14 Jan 2007
Last week, the Hokies go into Cameron and beat up on the #5 ranked Duke Blue Devils.
This week, #1 ranked UNC came to Blacksburg. New team, same result. The Hokies upset UNC 94-88. That's flat out awesome.
The best win I saw while I was in Blacksburg was probably a last second win over a mediocre George Washington team. Since then, the Hokies have beaten Duke twice and knocked off UNC. If they can keep it together, there's no doubt in my mind they'll be in the tourney this year.
11 Jan 2007
I got a nice trackback from the arc of time blog on my earlier post about creating a crappy little Greasemonkey script to let me quickly add Evite events into my Google Calendar. What that reminded me of was the fact that the script didn't work for events that didn't have an end time (and also got messed up with the time change).
Well, I fixed it. And now you can download the new version of the script that will let you, at least as far as far as I've tested, add any Evite directly into your Google Calendar. If there's an end time, it'll be set. If there's not, your start and end time will be the same, but you can quickly tweak that.
It all seems to work.
To use it, I'm assuming you have Greasemonkey. If not, go get it.
Then, install this user script: Evite to Google Calendar
That's it. Go to any open Evite. You'll see a column on the left that looks like the image below.
Note the link circled in red. That's what the script adds. Click that. You'll be whisked away to Google Calendar where you can quickly add the event and be done with Evite.
Again, I think it works. It at least works on what I've tested it on. Give it a shot. Let me know. If you like it, link to my blog so I can be the coolest.
07 Jan 2007
So, I've decided I'm going to try to capture every show I get to this year. On Wednesday, Kay Hanley and The Antisocialites played a fun earlyish show. I always try to catch Kay Hanley when she comes around since her shows just tend to be fun (since she's been pretty much playing here for like 15 years now or something).
I met my friend Liz at TTs and we headed in and hung out by the bar while The Antisocialites played. They sounded pretty good, though I'll admit, I didn't pay as much attention as I usually do. It was a surprisingly large crowd for 9pm, so there wasn't a whole lot of room to sneak over towards the stage. So we chatted while The Antisocialites played their rock. It was your typical local, indie rock band, but with the twist of having a female lead (and bassist, I think). I tend to like female-fronted rock bands (hence being at a Kay Hanley show) more than I should, so the sound definitely caught my ear. I'd probably check them out again.
Next up, of course, was Kay Hanley. Her shows are always fun. She knows half the crowd, and basically plays like she's at a small party and you're hanging out in the living room. The setlist had a bunch of older Letters to Cleo stuff, and a handful of unreleased songs. Surprisingly, there wasn't a ton off of her two solo albums, which was a little disappointing, but easily compensated for when Kay had to get instructions on how to play one of her new songs. Completely ridiculous (but quite funny). We also got a good view of some new tats on her arms, which were both scary and impressive. It was a pretty subdued night, but decent all-around.
Yes, this may be the least interesting thing I've ever written, but it's like 3 days later and I've forgotten some of the nuances. You smell like fish.
Kay at TTs (from Flickr, via Teddy K)
Next up, if all goes well, Bleu at TTs towards the end of the month.
06 Jan 2007
I get to post this every couple of years. Virginia Tech 69 - Duke 67. At Duke. In Cameron. With all of the little annoying crazies bouncing around pretending like they don't smell like fish.
Awesome.
28 Dec 2006
Remember back when I mentioned that I should build a little centralized social networking manager where you could manage your profile in one place?
Well, I don't have to anymore. ProfileLinker did it for me.
TechCrunch pointed to them today, which means they're bound to get a good bit of traffic today. Reading through the comments, folks are hitting on many of the reasons I never got energized to actually do anything about it: the networks could cut you off; users would have to really trust you to give you their login/pass; there are so many networks that you'd be constantly trying to keep up as new networks emerged (as well as keep old networks working).
Partnering with the networks is the only way to make it work long term, I think, and that's a tall order given that any centralized management system removes page views from their site, thus removing ad views from their site, thus directly reducing their revenue stream.
