Geek

I know I’ve been writing things with a geeky bent this week, but these are the things that have been consuming my thoughts lately. If this bothers you in any way, please let me know and I’ll come up with something not geek related; perhaps a picture of me sitting in the bathtub or something.

Google+ is becoming a bit of it’s own rage and I am right there on the bandwagon. I have been purposely avoiding becoming excited about the new social networking platform but I discover new features here and there that work well for me, especially when it comes to privacy. The kicker of this is that you have to have faith – faith that Google won’t screw up and release what was intended as a private conversation to an unintended audience member.

I am fortunate in that I discovered the benefits of connecting with others online fairly early; 1985 to be exact. I quickly learned not to write anything online that I wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of the New York Times. I remember sitting in my dorm room at SUNY Fredonia chatting with a man named Patrick at 300 baud on a service called GEnie using my Commodore 64. He was also 18 and asked where I went to school. I told him Fredonia. A week later I received a handwritten card in the mail. Through our conversation he had obtained my name and did a quick call to the local phone company, which turned up my phone number, which provided him my mailing address which included my room number at Alumni Hall because the phone numbers corresponded to the dorm room numbers.

Instead of being flattered I was freaked out.

Through this little lesson I learned what to say, where to say it and the relative ramifications of what I said when chatting online. Privacy is still a huge concern but if you live by the one simple rule you shouldn’t have much of an issue.

“Don’t type it online unless you wouldn’t mind having it on the front page of the New York Times.”

Back to Google+. One of the cool features about Google+ is that you can messages in your “stream” to intended audiences. For example, the blog entry preceding this one, a recipe for the macaroni and cheese that was served at the Harvest House restaurants in the Woolworths department store chain, was copied onto my Google stream. I marked it as ‘public’; anyone can see it. I want anyone to see it. This is kind of cool.

I had a brief conversation with a local musician on Twitter yesterday. I fully believe that Twitter is very abused with people using it for too personal communication (addressing the one instead of the crowd). The musician had compatibility concerns with some of his audio gear and Mac OS X Lion. I told him I would test my gear when I got home and notify him of the results. I didn’t have his email address, but I was able to a message directly to him in my Google+ stream. No one else was the wiser. The parts of the compatibility test that were fit for public consumption were added to my Google+ stream with a public tag.

There are times when I want to talk about beards or bears or the like and I don’t want certain people to see them. By giving me the ability to sort my connections on Google+ into ‘Circles’, I can tell the bears that I find so-so quite woofy but I don’t have to explain myself at the next family reunion or make old friends clutch their rosary beads.

This is kind of cool.

Now I still keep that “New York Times” rule in my mind regardless of the audience, but I no longer have to broadcast anything and everything to the entire world. I can direct the topics to the appropriate circle.

There has been discussion of Google+ replacing blogs altogether. Back in the day there was talk of Google Wave replacing email. I actually can see Google+ being a one-stop repository of all things communicated online. While this is very cool, it’s also VERY scary, especially when it comes to the advertising nature of Google. Again, this is where one has to have a little faith that Google will continue with the “don’t be evil” motto and live up to it.

So go ahead, don a pair of sunglasses, mix up a glass of alcoholic swill and go to your local Taco place and chow down like there’s no tomorrow and tell only your closest friends about the adventure on Google+.

Just don’t fret if you show up on the front page of the New York Times caught in the act with sour cream at the corners of your mouth.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

It’s no secret that I love me some social networking here on this internets thing made up of tubes. I love reaching out to others, sharing common interests with others halfway around the world and meeting new friends in person that we’ve already met digitally. This blog is going on ten years old next month and Earl and I have met some wonderful people via this avenue of conversation along the way. We look forward to meeting many more.

As technology progresses new methods of communications pop up here and there. For example, I used to share all of my photos on Flickr and then build blog entries from their interface to automatically post here. This whole thing used to live on Google’s Blogger platform. Not too long ago (relatively speaking), Twitter popped up and everyone start writing witty one liners and laughing silently in front of their screen, thinking how much they were making others laugh with their snappy tweets. At least I did. Then along came Facebook and you could find out what happened to the guy that you lusted after in high school and share all your secrets with all of your family and friends.

With all these new platforms and the like, my information has become scattered all over the place. Facebook used to have a reliable cross posting platform where their Notes interface sucked up each blog entry on a routine basis and posted it there. It got to where I was getting more comments there than here. Then that went haywire; yesterday a week’s worth of posts shot up at once. I write in a timely manner, so this made me look either very foolish or like I had been stricken with Alzheimer’s.

