blog

Design.  Every day I surf the web reading articles and trying new services. As I proceed on my journey I see sites that have amazing design.  Sites ranging from crazy, cluttered and creative to bare bones simple.  Every time that I cross paths with great design it creates a burning desire.  I want so badly to have the knowledge to mold my site how I see fit.

I love the theme I have.  It does a great job and my eyes don’t bleed when I look at it, but it isn’t mine.  I didn’t create it and it doesn’t satisfy my wants.  The problem is that I lack the knowledge and creativity to build my own.

My personality drives me to learn new things and tackle new problems.  Some day I hope to learn enough to create something that will satisfy my wants.  As of right now I just have too much on my plate* and must settle with a simple blog post.

* If you don’t believe me, you can ask those who are: waiting for my photos, wanting to hang out, suggesting I work more, etc.

I just finished watching Act 1 of “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” and had an absolute blast. Dr. Horrible is one of the latest projects by Joss Whedon, who you may know from Buffy, Angle, and Firefly (one of my favorites).

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a web based mini series starring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion as his arch nemesis Captain Hammer. You can view Act 1 (of 3) now with the others releasing on July 17th and 19th.

So far this is an excellent light hearted series. I hope this sparks some interest so we see more like this in the future.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

I promise I am working on some new posts, but in the meantime enjoy this website recommendation.

The site is Stuff White People Like. It is this great blog about, none other than, stuff white people like. I find it extremely funny and mostly dead on. The posts are very well written and make some amusing points. Head over to the site and see what you think.

Flickr rolled out a new feature to help us share our photos and videos. It is a little Share This button in the upper right hand corner of a photo page, sets page, or group. After clicking it you get a drop down menu where you can: email it, grab the link, grab the embed code, or post it to your blog (which requires some setup.)

This simple little feature will help us share more of the interesting stuff that we find on flickr.

I love being a geek. It keeps me entertained for hours as I fiddle with endless gadgets, software, and websites. My geeky nature also gives me the urge to fix things that are broken, even if I don’t know anything about it. I will fiddle for hours trying to learn about and fix new things. Although my geekiness is great most of the time, there is a downside. This is what I call the curse of the geek.

The constant fiddling is great most of the time.  That is until I have a lackluster yet important task to accomplish. I have no problem accomplishing the task and am perfectly capable, but my fiddling nature can quickly derail me. The other day I had to start writing a paper for one of my classes. It wasn’t a large and unbearable task, just less interesting than some other things. I had allocated more than enough time to accomplish the task and write an amazing paper. I had a full day of writing and then a couple of spare hours to revise. All was on track, until the curse.

I was knee deep in the research aspect of my assignment when I took a break for some food. I decided to take this extra time to check on my blog and maybe polish up some posts. Then it happened, my site was having problems. I logged into my blogs admin panel and tried to load up the main dashboard. It would start loading, then stop a quarter of the way. Worse than that, it would take down the rest of the site.  I would get error after error that the server wasn’t available.  If I waited a few minutes, I could regain access to other parts that weren’t the main dashboard (like plug-ins, posts, or comments.) If I went back to the dashboard, it all went down again.

As you can imagine, I just had to try and get this working again.  I couldn’t leave my precious blog struggling to stay alive.  The thing is, I am pretty new to hosting my own blog.  Up until a month ago I have used wordpress.com or Blogger.  So when things went bad, I wasn’t exactly sure how to fix it.  After messing around for awhile to make sure it was a consistent problem I contacted support.  Things got more difficult because they couldn’t recreate the problem.  It seemed really odd that it only happened when I went to one specific page.  After 12 hours, they had given up and told me that I needed to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server because I was using too much of my servers resources.  That is ridiculous considering I get 16 or 17 visitors on a good day.

Eventually I ended up reinstalling wordpress and restoring my database from an old backup.  The site worked fine for about 10 minutes and then the problems happened again.  Cutting to the end, I finally isolated the problem to my theme.  After disabling a feature of the theme, everything is working fine for the most part.

The point of this long drawn out story is that my fiddling can get the worst of me.  I did end up writing my paper, but that was after 8 hours were wasted trying to revive my blog.  The paper turned out to be great, but I had to make sacrifices.  I didn’t get as much sleep and I had to postpone other projects.  Overall it just wasn’t a good thing.  This is what I call the curse of the geek.  It is the ability to get distracted and derailed from more important tasks by something that requires fiddling and has to deal with technology.

There seems to be this notion popping up on the Internet that one must side with either Twitter or Pownce.  There is no room for both and they are inherently rivals.  It isn’t the general consensus or rule, but it does sway some people’s opinion.

The truth is, they are very different beasts.  The text entry box is about the only thing they have in common.  Once you shed the preconceived notion that they are the same or that Pownce in encroaching on Twitter, you can see the benefit of both these services.

Twitter derives its power from simplicity and the text interface.  This basically makes it a powerful text messaging/notification system.  It allows you to blast quick thoughts, ideas, and frustrations to your friends and followers (large groups of people).  At times Twitter reminds me of a man standing around shouting things into a bullhorn.  I can tune in momentarily to hear what is on his mind or what he is up to.  Overall, Twitter is very simple and very addicting.

Pownce on the other hand doesn’t have the same benefits as Twitter.  It is more complex (not in a bad way) and lack’s a texting interface.  It gains complexity in the fact that you can post much more content such as files, events, and links.  Pownce isn’t really ideal for the quick blurb of what people are thinking as much as re/aggregating content.  It is more like a customizable blog, in which you choose who writes it.  You can search across the Pownce community and become a friend/fan of people who write/aggregate content that you enjoy.  Instead of going to a blog dedicated to photography or lifehacks, you can choose friends on Pownce who will deliver that content.  Pownce also allows comments and ratings which helps create a community much like a blog or other website.

As you can see, these two services aren’t mutually exclusive.  You can incorporate them both into your life.  One as a message service and the other as a customized blog.

You can find me on both Pownce and Twitter.