Long Tail Time Waster
Waste hour after hour at The Long Tail
Waste hour after hour at The Long Tail
I used ecto for a while as an offline, easy to use blogging tool. It's very nice, and worked pretty well for me when I would try to actually spell check or compose a post, rather than my typically rough entries.
However, I've just recently started playing with MarsEdit, and I have to say it's even better. What can I say, it's been a good week of trying new software for me. There's scripting built in right now, the editing interface is better, customizable shortcuts and tags, and even customizable preview templates, so I can pull down my MT templates and get a perfect preview of the entry. It's got all your standard MT stuff thrown in too, categories, trackbacks, comments, extended texts, etc. Good stuff.
Prall finally gets a blog at ChristopherPrall.com. Good stuff.
In my eternal quest to be more organized and anal in my organizational stragies, I'd had basecamp on my radar for some time, but just got around to playing with it a few days ago. Basically, it's just a project management app, with todo lists, message boards (which border on blog-esque), milestones, calendars, etc. Wouldn't you know that the day I decided to put up a rant about the glory that is basecamp, would be the day they announce a price hike.
I gave it a few days to let it stew, and you know what? It really doesn't bother me. It's a pretty modest increase at my level, and it still seems worth every penny.
I've been trying to decide if I was more impressed with the site's functionality, the design and usability of the whole app, the responsiveness, or the open, frank, and right attitude of the product team. They've put together a great service, they offer a free trial, and then several pay plans, all very competitively priced. It's super easy to sign up, and amazingly enough, even easier to unsubscribe. Plus, for the geeks out there, they also offer RSS feeds and/or email notification for seemingly everything, making keeping up with your team a simple matter of a bloglines subscription. Add in calendar subscriptions for iCal or Mozilla calendar, and everyone is up to speed.
Those guys just seem to get it. All of it. And their app rocks. I was a 'free' subscriber for about 20 minutes, then I forked over the cash for a pay plan.
It's that good. If I can stick with it to nag myself about all the things I should be doing is another matter, but I'm going to see what happens.
Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 in Blog Together - Got to find a map of UNC now...
Well, the Greensboro blogging engine just won't stop. In this article, PressThink: Greensboro Newspaper Goes Open Source: A Follow Up, Jay Rosen completely missed the point of my comments to the original Greensboro Fiasco.
First he quotes me as saying:
To me, tech bloggers are vastly more important than locals to the foundation of any 'blogosphere'. That's just a matter of personal opinion and not going to change.Then he quotes me as saying:
Do you need a PhD or an intricate understanding of computer networking to have a good blog? Absolutely not, as I think you've all pointed out. Does a local blogging community need tech blogs to be successful? No more than it needs piano-repair blogs or any other niche of human interest. What it needs are passionate people, and those seem to be available in abundance in Greensboro.Finally, he asks, "What happened in between?". Not the vast sweeping change of heart he'd like to attribute to the blog comments. Here's what happened in between, the comment of mine that he chose not to include:
On the issue of 'blogospheres' (which just might be the most annoying term since 'information superhighway'), I'm of the opinion that everyone has his or her own personal version. That's the way things are supposed to work. Some get excited reading Doc Searls, while others hang on every word of scarfknitting.com, each party likely oblivious to the other. Personally, tech is what gets my blood pumping, and as such it composes the vast majority of what I consume from my blogosphereWhen I said I thought tech-bloggers were more important, perhaps what I should have said was "I like reading tech blogs, I don't live in Greensboro, and consequently can't get too excited about the latest City Council Meeting. The fact that you do care about the local issues and opinions of your fellow Greensboro-ites (?) and not the latest google fanboy rants is your choice, and I'm glad you're being so responsible with your duties as a citizen."
On a similar note, rather than the original post, intended as a back-handed compliment, perhaps what I should have said was "Greensboro is a town with a great blogging scene, of which I was previously unaware. I wish RTP, which has the resources available, would do the same."
