you want. This of course can’t be done, because if copyrighted material is put online, people “shouldn’t” be allowed to download and distribute that. Now, I know that there are ways to download YouTube Video, but none of the methods I have looked into appear to work as well as I would like.

Also, I think it’s good to say that YouTube is great for showing off your video work, and provides a way for you to show many people without having to worry about bandwidth costs.

Facebook. The other site I don’t like is Facebook. (Who decided that Facebook could be a verb, anyway, it doesn’t work, just don’t say it…) The reason I don’t like Facebook stems from two reasons, first that I am a geek and secondly, until recently I wasn’t a part of Facebook.

Now, I am part of Facebook now, but that’s a whole different story. What I really don’t understand about Facebook is how it has taken over email. Most of the people I know today, communicate mainly over IM and Facebook. I’m begining to see more events being announced over Facebook, rather then email. Is it just because it’s easier to go to Facebook then it is to start up your email client? Although, I think that perhaps the real reason simply stems from the fact that when using a web-based email client you don’t have access to people’s email addresses (I am rather fed up with some of the network policies here on Campus, but I’ll gripe about them later.)

But the main reason that I don’t like Facebook, is that I have a website. I have a half dozen websites. I try to post on them, at least weekly. (Although I’m not always successfull.) But people don’t have a reason or need to visit my website if they can talk to me via Facebook. My website becomes virtually meaningless because everyone expects Facebook to be the prime medium of communication or social interaction. No one is going to sign up at my web-blog if they can leave messages on my wall.

Flickr. My dislike toward Flickr follows in similar footsteps. Flickr is amazing. There are many photographers, be it hobbiest or perfesional that are displaying great work on Flickr. I deeply envy the macro photos of LordV and many of the flower and landscape photos by other photographers. Flickr is a great way to share photos. I have a photo blog, I want to display my photos to the world, but I don’t want to use Flickr. I’d rather use my own photoblog. In doing so, my exposure as a photographer is limited. Maybe I need to start using Flickr, I don’t really want to, but in trying to get my name out, I don’t always have much choice in the matter.

So let’s break it down. In it’s simplest form, I’m a geek. The amazing Social Network takes away from my ability to showcase my creations by creating an standard. Standards are great, standards are amazing, but in the case of these Netowrking sites, the standards are bland and uncreative. The personality of a website or blog are lost in the mass production of easy to use interfaces. Is this a bad thing? No, not at all. For the general public, it’s the best thing since the internet has been created. I will even go as far as to say that these could make my life easier or promote myself even more, if I only went about using them. But it doesn’t offer as much control as I desire.

Now these are just a handful of sites that I am choosing to talk about, mainly because they are most prevelent in my life. (I am refraining from attacking the poor design of MySpace [No, I'm not eveing going to link to it...]. The only thing that is more annoying than MySpace’s poor design is the fact that they don’t do anything about it.)

This is a great time for the internet. People are able to do more online now then ever before. The full potential of the webber-net is finally being realized and it is great. However, if you still like doing things the old fasion way, you may be in for a rough ride. Sites that don’t allow for social interaction or that don’t use the new standards of content distribution are on the way out, and many sites are adapting to make these changes.

Maybe it’s time I do the same…