Horrible, Unusable, Ridiculous, Completely Idiotic, Waste of Space

Today, while testing out Windows 7, I felt that it would be beneficial to put some stuff on my desktop. I have 2 montiors and might aswell keep some stuff on there to use it up. I go, look at the pre-given gadgets, and what do I find? An RSS Gadget. Not just any RSS Gadget, the only RSS Gadget that comes installed with Windows 7. And not only the only RSS Gadget installed with Windows 7, a RSS Gadget installed with Windows 7 that it tied to the horrible, unusable, ridiculous, completely idiotic, waste of space we call Internet Explorer. So I decide, well I don’t want to use the RSS Gadget installed with Windows 7 that is tied to the horrible unusable, ridiculous, completely idiotic, waste of space we call Internet Explorer, so I decided to search online for RSS Gadgets. All I found were RSS gadgets that linked to specific blogs, none of which I really wanted to read.

Janurary, Month Review.

January, The second month of http://chacha102.com. Let’s see first how it went for us, and then highlight some posts, and then I’ll point out some cool articles I just recently found.

Stats

Total Views: 1,507

Busiest Day: 119, Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Busiest Day in January: 87, January 23rd, 2009 (When I posted “Anyone use Twitter Favorites?“)

Average Views per Day: 38

Preceding Months Views: 354

Current Months Views: 1,153

Percent Increase: 325.70%

Overall, more views, probably because I post more and some people actually know about the site. But, in order to increase the awareness that I do infact have a blog, I will begin posting these stories to Twitter. I have been forgetting to do that, but it is probably my biggest outlet, with 400+ followers. Just a note: Everything is also fed through Friendfeed, and into my FF Twitter account: http://twitter.com/tandmnews

Next up, Posts.

Google Chrome, 2.0′d

A lot of people I know use Google Chrome. Whether it is becasue they want to use the latest stuff, they like the UI, or they are Google Fanboys, a good chunk of them rely on the new browser. Well, not to be outdone by not-so-tech-savy-people, I’ve decided that I am going to be MORE bleeding edge, and brag to them about features that they don’t have. I know, I’m mean. So, in order to do this, I decided to try the… wait for it:

Google Chrome Alpha Release Channel

I know, its a really long name. Oh wells.

Google Releases updates through channels. Everyone is subscribed to a channel, and Google Update listens to that channel to see if there is an update that needs to be applied. You can change your Google Chrome channel by reading this. You can choose either, Alpha, Beta, or Stable, Stable being the public release version. Each one gives you different, more advanced, more buggy features. (I.E: Alpha is buggier than Beta, which is buggier than Stable.)

So what is new in Google Chrome 2.0?

Less Apps, More Focus

So, in reformatting my new computer, I have decided to not use as many applications. One thing I found is that my computer built up a lot of junk over time. That made is very annoying to use, because I had so many applications. Well, this time I am going to install very few applications. I am going to see if I can go ALL Feburary with the same applications that I started with. Here are my guidelines:

Shareable Desktop

Wouldn’t it be cool if whatever one of your computers you worked at you had the same files, all ready for you to use on any of your computers? Well, I have found a way to make Dropbox be my Desktop, so anything I put on it is synced with the web, along with my other computers. The best part about this is that it isn’t cloud computing alone. You always have a copy of the files on your hard drive, so if Dropbox goes down, you don’t. Here’s how we do it.

Syncing Seamlessly

One journey that many companies embark on is the quest to sync documents between different computers, and increasingly the web. Microsoft has tried it with Live Mesh, allowing you to have 5GB of storage online, and sync folders between your computers. Live Mesh is actually unique in the fact that it allows you to sync folders only to computers, allowing big iTunes libraries to be synced with ease. Dropbox, another syncing company, creates a box that allows you to share 2GB with the web for free, and 50GB without. While both of the options are fine, I think a lot of them have missed what syncing really needs. The ability to match the syncing to your workflow.

What would you start with?

Going with my theme of new computer posts. I asked myself what are the first things that I am going to put on my computer. The 5 key applications that I could not survive without.