Now Google+ (G+) has come along and it’s turning out to be quite nice. It’s still in beta (testing) and probably will be for a while so there’s some kinks in their system but for the most part it’s pretty nifty. More importantly to me, it has all sorts of integration that appeals to me- photos (replacing Flickr), location stuff (replacing Foursquare), Hangouts (replacing Skype for video) and then the regular stream stuff, which allows you to be rather lengthy in your missives but still provides the option to still be witty with snappy one-liners. Plus there’s the whole social networking aspect with circles of friends, following people, finding G+ users nearby and the like.

So here’s my problem. I’ve never really liked Facebook and I’ve always been kind of half-assed with the way that I use it. Should I ditch it completely? Twitter is slowly replacing news feeds. I definitely find Twitter to be my “go to” place when I suspect something is going on in the world (i.e. the death of Bin Laden) and to keep a finger on the pulse of what the world is thinking about today. Should I just go with G+? The drawback is that it’s Google, who, in my mind at least, is an advertising company that has some really cool technology. This scares me. Even though I used to write ad copy for a living, I really don’t like advertising at all and will do everything I can to avoid it.

But I really like the integration of G+ and getting rid of that scattered feeling of having my data all over creation with multiple links pointing everyone in 10 different directions.

Such a dilemma in today’s world.

Now, if I could just find a way to get email under control. Someday I’ll have a clean inbox again.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Today is my weekend and I am using the occasion to do something I haven’t done in a very long time: go for a road trip. I’m exploring the roads of Upstate New York in the Acura, letting the summer wind blow through my, er, beard as I stick to the back roads the best I can. So far I have been within a stones throw of three revolutionary war era forts, two nuclear power plants and an international border. ‘Tis a pity I didn’t being my passport along. I’ll have to stay in the states.

Just as I find my zen when I’m riding my bike, I find a zen, albeit a different flavor of it, when I’m riding the back roads in my car on a beautiful day. It doesn’t always have to be sunny, in fact, sometimes I thunderstorm or a twister can keep it interesting, but today’s mix of sun and clouds with the feeling of a storm coming on later today is keeping it right where I want it to be. This exercise is giving me the opportunity to purge my head of extraneous thoughts and get my mind where I need to be to kick some ass at my job for the rest of the week, plus fully comprehend the joy of last week’s passage of the marriage equality bill. Earl and I are actually talking about our honeymoon and coming up with a timetable for our celebration of marriage.

I’ve filled up on some Panera food, at a very nice version of the popular chain, I must add, so it’s time to get back on the road. I’m one of those annoying people that checks in on Foursquare, so if you go to the Foursuare site you can figure out where I’m going and where I’ve been. I think I’m iMachias on there.

Happy motoring!

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Last week I told you about switching from an iPhone 4 to the HTC Thunderbolt 4G phone from Verizon. The HTC is quite a nice looking phone, however, about three days into the gig it started rebooting. Randomly. And if got bored with rebooting it would just go to sleep and not wake up. Pressing the power button would do nothing. It’d just sit there, dead.

So last night after work I raced to the mall and took advantage of Verizon Wireless’ “15 Day Satisfaction Guaranteed policy”. I switched back to an iPhone. No questions asked. There was a small restocking fee of $35 for the HTC, but to make the switch back was worth it.

When the VZ associate asked why I was switching, I told him of the issues i was having with the Thunderbolt. He said that while he hadn’t experienced the issue, he had heard of others having similar problems. He said that they were either completely devoid of trouble or they were plagued with a lot of them, there didn’t seem to be an in-between.

This morning when I went to use the Personal Hotspot feature of my iPhone, I found that it made itself scarce and was no longer available for me. I called VZ support and they were able to fix the problem pretty quick.

I’m back in business. AND back on Instagram. 🙂

I guess once you go Mac, you never go back.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

One of the really bad jokes that is omnipresent in the Manor is how much money I spend in iTunes. It’s really pitiful if you think about it. Having worked in radio for 15 years, I tend to remember every one hit wonder that hit the Top 40 stage anywhere from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s. I have this habit of remembering a song, getting it stuck in my head and subsequently buying it on iTunes. Then I’ll play it a dozen times and forget about it completely, the ear bug having been completely squashed. It can be (and is) an expensive habit and something that I needed to rectify. There was the Great Zune Experiment last year, where I bought a Zune and used the Zune monthly subscription service to satisfy these musical needs. The Zune is a nifty little device, but it seemed like every track I looked up on the Zune Marketplace would show the album cover, artist and everything and then come with a little note to the side “Not Available.” Why show the damn thing if you’re not going to make it available?

