Listics

Lots of perpetual betas out there reaching for the brass ring.  They’ll be chumming at the February DEMO, and the VCs will be there like piranhas in a feeding frenzy, while just offshore, the school of corporate sharks, the  OOs (pronounce "ooze") - gOOgle, yahOO, and OObilly-what-you-do-to-me - the OOs will be waiting to see if anything survives that first round of funding and learns to swim in the deeper waters.

One of the downsides of DIY PR and Marketing is that we get derivative names like Krugle and Ookle, although in fairness, at least Krugle’s serendipitous assonance is courtesy of the last name of international software engineer Ken Krugler.

And is anybody tired of the green and black wordpress "Green Marinee" template yet?

On Tuesday I tried to power-up my favorite PC (a Dell Dimension 4550 that I bought late in the summer of 2024) and nothing happened when I hit the button.  I swapped power cords, and tried a different power outlet but no success.  The unit was comatose.  "Power supply," I thought.

I hauled the unit out from under the desk unplugged it again, disconnected a couple of audio lines, a mouse, a keyboard, three USB cables, the video interface, the network cable and god knows what else and I put it on the dining room table where I’ve been known to do my best work.  Looking at it face to face I thought it might be laughing at me.  "Wipe away that idiot smile," I said.  The unit was about as obedient as the dog.  I thought perhaps a tongue would come lolling out and panting would ensue. 

I wasn’t ready to trust my intuition so I powered-up the laptop, logged onto the
Dell site and opened the documentation that would confirm my
diagnosis.  The first challenge that the tyro PC repairman faces is finding his way into the box.  The documentation omits this critical step.  (Hint to Dell:  use hyperlinks better.)  After a walk around the dining room table for a 360 degree inspection, some chin rubbing, audible hemming and hawing, I figured out how to open the box.  It’s actually nicely engineered for service access.  It opens like a clamshell.  I popped out the 512MB memory chip, the video card, removed the power plugs from the floppy drive, the undersized 30GB hard drive, the DVD drive, removed the ribbon cables from the drives and from the motherboard, plugged the denuded thing back in the wall, saw a dim green FLEA light on the motherboard, but nothing else.  When I was on about step eleventy-seven ("Visually scan IDE controller for Cheetos") I decided to hell with it and removed the power supply.

Next came ten minutes of market research on new power supplies that led me to believe I wouldn’t be getting ripped off too badly if I paid some dude on eBay the "Buy it now" price of $26 plus $14 dollars for shipping.  Which I did. 

Last night, the new power supply was on the doorstep when I got home.  I had it out of the box and installed lickety split.  Powered-up, got the diagnostic beepery that says "fine, your power works, but nothing else is installed,"  and then I faced the demons of consumerism head-on.  Where you have 512MB of memory, shouldn’t you double it to 1GB?  Where you have a pitiful 30GB hard drive with only a few gigs free, shouldn’t you augment that with more disk space?  I’m an affirmative kind of guy so I answered "Yes!" to these inner voices.  Besides - excellent rationalization here - I had the unit open on the dining room table and why not upgrade it before shoving it back out of sight beneath the desk?  And with that I was off to Best Buy. 

Beth won’t go near the place, claims electron poisoning will kill her, so I dropped her at the Barnes and Noble where she made her monthly new releases library list.  "Voracious reader" is cliched from erroneous over-use, but Beth actually is one.  She gobbles a book or two every day and is grateful to our county library system for having all the new stuff that Barnes and Noble stocks.

Picked up some tax software, a new Microsoft optical scroll mouse, a can of compressed air, a 120 GB Western hard drive, and a Kingston 512MB memory card that matched the DDR 333 card that was already there.   Then home again, home again jiggety-jog, where I had a good time using the compressed air to blow all the dust bunnies out of the box, attached cables, powered up and partitioned my new drive so I could keep a live back-up of the C: drive on the 30 GB partition and move all my media files - graphics, video, audio, and textual - to the 90 GB partition.

I still have to install the mouse.

…and do the taxes.

"Can’t you hear that {kr}ugle {kr}ow…"

"He’s the {kr}oogie-woogie {kr}ugle boy from Company B…"

Brian Moffatt shares a link to a decent hymnal.

(Filed under hairballs?)