Firefox

The jack of all trade applications. It has plugins, is very reliable, and can get the job done. Although Google Chrome is very nice, and I’d pick it as my primary browser, Firefox can do it all. Its like my IE. When I need something to work, it just works. And yes, that is the slogan for Duracell…. or was it “Trusted Everywhere”.

Pidign

While many people don’t use all the different IM network, I need an application that can handle whatever I want to do with it. I need an app that can connect me to whatever network, and work. Well, Pidign connects to all 4 major networks, and many other smaller ones. That, and being an IRC client, it basically gives me all the chat things I need. It even has a plugin for Skype.

Crackberries and Problem Solving

So, over this 4 weekend break, I have taken an interest in the iTunes U section of the Music Store. In there are many lectures given at universites like Yale, CMU, and others. A lot of these give Audio and Video ways to watch/listen, and each provide interesting information. On my last post I provided you with the m y 4 favorite lectures so far. Now I’m going to give you 2 more. I’ve also included a quick notes link to my notes about the lectures. I tried to pick out some of the interesting parts.

My Favorite Lectures

These are some of the lectures that I have recently listened to, that give some very good points. They arn’t really in a ‘theme’, but both are extremely interesting.

Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman is a writer for The New York Times aswell as the writer for books like ‘The World is Flat’, ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’, and ‘Longitudes and Attidutes’.

The World is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

This talk at MIT explains the book ‘The World is Flat’ by Thomas L. Friedman, where he explains the different 10 thing what flattened the world economy, and the 3 events that recently have caused the 10 fatteners to converge.

[Audio] [Video]

Hot, Flat and Crowded - Thomas L. Friedman

This talk explains how the new energy market will be one of the biggest upcoming world market It also touches upon the fact that the United States is missing this large opportunity to undertake one of the biggest tasks of possibly the entire human history.

[Audio]

Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch was a Virtual Reality teacher at CMU, and the creator of the Alice programming software.

He gave a series of talks during his battle with pancreatic cancer. He died in July of 2008.

Time Management

This talk by Randy Pausch gives a look at how in his time, prioritizes tasks, dealing with meetings, and bosses.

[Audio ] [Video]

Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams

This talk by Randy Pausch gives a view of his childhood dreams and how he achieved them. He also gives pointers on how to achieve your childhood dreams.

[Audio ] [Video]

I hope you enjoy some of these. Most of the links are to iTunes, but can also be found with a Google Search.

Hope you enjoy them.

25 Things about you and me.

Yes, I guess I will do this blog post aswell. Giving you 25 things that you may not know about me. And then afterwards because I am not very interesting, I’ll link to 15 other people that have done the same thing.

1. I bought an iPod in August for my birthday. Returned it because of the lining was peeling, bought another, returned that one and got the 2nd Gen. (Costco Rules)
2. I have 2 monitors on my desktop, 1 laptop, and an iPod
3. I like to put my feet ontop of the case of my computer.
4. My chair deserves the title : “Squeakiest Chair in the Universe”
5. I don’t switch to the new light bulbs because my kitten likes the heat from the old ones.
6. I almost never charge my cellphone because I forget.
7. I spend at least 3-5 days a week at my church helping out.
8. I have no idea what a ‘visionary’ is.

Anyone use Twitter Favorites?

I’ve wondered for many months of why that little ‘Favorite’ button was both on  the website, aswell as supported in so many Twitter clients. It is a little star that saves things, doesn’t reshare or do anything fancy, and simply lets you save a Tweet for later. Yes, much of the web is centered around saving things for later, but I really didn’t find it that useful. It just takes up space that could instead be given to a more useful feature. I’d really like to see ‘favorites’ mimic Friendfeed’s ‘Like’ action, where instead of having to Retweet a message, instead I could just ‘like’ it. Robert Scoble points out here that Retweeting is simply the gateway into eventual implementation of the ‘like’ feature. 

But then something hit me. I noticed that the ‘Favorite’ RSS feed was public, meaning that I could have any service come in and grab it. Now I’m thinking to myself: “What service aggregates RSS feeds and allows me to share them with others”. I immediatly imported my feed into Friendfeed as a Custom RSS/Atom feed and now I have a stream of all the Tweets I find interesting, shared as another item. The best part about it is that if I wanted to do Retweet-like functionality, I could set up Friendfeed to simply post all my messages coming from that RSS stream into Twitter. 

