links for 2009-11-19

• Seven Ways to Create More Time In Your Day
  (tags: productivity)

links for 2009-11-06

• 15 Free Guides That Really Teach You USEFUL Stuff
  (tags: howto technology mac reference productivity useful manuals guides tutorials)

Lego

I love XKCD, for its humor and also how it makes you think!

Lego

via xkcd.com on 11/5/09

links for 2009-09-21

• Reggie Ashworth releases AppDelete 3.0 – Uninstall Anything | BabyGotMac
  (tags: applications apps)

THE TOP 10 INDICATORS THAT THE ECONOMY IS BAD

This is hilarious. I found it on Kirk Weisler’s Thought for the Day blog http://www.kirkweisler.com/t4d/
 

THE TOP 10 INDICATORS THAT THE ECONOMY IS BAD
via T4D – Thought for the Day by kirkweisler on 9/16/09

THE TOP 10 INDICATORS THAT THE ECONOMY IS BAD

10. CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.
9. You get a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
8. You buy a toaster oven and they give you a bank.
7. Hotwheels and Matchbox car companies are now trading higher than GM in the stock market.
6. McDonalds is selling the 1/4 ouncer.
5. People in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and are learning their children’s names.
4. The most highly-paid job is now jury duty.
3. Motel 6 won’t leave the lights on.
2. The Mafia is laying off judges.
1. If the bank returns your check marked as “insufficient funds,” you have to call them and ask if they meant you or them.

Remember just because things are bad….you don’t have to be! 

Kirk

links for 2009-09-14

• Homepage | Editra.org
  (tags: free tools software utilities windows opensource mac linux text-editor python)
• Rob DuToit OSX Software
  (tags: software mac)
• BusyCal – Share Calendars on a LAN and sync with Google Calendar
• Dock Library – Manage Leopard dock styles with ease

My Pic for the WorldWideMoment #wwm09

I thought about taking all kinds of pictures, but in the end, a picture of Justin and Sabrina says it all for me.  We need peace in the world so other young people all over the world won’t need to grow up knowing or fearing war.

This time, it really is for the kids.

I broke my FriendFeed and Twitter timelines

I haven’t been posting a lot lately becuase i just can’t stand wading through my feeds anymore.  You see, I am a nice guy, or at least I think I am.  People tell me I am a nice guy, so it must be true right?  Well anyway, this “nice guy” broke his FriendFeed and Twiiter timeline to a point almost beyond repair because he was being “nice.”

By “Nice”, I mean I dutifully followed everyone who followed me.  That was the “nice” thing to do, I mean if they took the trouble to follow me, then I HAVE to follow back, not to do that would be…well rude,…right?  In FriendFeed, I went the next step with this by using an online tool that automatically followed everyone who followed me as well as those who “liked” or commented on the same topics I did.  All of this was in the name of growing the “conversation” and exposing myself to “more and more voices.”  So now I am following 947 people on Twitter and 293 on FriendFeed and my timelines stay lit up like a nuclear reactor set on Melt-Down.  On FriendFeed, I have to pause the stream just to read the whole page before it drops away and then I have 2 pages to read when I take the page real time again and Twitter is even worse.  I had Tweet Deck set to refresh every 10 minutes and I would have over 500 new posts to mark read because it was impossible to scan 500 posts before the next refresh.  Even my groups stayed full of unread “stuff.”  It is almost impossible to stay abreast of it because it it like drinking, not from a fire hose, but the Mississippi River, mud and all.  The people I so carefully followed back either dropped me the minute they saw the follow or constantly spam me with extreme politics on both sides, or the latest MLM scheme to make loads of money.

So that’s when I realized I had broken my FriendFeed and Twitter timelines.

I have seen some , like Robert Scoble, bless his heart, decide to declare “bankruptcy” and just kill all their follows and start fresh.  I could do that I guess, but that seems like throwing the good out with the bad, just so you can say you got rid of the bad.  In simpler terms from my heritage, “That’s a lot like throwing the baby out with the bath water, you get rid of the dirty water alright, but the clean baby goes with it and that’s not good.”  I just can’t bring myself to “kill off” all the accounts I am following because I enjoy many of them, even the annoying extremists on the left and right.  So that leads me to a “what do I do now?” moment.

First, no more “Mister Nice Guy.”  I will no longer auto-follow or reciprocate follows without thinking about it.  I am going to look over each follower I get and if they are too noisy about things I have little or no interest in seeing, I won’t follow.  If their updates come at a rate of one every two minutes, I am probably not going to follow them.  If they are self described MLM, Self-Help, or Social Networking Gurus, I am not following and may even block them.  (If a person has to constantly tell you how much he/she knows, then they probably don’t, but that’s getting off topic)

Then as much as I hate to say it, I am going to have to “thin the herd” so to speak.  I am going to have to look at each person I subscribe to in Twitter and FriendFeed and decide if I really need to follow this user or that feed.  I have to decide if I need to follow all those news sites, or just watch the trending topics and get what bubbles to the top. I need to see who’s just dumping content, and who is trying to converse and stick with those people and really converse myself.

This is going to be painful and take a LONG time, but in the end I MIGHT just end up with a FriendFeed and Twitter Timeline I can actually USE for a change, instead of avoiding.

I’ll try to chime in every so often on how it is going, but I can’t say when I’ll be done. Also, if I happen to unfollow you and you think I was wrong for some reason, let me know.  I won’t say i can’t be swayed with good reason and an occasional ice cream cone .

Oh and you in the corner grinning, yeah you Facebook, you’re next on my list so don’t get all smug with your 250+ friends on my list, some of which I have never met in my life….How’d that happen?  Oh Yeah, the Nice Guy thing again. Will I ever learn? – Don’t answer that…:)

Insane Packaging

I have always heard of companies shipping things in boxes that were way to big or swallowed the product in packing material, but I never really received a good example myself, until just the other day that is.

We needed to get a backpack for my son that was large enough to handle everything he needs to carry as a high school freshman.  We tried a couple stores and then I had an idea.  I have an Amazon Prime account and I get free 2 day shipping, so why not just order a big backpack from Amazon and save the hassle of fighting the back to school crowds at the local stores.  My son picked out a good size JanSport backpack in “Guerrilla Green”

JanSport Classic Big Student Backpack

When the package arrived from amazon, I wondered what exactly we had ordered because the box was HUGE

I thought, well, maybe the backpack was stuffed full of filler like in the department stores and of course I couldn’t expect Amazon to empty it out. Imagine my surprise when we opened it, and we found the the backpack was packed like this:

And the rest of the box was full of those “plastic pillows”

We had a mountain of plastic pillows

Now I understand wanting to pack things securely but this is a bit much.  I mean, was Amazon out of slightly smaller boxes?  Maybe they didn’t have any of those big padded envelopes left after mailing a coupe of CDs maybe…?

All joking aside, I really like Amazon and won’t stop shopping on the site, but I hope they get packaging (or a packer) that is a bit more environmentally conscious.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Glenn Beck: The Letter

It’s been a while since I posted and I plan on more original content, but for now, I couldn’t let this go by without a quick post
Glenn Beck – Current Events & Politics – Glenn Beck: The Letter

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