I have mentioned before that I follow several tech podcasts (net casts) from the TwIT network, more specifically iPad Today, MacBreak Weekly and This Week In Google. I will admit that I am a little hard to deal with in the morning and this mood doesn’t usually dissipate until 11:00 or so, but I have been finding it hard to get through the MacBreak Weekly episodes lately, especially since there are screeching Edith Bunker impersonations (no one but Jean Stapleton can do Edith Bunker), hosts that have apparently not prepared for the episode and are subsequently asking repetitive or downright moronic questions, instances of ultra hamming it up with needless accents and carrying on more appropriate for a Top 40 Morning Zoo show and singing and dancing to a song called “Rat Hole”.

But I digress as I just had to get that little venting out of my system.

The reason I bring up the music consumption habit and the podcasts in tandem is because amongst all the inane chatter I got through this morning, the always lovely Veronica Belmont brought up the fact that she has moved away from using iTunes altogether over the past six months and is now using a service called Rdio. She mentioned that she has used Pandora and a couple of the other alternative music services. Like me, she mentioned that Pandora seems to play the same songs over and over again. (I have an additional problem with Pandora in that as the playlist progresses the tempo gets slower and slower and slower until I am snoring through a suicide inducing track that is suspiciously part of what should be a 70s disco love fest).

Again, I digress.

Rdio is brilliant. It is a subscription service that lets you stream music through a web browser, to a whole assortment of mobile devices or through native applications built for your favorite computing platform. Well, not entirely native, some apps are written through Adobe Air, but that’s better than nothing.

The best part of Rdio is that you can store tracks on your mobile device for offline listening, perfect for those that are copping some wifi in the office and lose connectivity once in a while. (I don’t know who would do that).

There are a couple of subscription price levels. I believe the most expensive is $9.99 per month for unlimited offline music downloads, which is far less than what I was paying for Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace and a hell of a lot cheaper than my monthly iTunes habit.

An added bonus for Rdio is that it has social networking features built in, much like the Ping service on iTunes. So I can see what my Twitter followers are listening to if they use Rdio and then try those songs out. In fact, I took a look at what Veronica Belmont was listening to and discovered Foster The People, which is an awesome band that I highly recommend. They had me bopping in my cubicle this morning. I even downloaded the Scissor Sisters, which I haven’t done on iTunes because they keep getting moved to the back of the “purchasing agenda”.

I think everyone will hear a sigh of relief from my husbear when I settle on using Rdio for my music listening needs. If I find anything that breaks the deal I’ll be sure to share my findings here, but I have a good feeling that this service is going to be a keeper for my musical needs.

Now, if I could just find a way to avoid the bad stand up routines on the TwIT podcasts.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

So I have had a couple of people ask how the CatCam works. Here’s the short version of it.

In the kitchen we have a MacMini acting as our kitchen television. This allows us to stream internet content, Netflix, Hulu, etc. to a new 19-inch display, which is a vast improvement over the 13-inch television that used to sit in the corner. The remote included with the MacMini allows us to move around the FrontRow software, much like you would on an original Apple TV. The MacMini isn’t really anything exceptional; it’s several years old and is the first incarnation of the Intel-based MacMinis. In fact, it’s not even a Core2 Duo, I believe they call it a “Core Solo”.

Since the MacMini is a full blown computer, it can do a whole lot more! We had an original firewire iSight camera that was left over from my old PowerMac G4 from back in the day, so I decided to hook it up and see if it works. It works beautifully, as you can see.

I found a nifty piece of software called EvoCam. EvoCam has a bunch of features that I haven’t even begun to explore yet, but I like it because it has motion detection and timestamping. It also has the ability to upload pictures to the webhost that serves up jpnearl.com. The cam is always active, looking for some sort of motion in front of Tom’s food and water bowls. When it senses motion, it snaps a picture and overwrites the previous picture on the server. That way, I can easily display it using one line of HTML code on the webpage, instead of having to accommodate different filenames.

The motion sensor is looking at a particular spot, so from time to time you’ll notice that one of us walking around in the kitchen will trip the sensor, even when Tom is somewhere else in the house napping or whatnot. I have reminded everyone of this fact so that everyone can make sure they’re properly clothed when passing through the kitchen (Tom included). So far the system is working pretty good. The software is currently on a 15 day free trial. I’m going to mess around with it a little more before deciding if I want to plonk down the money to buy it or try something else.

The things we do on a rainy day.

I’m a geek. I added a new feature to the sidebar. It’s down near the bottom. It looks something like this.