My boss and I were talking recently about blogs, the Internet, Social Networking (Social Media), Twitter, and the like. He brought up some statistic about blogs that I found interesting. That only 5% of blogs have been updated in the past 120 days (according to a New York Times blog entry from June). He considers himself one of the early bloggers and has had a blog since the dinosaurs. He regularly updates it (at least once per week but sometimes as frequently as dozen times per month) and has many opinions about the value of bloggers and blogs in general. I’m not going to go into that, but he can on his blog if he so chooses.
It got me to thinking about my own blog and the fact that it’s not something I update regularly. I sort of go through spurts where I’ll write blog entries a few times per week and other times where I either can’t think of a topic or I have bloggers block I just don’t want to blog on topics that may be on my mind.
Category: Life Page 4 of 6
Chalk this up to musings of someone who has had two G&Ts who is also suffering as a bachelor for a few more weeks (while his wife is in Kentucky at some giant vet clinic or other) and he may or may not feel like he’s in need to find some topic or other to post on his blog or facebook or twitter or something or like that….
Consider this scenario: Have you ever purchased something at the store that you were really looking forward to? (eating)? Like you recalled picking it off the shelf and thinking, wow, garlic black pepper pork loin, “that sounds damn good.” So it is in the fridge overnight (or three) and you decide to fire up the grill and have you some garlic black pepper pork loin.
Meanwhile, you’re on the phone with your wife (from Kentucky) and you pull the pork loin out of the fridge just thinking how good it will be for dinner. You casually read the package that says, “? portabelo mushroom ?” pork loin and you literally say (into the phone), “Oh, Snap!”
Why? Because you don’t much care for fungus. Thank you very much.
The out-of-the-box Xandros Linux that comes on the EeePC just seem too much like a toy. I was very familiar with Ubuntu so I decided to install an Ubuntu derivative on my EeePC 901. The top choices were the Eeebuntu or the easy peasy distributions. I liked the eeebuntu forums a lot so I decided to go with the Eeebuntu NBR (Netbook Remix) distribution.
I’ll attempt to describe all that I had to do to get it installed and go into some of the customizations or additions I’ve made and why.
Installing Eeebuntu was not very difficult but I did have a few challenges and even did a re-install to change the default partitioning to use both SSD drives.
My wife gave me an EeePC for my birthday last week. I blogged about wanting one a few weeks ago and I guess she got the hint. Overall, she did pretty good with the request. She got me a linux based EeePC 901 with the SSD drive.
My first impression was that the damn thing was tiny, shiny and did I say tiny. I’ve been using it for a little over a week now and I am grabbing it from the computer room more often than sitting down at my desktop. I did take it to work with me as it fit in my bag with my other laptop and didn’t add much weight nor was it too bulky in addition to the MacBook Pro and a few folders and notebooks. I haven’t traveled with it, but I’m sure it will make the rounds soon.
After a week of use here are my first impressions both negative and positive:
Oh what to do with the random piece of meat in the freezer? My answer…grill it. On the Big Green Egg of course.
So I found a random zip lock bag in the freezer. It had a symbol written on the zip lock that was a circle with the arrow pointing out. You know the one, the global symbol of the male (as opposed to the circle with the cross on the inside which is the symbol of a female).
Upon further consideration, I determined that it must have been given to me by some random person (I know, how bad of me not to remember) and knowing my friends it was most likely vension. The symbol was to indicate that it was a buck.
My wife and I are planning on moving in the next few months. We’ve started to empty out the basement and have successfully gotten rid of stuff (and made money at it too) on eBay and Craig’s List. We also started going through the various book shelves in our house and deciding what to keep (i.e. pay someone to haul across the country) and what not to keep.
I’ve had a crate of used paperback and hardback books in the basement for months. When friends come over, we offer them any book in the crate that they want free of charge just to get it off our hands. We don’t have a local used bookstore so we were going to toss them if we couldn’t pass them on. We are trying to be environmentally friendly and were loathe to put the stuff in the trash so we have identified ways to recycle them (our local recycle pickup will accept paperback books and the local YMCA will take old text books and hardback books). However, even that just seemed wasteful.
I was walking down College Street in Blacksburg recently and noticed that Slumdog Millionaire was playing at the Lyric Theater. I had never been to the Lyric and I have been wanting to see Slumdog for a while so I knocked out both birds with a single stone.
Last night, Stacie and I went to see the movie and thoroughly enjoyed it. Stacie didn’t have any idea what the movie was about and was afraid that I was taking her to see a political movie based on the name and the fact that she had never heard of it before. I also am guilty of taking her to political movies in the past.
As I said, I had not been to the Lyric before and was very surprised when we walked around the corner to see how long the line was. I was afraid we were going to have to go the the big theater, but we made it in just before they quit selling tickets to the early show. While in that long line Stacie saw the poster (my thumbnail) and thought that was a wierd poster for a left wing political movie.
So my birthday is coming up and I’m hoping to get a UMPC/Netbook. I’ve been looking at them for months.
I was torn for a while as I already have an iPhone that handles just about anything I would do on a Netbook with the exception of document editing. The iPhone, though tiny, is very nice for checking e-mail just about anywhere and sending back the short replies that we have become so familiar with since the days of clam shell pagers, Blackberries, and now iPhones (and other small e-mail devices).
Another reason I was torn for a while on the idea of a Netbook is that I have a laptop that I use for business and for business travel I usually lug it around. It’s not an aircraft carrier of a laptop (it’s not a 17 incher) but it’s still large and can’t just be chucked in a suitcase or backpack. I don’t like carrying it on personal weekend trips or even longer personal vacations but often find myself doing it just so I can keep in touch (even if I’m not “technically” going to be working while away from home.
I love ribs and sometimes I just can’t wait until summer for some damn good BBQ. That’s where my Big Green Egg comes in. I’ve made pizza at 600°F when it’s below freezing. I’ve smoked turkeys on Christmas day in crazy freezing windy weather. I’ve done a 18 hour smoke on a brisket in the snow and a 13 hour Boston Butt in single digits.
I just figured earlier this week that Saturday would be a good day for ribs. So I bought 4 racks of Baby Backs and followed a modified 3/2/1 method:
I started by pulling the silver membrane off the back of the ribs. I then marinated the ribs overnight in the fridge by applying liberal dusting of Dizzy Pig Dizzy Dust and some Turbinado sugar wrapping in foil and forgetting. One rack in particular has one side that was quite thick.
Tweety
Twitter is all the rage. Is it the next facebook? The next version of social networking? Social network without wiress?
I created a twitter feed. You can follow me here, or you can simply text “follow sidboswell” to 40404. You’ll be requested to respond with a username and you’re off.
Twitter is like a combination of SMS (texting) and facebook. The basic question is “what are you doing now.” That can only get you so far. Do I really need to know that my friends are cooking bacon or driving to work. Is that valueable?
Rather, use clever updates to your twitter feed. Consider it a micro-blog. Follow some others that you find interesting and respond to them (using the @username command). I can think of 100 utilities for twitter, but for now, I’m going to stick with the social side of things. When I’ve mastered that, I may try some utilitiarian tasks in my professional life.
Until then…..