Cal DeWitt (above) shares research on micro co-generation alternatives to high voltage powerline distribution of electric power at the Town of Dunn Town Hall this evening.  Cal is a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and the former Town of Dunn Town Chairman.  (That’s Cal third from the right in the rogues gallery of former Town Executives running above the window).

There are small high efficiency engines that run on propane or natural gas, and will both heat and power a household economically, usually with a return of power to the grid.  We’re looking deeper into this.

About twenty people from around Dane County were there to share ideas on 21st century approaches to clean power generation and distribution.  ATC, the powerline construction company, did not send a representative to the meeting.

Maryam Scoble lists some of the top reasons to marry a geek…

…be as popular as if you owned a truck and you don’t even have to help anyone move.

[psst… Maryam:  also he can fix your computer… or did you mention that?]

"Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years."

Charlie Stross, for one, is a bit upset about this.

They’re waving the Terrorism bloody shirt around a lot, seemingly in ignorance of the fact that the July 7th bombers did their stuff on public transport. But that’s about par for the level of logic I’m coming to expect from our public servants these days. It seems to be a case of "if something is possible it must be done" in respect of any and all possible surveillance technologies. Presumably because of a misplaced neo-Benthamite trust in the panopticon …

I blog as if there are readers, listeners, viewers… people with whom I am communicating.  I blog as a member of a community. 

I use a few simple tools to create my blog posts.  I have blogged in four different environments, using Blogger, Radio Userland, TypePad, and WordPress.  Inexpertly, I use several packages to prepare post content.  I use

• SnagIt, to grab images from the screen.
• TextPad is a powerful editor that I use to create files that will be placed in the unforgiving window of the blogging tool, the window that has so many times eaten my posts that when I am being careful, when I care about the post I am creating, when that post has more complexity than a simple link to share with others, I create the post offline using TextPad.
• I use Photoshop to optimize and re-size images for inclusion in a post.
• I have a copy of Audacity that I fully intend to use for audio files when I get over my psychological block that has somehow prevented me from using it.  I have a recording of Dervala, and she uses the phrase "posh totty" and that alone should be enough incentive for me to get my ass in gear on this, but alas… something always stands in the way.

For my WordPress blog (hosted on cheap server space I rent from GoDaddy), I also need an FTP client.  WS_FTP Pro is the tool that I use, but any FTP client will do.

Yet I am neither geek, nor nerd.  I am not a hacker, a phreaker, a programmer or any variety of technoid dweeb.  I am a writer.  Weblogging is a medium for capturing my work and for publishing it.  How do I blog?  When I am blogging at my best, the answer is "intentionally."  More often, I blog casually, sharing impressions, trying on ideas to see how they look.

None of this yet speaks to the web services that bubble up and enhance our ability to blog.  Take FlickR, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Google, Wikipedia and the New York Times.  Consider the blogs of dozens of others that every day provide input that sparks creativity, that abrade the consciousness and require response.  Consider the immediate feedback mechanisms that tell us how we’re doing:  the comments and the trackbacks, the feedback provided by Sitemeter or the link data from Technorati.  We blog with all of these providing a context for our work.

During the week to come, I’ll post information from others on these matters.  If anybody wants to tag or follow the tag set that develops, the tag I’m using is howBlog.  I’m organizing this material in a way that makes sense to me.  On Monday, Jeneane Sessum and Rebecca Blood will provide short takes on how they blog.  Jeneane and Rebecca informed my understanding of what blogging was about when I first began "wiggling my fingers on the keyboard."  Throughout the week other voices will be heard, brief comments from Doc Searls and David Weinberger, Shelley Powers and Sheila Lennon.  Dean Landsman will check in, and we’ll hear from literally dozens of others on how they blog. On Friday, Chris Locke closes out the week with a post that takes the top prizes for comprehensiveness, comprehensibility, computronic compo-mentation, and most uses of the word "fuck" in a technical document (2005).  It is simply the gold standard.  It is so good that I couldn’t get the email past the corporate spam filter.   Just as Jeneane and Rebecca informed my understanding of the ethics and community foundation of bloggery, Chris provided an incentive and a model for blogging when I started my first blog with readership greater than one.

I think this will be a fun week, and informational.  I think it will provide tips and tricks and technical insights, and I know it will also provide poetic inspiration.  The posts will run at Sandhill Trek and at Doc Searls IT Garage.  Please join the conversation this week!