Backing up the data on my computers at home has been one of those things that’s been on my list for a long time, but I just kept putting it off. Lately it seems like there’s been a handful of articles bringing it back in the spotlight, so over the holiday weekend I set out to actually do something about it. The following is partly a writeup I did for some advice to Jen’s work, but I thought it might be of interest to others out there, so here it is! Read the rest of this entry »
Ahhhh, the first real day of crappy driving conditions of the year! Special thanks to both Eaton and Ionia counties on their lack plowing or salting roads, by the way. I still haven’t figured out why I think a shovel beats a snowblower, either.
Ah, who am I kidding? I wouldn’t have it any other way!
I realize I’ve been absent from writing for a long time, and this won’t make up for it, but I HAD to share this link. Courtesy of Gizmodo, MTV Music is apparently trying to put everything music video related online. Like seriously. Music videos, live recordings, clips from shows, everything. Its at once bare in some places and overloaded in others – I’m wasting tons of time on this. I keep entering in songs and artists, seeing what I can find, and then wandering off on the similar artist links to find even more!
I only have two requests. Well, three. First, keep adding more! Then….
Give me a 10ft workable-from-the-TV interface. I want this in MythTV or Windows Media Center or something. Hmmmm….I wonder if it would work from the Wii web browser.
Finally, mash this up with my MP3 collection database. I want to see corresponding music videos for the artists and songs in my music collection! Happy browsing!
Why in the blue hell can’t I copy and paste between GIMP and Word 2007?!? It is such a collossal pain in the ass to take screenshots, crop them, and put them into Word.
It’s a few days late, but I wanted to comment on the recent news about UAL Corporation, parent of United Airlines, almost being run into the ground at the hands of a bunch of automated computer systems. Slashdot has some good commentary (deliciously titled Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B), but the summary at the Wall Street Journal (cached since they seem to have truncated it now?) seems to explain it well. Additionally, Google has posted some behind-the-scenes info on the subject.
Basically an article on a newspaper website was somehow placed on it’s “latest business news” section. Google’s automated news crawler detected that a new link was on that page, and so indexed the page. The article in question was an undated article from 2002 detailing United Airlines’ bankruptcy filings. Once Google had indexed the article, people who had Google Alerts set up for United Airlines started getting messages, and it started filtering throughout the internet. The way I understand it is that people then started trading the stock, which eventually brough automated stock trading programs in on the action. End result? UAL dropped from $12.50 a share to $3 before trading was halted and real people started straightening things out.
I don’t know what it is, but I find this fascinating, horrible, and awesome. Maybe it’s my intense hatred for the airline industry in general. The thought that a freak oversight somewhere (and I think reports have started to say it was an error on the newspaper site that the original article was undated) can potentially drive a mega-corporation into the ground blows my mind. It’s crazy to think about how the world has become so automated and interconnected that something like this would happend in the first place!
An excellent article about Jon Stewart ragging on the current television media. Courtesy of my new favorite news aggregator, NewsTrust.net.
We’ve been gone on vacation for just over a week, and I’m flooded with electronic “stuff”. I did manage to check my personal email a few times here and there, but if it was let go after a few days I’d have 50-60 unread messages in my inbox. Most of those are daily alerts or newsletters, but I try to at least skim through those each day for anything good. Maybe I should be using some more filters.
My work email, which I didn’t check!, 1730 unread messages when I got in this morning. Granted, all but ~150 of those were from an automated process that errored out and spit the message back to me, so those were easily cleaned up. But still, I had 150 messages to go through when I got in, trying to piece together what’s going on, where things are with projects and whatnot. It’s a pain.
Then there’s the RSS feeds. I can’t seem to find a specifc number on Google Reader (it only says 1000+), but my breakdown has 1000+ for the regular news sites, 1000+ in tech-related sites, and ~600 for misc blogs and websites. These are all feeds that I usually read or at least skim in the reader each item. All in all I’m left with literally thousands of stories that are unread, and no idea what has been going on in the world over roughly the past week and a half. Am I really that much of a slave to the Internet?
I need something that summarizes the summaries for me! I’m thinking now I’m just going to “mark all as read”, and figure that if it’s important I’ll find out about it eventually!
On a somewhat related note, I’ve been reading the first book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time now for over a year. I’ve have multiple coworkers recommend it, and friends rave about it, so I took the opportunity to waste a gift card on set of the first three books. Lately, I’ve found myself on quite a few cross-country airplane trips, and spend much of the airtime reading. But I just can’t get into it. I have no idea why – I enjoy fantasy fiction, and have read many of that genre. I’ve flown through the last few fiction books I’ve read. But the Eye of the World just isn’t drawing me in. Blasphemy, I know, but what the heck? I’m going to finish it one way or another (maybe in the next year?), but I’m doubting I’ll check out the rest. [shrug]
So Netflix has account “profiles” that you can set up – giving you the ability to allocate slots to different queues. I want to create a “TV” queue and dedicate a slot to streamline getting TV show discs. I’ve got everything in my main queue now – how the hell can I move those movies from the main queue to the new queue? All I can seem to find is….well, nothing. Am I supposed to delete the item, then switch to the other queue and add it again?
I’d contact their support, but apparently there’s no more email support , either. What?!? There’s a phone support option…but I don’t want to talk to someone on the phone. First, it’s late. Second, it’s not a big enough deal to deal with talking to someone right now. But an email could be written tonight, answered sometime in the next day, and I’d have an answer at my leisure. Gahhhh!
I saw in this morning’s Amazon MP3 newsletter that they had the new Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, available for just shy of $9. Buuuut, that made me remember bookmarking a blog post awhile back about how NIN were giving the album away for free! Not only that, but the free offerings start at high quality MP3s and go all the way up to raw WAV files. Hmmmmm….I don’t know what racket Amazon is running (actually, I think their MP3 store is awesome and there’s finally a reasonable alternative to iTunes), but whats the point of selling something that’s available elsewhere at no cost?
This has to be the coolest thing I’ve seen in some time….where was this when we were doing field trips back in the day?
Extinct, my ASS! from The Original Joe Fisher on Vimeo.
Thanks, Giz!