Groovymarlin.com

Have you ever checked out this site, Instapaper? It is SO COOL. It lets you save web pages to read later. You can add a bookmarklet to your browser to automatically save stuff to Instapaper, or do it manually. Then you can go there to read your articles later, or you can download them to a file, or have them sent to your Kindle. I am LOVING THIS. I think I first heard about Instapaper from the surprisingly curmudgeonly Merlin Mann. (Surprising because I know he’s about the same age as me, but seems like he’s about 100 times crabbier most of the time. Maybe that’s his schtick. In any case, he’s worth following on his blog and twitter because he totally turns me onto some cool tools like Instapaper!)

So that’s been happening, and what else? Um…I thought for a few minutes, very seriously, about buying an iPad. Then I said “naw!” Because really, why do I need one at this point? I already have all of the following:

1. several PCs
2. a Macbook Pro
3. several iPods
4. an iPhone
5. a Kindle
6. a netbook

Seriously, why would I need an iPad at this point? I’m not ruling out suddenly deciding that I have to have one later. But I think I’ve learned my lesson after being an early adopter of the iPhone: I’ll wait for the second generation at least. That way some of the bugs will be addressed, features will be added, and prices will come down.

Speaking of my Kindle, I LOVE IT. See the Instapaper stuff above, plus I have lots of books on there and since I buy almost all of my books and stuff from Amazon, the Kindle just works out great for me. It’s lightweight, easy on the eyes, hold a charge for-freaking-ever, and makes me super happy. Best gift I ever got (thanks, spousal unit!). And, not surprisingly – the one I have is the second gen. NOTICE A TREND?

Ouch my wrist hurts so freaking much. I’m driving myself much harder than any physical therapist ever could. More on that in another post. Right now I need IBUPROFEN! Is it possible to become addicted to Ibuprofen?

Groovymarlin (that’s me!) is a Google Reader fanatic! As of right now, I subscribe to about 300 different feeds, and read nearly 500 individual posts per day. I subscribe to a variety of feeds: parenting blogs, humor blogs, daily deals, Jezebel, political stuff, etc.

With that many feeds to look at, not to mention the few more that seem to get added every week, thoughtful maintenance of my subscriptions is a must, otherwise I’d get completely overwhelmed. Here are the main reasons why I unsubscribe from feeds:

1. You post too much quantity with too little quality: your feed has 50+ posts a day, most of which are meaningless or banal. Edit thyself, blogger!

2. You’re full of shit: there was one “mommy blogger” that I completely unsubscribed from recently because I got fed up with how insanely perfect she made her life seem. Listen sister, I’m a mom too, I know that nobody’s life is all perfect and sunshine all the time. You and your perfect wardrobe and your perfect hair and your perfect husband and your perfect kids and your perfect shopping suggestions and your perfect internet-famous friends MAKE ME SICK.

3. You insult your readers: there’s a guy who used to blog quite a bit, and was pretty interesting, but recently he’s eased up on the blogging and done a lot more tweeting instead. Eventually, I unsubscribed from his Twitter feed because it seemed to bring out the mean side in him. What was snarky and amusing on his blogs turned into real vitriol on Twitter. Maybe because of the lack of context? Whatever, he just seemed to hate on everyone and everything, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

4. Your feed is full of garbage: you have nary a thoughtful, original post in a week’s time. Instead, your [insert hobby or interest here] blog merely reproduces every stupid press release and promotional blurb you receive. Or worse, you steal ideas and content from other, more talented writers. For shame, blogger.

5. You decided to be annoying: by only publishing a headline, and forcing me to click through to read EVERY WORD OF ACTUAL CONTENT, in a desperate ploy for blog traffic. Sorry, page hit whore, not gonna happen.

Sounds bitchy? You’ll live.

So I’m guessing that my blogging will be pretty light (ha ha, when isn’t it?) over the next few days as we celebrate Christmas 2009, or what I will always remember as the BARBIE PINK GLAMOUR CAMPER HOLOCAUST OF 2009. However, since the company I work for wisely shuts down completely between Christmas and New Year’s, I will have some down time next week and maybe, just maybe, I’ll write some blog posts! Won’t that be fun? And bitchy as hell, I promise!

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.

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.

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