Basically, just another blog

New Design

Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0 — groovymarlin @ 8:43 pm July 22, 2009

Tonight I updated my Wordpress theme and then spent, literally, hours tweaking and futzing with it. I am never satisfied! Unfortunately, I also don’t know enough CSS to really make things exactly the way I want them. But this new layout is close enough. I wanted to update to something with three columns, and that supported Gravatars in the comments. So if you ever plan to comment, make sure you go and sign up for your Gravatar!

Most of the people who bother to read my blog are probably reading it via the RSS feed, so all this design stuff doesn’t really mean anything to them. If you are reading this in Google Reader or some other similar tool, please do me a favor and click over to the actual site, and let me know if anything looks really weird or just plain wrong in your browser.

Man, I love WordPress.

The Poetry of Spam

Filed under: Huh?, Technology — groovymarlin @ 10:35 am June 19, 2009

About once or twice a week, I look in the spam folder of my Gmail and delete everything. I was about to do that last night, but I paused. Some of the subject lines were just…hilarious! Here’s some highlights of my spam folder from this week:

- Your difficult situation

- Bring photos, please

- Open it or get constipation

- Have Joe’s number?

- I’m ill, won’t come, sorry

See? You could put them together and make a haiku, or something…

The Old Guys

Filed under: Rants, Technology, Web 2.0 — groovymarlin @ 1:28 pm May 18, 2009

I subscribe to (as of today) 248 different RSS feeds, and I follow 126 people on Twitter. Some of the feeds belong to friends or people I know personally, but most don’t, and the same goes for the people I follow on Twitter. I tend to follow and subscribe to “thinkers” – people whose writing I admire, who are interesting or entertaining, or who give me lots of links to other useful (and not-so-useful) information.

Of course a bunch of the feeds I subscribe to are related to technology and software development. Those feeds are really a mixed bag. In fact, just today I went through and unsubbed a few things because I found they weren’t really very useful or interesting or even relevant.

Here’s something I’ve found about technology bloggers and other such “personalities” – a lot of them don’t impress me. I’m not going to name any names, but there are certain “big” or well-known bloggers out there that I’ve tried to follow, and find that I just can’t, because they have NOTHING to say to me. They are people who are nearly revered among other people that I do respect, admire, and find interesting. But to me they’re boring and useless at best; loud, obnoxious, and bloviating at worst.

It’s like I was at this conference/training thing once, and a friend of mine was RAVING about one of the presenters, basically making him out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. I sat in one of his sessions and promptly decided to never attend another. What my friend found so great I couldn’t understand, because to me the guy was too loud, too full of himself, and basically taking it for granted that everyone in the room loved him so much they would take every nugget of bullshit that he spewed as the unquestionable truth, and love him even more for it.

I, as you can see, was just not impressed.

So what am I saying here? Not much, really. See, I don’t want to piss people off by naming names. But if I could, wow…I’d really like to tell some well-known “gurus” how full of themselves I think they are.

Twitter, yo.

Filed under: Lifestyle, Technology, Web 2.0 — groovymarlin @ 3:46 pm April 8, 2009

It’s kind of amazing how quickly I’ve adapted to using Twitter (follow me here). At first I couldn’t see any value in it, but after giving it a try, it is really growing on me. You’d never have guessed if you overheard this actual conversation that I had a few months ago:

Coworker 1: Hmm, Twitter. What is that?

Coworker 2: It’s a cross-platform communication tool, kind of a messaging or microblogging service.

Coworker 1: But what IS it?

Me: It’s like IM for attention whores.

Coworker 1: Ohhh. OK.

I still stand by that statement, by the way. A lot of people DO use it like instant messaging for attention. But it’s also pretty valuable as an information dissemination tool; a quick way for news to spread, often before blogs or mainstream media picks up on it. In that sense, it’s the future for sure.

I’m also fascinated by the number of applications and other sites springing up around it. Apps for mobile devices abound, but there are also standalone apps for use on the desktop, and search applications, and websites/services for sharing photos and media. Who saw this coming two years ago? Even a year ago? Not me, and I think I’m pretty hip technologically.

Related links:

Twitter (main site)

Tweetdeck (application)

TwitPic (photo sharing)

twistori (a “social experiment”)

Tweetie (application for iPhone and others)

twidroid (application for android phones)

Twitterific (app for iPhones, OSX)

Twitter Google Gadget

Twitter Fan Wiki

What’s on TV?

Filed under: Technology — groovymarlin @ 7:48 pm March 14, 2009

I watched my usual Battlestar Galactica on Friday night, though I was caught up in some online research when it first aired (1opm EDT) and didn’t catch it until the re-air at midnight. It was excellent, as usual, and I find that I’m more and more sorry that it’s going to be over soon. I could go on at length about why this show is so frakking awesome (heh, BSG joke there), but that would take more time and energy than I have right now. I’ll just say one thing that constantly amazes me – Grace Park. How does she play all the various model 8 cylons so differently? After a while you forget that it’s the same person playing Boomer, and Athena, and all the others, she’s just that good.

I did not watch Dollhouse and completely forgot about it until today, so I watched it on Hulu this afternoon. I’m still feeling very meh about Dollhouse. Even though next week is the episode (sixth of the season) that supposedly gets really good, and shows us the brilliance we’ve come to expect from Whedon, I can’t say that I’m terribly optimistic. For one thing, I have a tremendous problem with the cast – I find them ALL very annoying. I am not a fan of Eliza Dushku, even as Faith on Buffy; the dude who plays Topher is just over-the-top trying too hard; the boss lady character and her head of security (with a grudge, of course) are irritating. About the only characters I can stomach are Amy Acker as the doctor and Harry Lennix as Echo’s handler, and even then, only just barely. So yeah, I’m waiting for that show to get good, but I’m about ready to give up on it.

Tomorrow night there’s Big Love, which has been surprisingly, consistently awesome this season. But I think there are only two new episodes left in said season, and that’s depressing. I guess I’ve got True Blood to look forward to this summer?

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