Still, it's an idea that needs to happen because managing multiple profiles is just silly.
27 Dec 2006
I likes the rock music. I likes to go to the rock shows from time to time. Every once in awhile, I go through the local listings and ID some shows I want to take in. There's some good shows coming up.
Kay Hanley at TT the Bear's! (1/3)
Bleu at TT the Bear's! (1/27)
Dear Leader and Taxpayer at the Paradise! (2/9)
Stellastarr* at the Middle East Downstairs! (2/16)
That's four really good shows! I bet they all cost $10 or less! How can you go wrong?
You can keep track of cool shows by watching this Google Calendar link. It's the "Shows I Want To Go To And You Would Be My Bestest Friend In The Whole World If You Took Me" link.
22 Dec 2006
Heh.
This is sorta cool. I'm posting this from the newly released Wii / Opera browser. Just laying on my couch, watching some Youtube. Even Gmail and Google Reader work! So far, I've only had trouble with Digg, but this is beta.
More thoughts soon.
21 Dec 2006
I've decided that adding "smells like fish" to things is the new way to make a snappy comeback. It works with everything.
- If someone cuts you off while driving, rather than flipping them off or shooting them with a gun (the two most common forms of comebacks), you can simply say "I bet their car smells like fish."
- If someone disses your mom, as in "Your mom is a poophead", you can simply say, "oh yeah, well, your mom smells like fish."
- Should someone bump into you while shopping for Christmas gifts in the very crowded shopping mall, and then that person shoots you the "ohhhhh, if we weren't in a mall I would so crush your head with a Casio keyboard" look, you can simply tell them "hey, stop staring at me, your eye stare smells like fish."
- If the Dead Sea Spa people try to harrass you into testing their products in the mall, you can simply say "Sorry, your Dead Sea Spa smells like fish." (This one, I wish I had thought of a few weeks ago).
I can't think of a single thing that you can't use "smells like fish" in response to. I encourage you to start using it in your daily life.
If you do start using it, I encourage you to link to this post using the words "smells like fish" ... maybe I can get the top spot on Google!
P.S. Stop reading this, your reading smells like fish.
15 Dec 2006
In part one, I told you what to do if you just want an email address or a blog. In part two, I'll tell you want to do if you fall into the category of folks who just want their own little nook on the web.
I want my own small little corner of the internet!
Awesome! I'm going to assume you've got a domain name (how else can you have your own cool little place without owning www.coffeepotamus.com?). What you need now is web hosting.
Actually, what you need now is an idea of what you're going to do with your site. Maybe you'll have a blog and some images of your friend and family? (Using friend rather than friends was unintentional, but funny, so I decided to not correct it.) Maybe you want to throw up those mp3s of your band that you've kept squirreled away on your hard drive.
Or maybe you want to go full bore Flash with games and forums and a whole site devoted to the awesomeness that is you.
In any case, you need to make a couple of estimates: how much disk space you'll need and how much bandwidth you need. For a lot of folks, this is the toughest part of getting a website as it's the largest way web hosting companies differentiate themselves from each other.
But ... I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
It doesn't matter.
These days, almost any plan that runs you $7-8/month is going to come with gigabytes of diskspace and tens of gigabytes of bandwidth. Guess what? Unless you're really really popular, you won't even use a tenth of that. Most people won't even use 1/100th of that.
The lesson here? Pick a hosting company based on things that will have a bigger effect on your life. Do you prefer to use email and forums for support? Pick a host who focuses on that. Want someone on call 24/7? Pick a host who offers support in that fashion. Want to be able to install and update software with the click of a button? Look for a host who offers one click software installation and upgrades.
Basically, just identify what matters to you and realize that if you're really going to use all of that disk space and bandwidth, you probably shouldn't be using shared hosting.