Sadly, my blogging tends to be more from-the-hip than that ("Rants & Raves", you know?), so I got jacked-up. It happens.
In this press release, Better Calendar Proposed, Richard Conn Henry is proposing a new calendar system for the world. As someone who's cursed dates and scheduling systems before, I can certainly understand his desire, but what most caught my eye was that his target date for this switch would be Jan 1st of 2006! That's certifiably insane!
I can't imagine that the massive infrastructure around calendaring could possibly be changed in one year. That would make the Y2K fiasco look like a tiny little blip. This would be a truly enormous undertaking. And "Newton week"? Where does that fit into my monthly billing cycle? It's a hack onto his system to correct the fact that there aren't really 365 days in a year. Until that happens, dates are going to be 'approximate', and the system will need periodic adjustments.
And switch everyone around the globe to UTC (or GMT)? Why? I really don't want to wake up at 2AM and avoid the 11PM after-work traffic.
People fear change. Our busted, convoluted, and very firmly entrenched calendar is here to stay, I'm afraid.
Since I've so thouroughly enjoyed the lashings from Greensboro's blogging elite, I thought I'd take a swing at my favorite town to bash: Wadsworth, Ohio.
I've been here for about 72 hours now, and we've gone from bitter sub-zero cold, to wild blizzard, to a current state of "freezing rain that's going to make tomorrow really suck". Ahh, Ohio. It's enough to make a guy pine for North Carolina (even Greensboro).
In all seriousness, it's great to be home and enjoying the company of friends and family, I just wish it was more like that balmy 56 degress they've got going on down in NC.
Amazon Light 4.0. Very cool usage of Amazon's API.
Another gem from Schneier - Has anyone seen my bomb? I think that airport is cursed.
First we lost Mark Pilgrim, and now apparently Greensboro is the blog capital of North Carolina.
How can Greensboro, often described as "Raleigh without the PhD's" be this onto the scene, while myself, 50K other geeks at RTP tech companies, and umpteen thousands of NCSU, UNC, and Duke college students sit by idly? Whenever I'm there and surrounded by locals and not lawyers, I expect a spontaneous NASCAR race to materialize. If that town can get together and make peoples lives better through improved communication, imagine what would happen if a real city got motivated? It boggles the mind.
All that said, there are one or two redeeming qualities about Greensboro.
Apple and Moto announce partnership on cellphone. Man, the Reality Distortion Field is strong. An iPod "accessory"? As in, sync a small portion of your library to the flash drive in the phone? Hmmm...
It's like those guys at Penny Arcade know me.
Bruse Schneier lists concrete steps on practicing Safe Personal Computing
Recently, it would seem that gmail has reached the critical mass of users where generating email addresses to spam is a viable business model. Just today, I've gotten spams to wismann, wismar241, wismans, wismannu, and wisma. My address is my last name at gmail.com, so why on earth are these messages delivered to me?
I know gmail does some magic to enable first.last@gmail.com to be the same as firstlast@gmail.com, but this is a pain I don't need. Granted, all of these have been properly identified and routed to the 'Spam' label, but I don't want to see the stinking things at all, even in my spam folder.
Ok, this just came to me, and I thought it was something genuinely interesting.
Apple is making "flash-based iPods". Wall Street is even guessing this, so it's pretty much a done deal. The expectation is a January release.
Apple is working on some sort of secret cell phone design.
The logical conclusion? They are the same device.
Think about that for a minute. In your car, needing to hear some Weezer? Pull up the iTunes Music Store on your phone, download the tracks, and voila, there you go. Come home a little later, put your bluetooth phone within range of your PC/laptop, and the song is sync'd up with your iTunes library, and later that day, your full size iPod. A gig or two of storage in your phone sure would be nice.
Smart guy, that Steve.
First Ken Jennings goes down, and within hours, my unbeaten streak of Trivial Pursuit victories ends.
What's wrong with the world today? I think it's a sign of the Apocolypse.