Category Archives: Thoughts

DIY 8G iPod Shuffle. Just add water.

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Items needed:

Instructions:

  1. Take 8G iPhone and drop (while listening) into pond
  2. Remove iPhone from pond and towel off
  3. Attempt to turn off iPhone by holding down hold button
  4. When touchscreen is unresponsive (when attempting to activate slider to power off device) place into Ziploc bag and fill with uncooked rice in powered-on state (flickering screen optional)
  5. Leave in sealed bag for 72 hours

If you have followed the instructions carefully, you will be left with an 8G iPod Shuffle without any of those flashy iPhone features like display, touchscreen, built-in speakers but can easily sync with iTunes and control music playback with the play/pause switch on the headphones. Enjoy the simplicity!

Yummy!

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Bud Light & ClamatoI ran to the store this past weekend with the kids for a few items and saw this sitting on a light post in the parking lot. It just truly seems like a joke product. Bud Light & Clamato?!

There’s spanish below the title that says “With salt-and-lemon the perfect combination”. Perhaps, but I don’t think so.

You talkin’ to me?

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Of course everyone has seen Bluetooth headsets that you can get for most cell phones these days. Jabra BT200I have even been using mine shown t the right for years. One of my favorite books is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and in the second book of the series, Speaker for the Dead the main character, Ender Wiggin, speaks to a computer (Jane) through a gem he keeps in his ear. Every time I see someone walking around with a headset, I can’t help but think of that.

While at CostCo returning a broken fan set, I saw a woman in the checkout lane who had two different headsets, one in each ear. I can only presume she is some über type-A person like a realtor, but when you’re not in your car, those headsets just look funny and that looked worse than usual.

Since my current headset is getting a little weak due to a severly aging battery, I’ll probably have to pick up a new one sometime soon. The one Apple made to compliment the new iPhone is quite nice and really small. I’ve also heard really good things about the Jawbone (the demo on the site is very impressive), and the noise cancellation would be useful in the car, but I’m inclined to go for something more compact (and presumably lighter).

It’s called an Oxford comma.

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English was never my best subject but if you have read my correspondence or even this blog, you can tell that I have basic, yet acceptable, command of grammar. What little I do know, I try to exercise to the point of almost obsessing at times. One such item is the use of the comma in lists. I was taught and was of the belief that you include a comma before the last item in a list. For example:

For lunch today, I had a hamburger, potato salad, and fritos.

Most people seem to omit that last comma which has been a pet peeve of mine. This past weekend, I was browsing through the Upstart Crow at Seaport Village and ran across a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. It turns out, that particular item is called an Oxford comma and its inclusion or omission are both acceptable. Interestingly, in the U.S. it’s usually included but in the U.K. it is usually omitted.

Aren’t you glad you learned that?

Professional conferences are a necessary evil

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I’ve always been torn on the idea of attending professional conferences. I usually lean towards not going as I figure I can get any information that I need from various forms of documentation or from well crafted searches on Google so the effort and expense are not worth it.

In practice, though, I have been glad that I attended any conference that I’ve been to. It really is school. Sure, if you just have the book, you can get the information you need, but it isn’t the same as sitting and focusing on presentations to be exposed to things you wouldn’t bother with or sometimes even think about.

This conference that I’m at now is a good example. I technically knew what I needed before arriving, but having different ideas shared will make me a better administrator.

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Information: Who is serving whom?

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I got bit by the RSS bug about two years ago as I used to frequent the same 15-20 websites daily and being able to subscribe to them made keeping up much easier and reduced the chance of me missing something because I didn’t check often enough.

For the unfamiliar, RSS is a way to publish the essential information about a blog post, news article or similar data and make that available to anything that can parse and display that information (e.g., a browser, application, or web service). Podcasts are distributed in this fashion with your “podcatcher” occasionally checking the feed and downloaded a new episode for you.

I used to use Bloglines but am currently enjoying Google’s Reader and am subscribed to 67 different feeds. With a good portion producing new information daily and a few several times an hour, the amount of content is considerable.

A good friend of mine was lamenting to me how his “TiVo chores.” TiVo has an option to automatically record shows it thinks you will like in addition to the shows you tell it to record. For him, he has to make a point to sit down and filter through and/or watch all the shows before he gets too behind. Similarly, for me, I check Google Reader multiple times a day to ensure that I don’t get too far behind.

So having said all of that, the question I have to ask is are we being served ball all this information or are we instead allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by things that don’t really matter? I could probably read only a fraction of the items that I wade through and not be the worse for it, but my compulsive side would make me obsess about the things I didn’t read.

The second complaint another friend of mine made was the fact that by digesting website information via RSS you can often miss out on the other things you see if you visit the website directly. Things like comments, related links, and even in some cases, ads. “Browsing” in the general sense is lost. In the context of a printed newspaper, if you read only the front page, you miss all sorts of content on page 3 or in the Lifestyles section (not to mention the classifieds).

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I can’t help but think there is a considerable amount of growing up and learning we will all have to do to find a balance between the information serving us and us serving the information.

I’m starting to feel old

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A colleague at work had a birthday this past Thursday and, to be honest, I thought he was a year or two older than me. As it turns out, he is three years younger than me.

It’s not a big deal, but it’s a bit of a bummer to realize that you are pretty much the oldest in the group (aside from managers). Of course, I never expected that I was the youngest in a the group, but when you realize that you are not, it is a bit tough.

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