There's one other tricky question -- Windows or Unix? I think this ones pretty easy though. Unless you plan on using ASP or ASP.NET (two web scripting languages), you should go with Unix. Many of you are now thinking to yourselves, "but I use Windows at home? Why wouldn't I pick Windows?" The answer, quite simply, is that you don't have to run the server so you just want to pick something that works well. And web hosts have been doing Unix hosting forever. It just works. Plus the cool SysAdmins all know it inside and out and can make it do crazy things.
So, we've figured out that you will:
- Pick shared web hosting
- Ignore disk space and bandwidth and go with the host that fits you best
- Pick Unix (unless you need ASP or ASP.NET)
Basically, now you just need to shell out the dough and start building your site.
The next lesson?
Do NOT use Microsoft Frontpage.
It's not that it's a bad product. It does it's job really well. It's also a pain to support, has a startling tendency to decide to change your page without asking, and a tendency to become corrupt and break your site entirely. Plus, Microsoft is done with it. So it's a dying product anyway.
Save yourself the time and money and grab one of the many nice free editors. Nvu is a good one.
Now just build your site. Try not to reinvent the wheel. If you picked a host who has one click installers, try something like Gallery2 for image galleries, or Wordpress for a blog. You don't need to do it yourself -- the one click installers can make it very easy to build a site without much work. However, make sure you stay up to date. If your web host offers upgrades or patches for your installed apps, take advantage of them when they become available.
If you don't, you could login one day and see that your site says:
"Haha you suck you've been h4xx043d"
In other words, some ingenious little kid has hacked your site because you're using a 4 year old version of some guestbook software your Uncle Dale (who smells like fish) gave you. You curse to yourself, "I'll always upgrade from now on, now I just need to get my site back."
Which, because you follow my last lesson, is a piece of cake.
Always back up your site on your hard drive.
I cannot tell you how many sob stories we hear about customers who are running their "business" off of their account, but don't have their own backup. When their site gets hacked, they expect that their web host will have a copy of the file they uploaded 5 months ago. Here's a little secret: most web host do have backups, but they are rotated out quickly (daily, weekly, or semiweekly). What that means is that if you get hacked while you're on vacation, you may come back and find out that the only backup your host has is of the hacked file itself.
Thanks Uncle Dale, you fishy bastard.
Backup your files. Keep a copy on your hard drive. If you use a database-driven application, ask your host (or, better yet, look in their knowledgebase or forums) if there is a way for you to get backups of your database.
So, you want to build your own little site?
- Pick shared web hosting
- Ignore disk space and bandwidth and go with the host that fits you best
- Pick Unix (unless you need ASP or ASP.NET)
- Don't use Frontpage
- Backup, backup, backup
That's it. Everything else you really don't need to care about. And, by the time you need to care about it, you'll be a superstar web expert and won't be reading silly stuff like this.
In Part Three, we'll disuss what to when you plan to make your living online.
14 Dec 2006
So a while back, we were having one of those random discussions at work that leads to someone animatedly saying "I got corndogs, yo!" and waving his arms around, even though he did not have a corndog.
I'm sure you've all been there. We've all had a "corndogs, yo" moment.
This week rolls around and we're planning our office holiday potluck (which is tomorrow). What do I sign up for? Corndogs.
Yo.
See, I'd seen Alton Brown make them on Good Eats and it looks really easy. And I'm not a complete moron. So I figured I could pull it off.
Well, after 2 hours, I've learned I couldn't. My deep fryer doesn't get hot enough, nor is it deep enough, nor is it wide enough, to really fit in a corndog on a stick. So I improvised and just kinda dropped them in. Which seemed ok, except they'd stick to the bottom and then I couldn't really get them out without ripping the nice corny outside.
I'm still bringing them in, and I'm sure I'll get a couple of people to eat one out of pity, but they don't look good. Rather than having a nice uniform outside, they look more like "pigs in a blanket." Except rather than being in a nice, soft blanket of a crescent roll, it's a ratty old blanket of cornmeal.
I suck at making corndogs, yo.