The best part of Technology is the fact that people can take the tools that a service gets them, and find cool new ways to do stuff with them. Afterwards I checked on Friendfeed for other people with similar RSS feeds, and found several people feeding their favorites into Friendfeed. I’ve seen people pull RSS feeds from services I didn’t even know offered them. 

Many people have probably came up with many different implementations for the Twitter Favorites section. How do you use yours? Do you use it to save for later? Do you somehow share it via RSS? Do you check others favorites?

A Friendfeed Twitter Account. Sounds Ironic. It is.

So, some people like to have the content they produce on Friendfeed to be sent to Twitter. I happen to be one of these people. I like having everything I like go to Twitter, because it is easier to scan, and it also me to reach a broader audience of people (I don’t only reach the 2 people that follow me on FF, I reach the 2 that follow me on Twitter).

But, when you send all that content to your personal account, you start to get friends, sometimes real life friends, annoyed at you because they don’t follow 600 people and you flood their feed. Me, being very courtious to my RL friends, decided to create a second Twitter account. Acctually, I decided to create a Twitter account in the middle of a church sermon. But, wherever I decided to create it, it still stands that almost all of my content generated on Friendfeed (Google Reader Shares, Likes, and Blog Posts) will go to http://twitter.com/tandmnews. It will also serve as my communication to anyone who wants to follow my blog, hence that username @tandmnews. 

My question to you is: Do you use a second Twitter account for any reason? Personal vs Proffessional? Following different people? 

As people generate more content, it will be more important that you only get the items that you want, because those items take up valuble time to look through. Services like Twitter and Friendfeed are going to need to implement better filtering options to be able to zero in on content that is exactly what you want.

Say Hello to President Scoble.

Today I have read probably 3-4 sets of arguments on why Robert Scoble should/shouldn’t post Amazon Affiliate Links to his Friendfeed/Twitter. Louis Gray even graced us with a post about it, and there has been buzz going on Friendfeed about it all this morning. Some people argue that by posting affiliate links, he might become biased towards the products because he gets a percentage if people buy it.

via LouisGray.com

The point is that so many people post affiliate links to Amazon product, why should we really care? You don’t call out the other bloggers that use the affiliate program, why is Robert Scoble so very important? As Chris Baskind put here, this is not the first time it has been done. Heck, probably all of you have clicked on 1 or 2 affiliate links without knowing it. So no, there is no reason why everyone is all in a buzz about this. There is a great disscussion going on about this here. One of the best points I think that is made is if you really cared about seeing if it was an affiliate link, you could have simply checked to the URL that Friendfeed gives you. 

This Week in Previews….

Incase anyone was wondering, I haven’t been able to post recently because of the closing of the first semester at school. With this comes a lot of preperation to get things done as fast as possible. Making me unable to post. But next week is a whole other story. I intend to talk about:

• My Experience with Google Apps
• All Email Clients Suck
• Start Up Apps
• Google Reader Decimation

So, I hope you all look forward to this week on T&M News. We also are trying to get ideas for weekly video type broadcasts so send me an idea at ideas@chacha102.com if you have a cool video idea that somehow relates to news. If it doesn’t relate to news, send us an email anyway. Or you can always leave it in the comments. 

Currently, I am trying to find more content to put up on the blog. A lot of times I only post every 2 days and I’m trying to be able to get content out at least once a day. The first thing on that list is I will start to round up content I find interesting and post 3/4 entries on here with my take on it. This will be about once/twice a week, and I will make an effort to keep it short. If you want to see EVERYTHING I find interesting, just go to my Friendfeed.

Have a great week!

Why I will go to an actual host someday.

So, I’m about 4-5 hours into this WordPress nameserver stuff. What happened is that in order for me to have WordPress host my blog, on my domain (chacha102.com), I had to point the domain at WordPress.com nameservers. For people that don’t know this mumbo jumbo, here is what it means:

1. I can’t have email go to anywhere but Google Apps . 
2. I can’t create a subdomain (something.chacha102.com)
3. I can’t FTP (load files up to the server)

So, these are some big things, that I’m quickly learning mean that WordPress just screwed me out of $10, AND my domain (for the length I want to keep pointing to WordPress). Because I can’t create any subdomains, I can’t hook up a lot of features that Google Apps is built for. If I wanted to, I could add my own custom Google Sites to something like sites.chacha102.com, Google Calendar to, calendar.chacha102.com, and access to the Mail (Uses the Gmail Interface) at mail.chacha102.com. Apps also has a bunch of great other capabilties, and none I can use because WordPress wants me to basically hand over control of my domain (or the records for my domain, I still own it).

New Home

This holiday season I bought myself a domain name. For a few months, I’ve been deciding whether to give up my domain name servers to WordPress in order to get my blog hooked up. Well, I finally decided that being able to use OtherInbox for my mail was less important than establishing myself on Chacha102.com, so I bit the bullet and now our new home is : Chacha102.com. I figure it was best to switch us before we were that well established. 

By the way, we just hit 1,000 views in total. Not that big of an accomplishment, but one none the less. One thing I find strange is that 1/3 of the hits everyday come from people searching for ‘Motivational Posters’ on Google. I don’t get it, but obviously I am a authority on motivational posters, after only one mere post about them. Who would have guessed?

So, Chacha102.com lives! No, I will not explain the T&M part.

Windows 7: Setting Up the thing.

I meant to write something useful today. I really did. I meant to sit down, open up the browser, and write a fully featured and useful blog post. It never happened. Instead I decided to install Windows 7 on a virtual machine today, and will give you a review when I’ve tested it out for awhile. Here are my first impressions.

After a weekend of shakey downloading from Microsoft, Windows 7 has been released in a beta to an indefinite amount of users, unlike the 2.5 million cap it had before this Friday. Originally, only 2.5 million people were oging to be able to download it. After Microsoft had to shut down the downloads because of the massive traffic, they reopned it without a cap. Alex Wilhelm gave me all the links here. I downloaded it, and it was annoying. Why? Because Microsoft, is Microsoft.

I am Sick.

Disclaimer: This is not my usual writing style. Please bare with me as my head returns to its usual state of mind. Also, if you perfer this writing style, say so in the comments.

 

And I caught it from all of you Friendfeeders who are also sick. Just because one of you is in Australia, one in Canada, and a few on the East Coast, doesn’t mean you didn’t give me a virus over here in San Diego. Well, while I am sick I’ve decided to give you all a nice little batch of updates.

Windows 7

Windows 7 will be launching its beta version tomorrow to 25 million people. I don’t like that 25 million cap because it puts everyone who has to do something, like go to school, out of the loop. Although, if I don’t get better by tomorrow, you can be sure as heck that I’ll be downloading it. No sore throat is going to keep me away from trying it out. Find more here.

Push and Pull Content Please.

One of the reasons that some networks are so annoying to a lot of people is that things get lost amongst the noise. Articles you want to hear about often won’t be seen by you because you have … *checks Friendfeed*…. 435 other people throwing content onto your screen. You can create lists to help sort this out, and that is very useful. But often between the time you check and you get back, you don’t know exactly what happened, because you were just caught up reading about the latest Scoblememe. The fact is that we can’t catch everything, and we shouldn’t try to. It is estimated that 4 Exabyte’s of information will be created this year, and your brain can only hold 10 TERABYTES! That means you about 4,194,294 terabytes short. This is important while thinking about how you consume social media, but not my current topic.

The Many Ways Your Content Travels

Just recently I did a sketch mapping out all the different ways content can get onto Google.  If you follow the entire path of what happens to a message,  you can see a large amount of repetition begining to form when one site triggers another site, that triggers another site, and chain reactions begin to form to where you probably have a single message on the web 10-12 times.

Getting Back to the Norm

If you have ever had a bunch of relatives cooped up in a house for too long, your probably seeing the same effect on Twitter and Friendfeed. Tonight Robert Scoble decided to block Dave Winer after both of them having been at each other’s necks for a good portion of the holidays. This is kind of sad because the meaning of the holidays is to bring people together, not create conflict. Either way, things are finally starting to calm down.