Tag Archives: techie toys

metablogging

{27 November 2007}

hullo internets! we have been away working a LOT lately…and then making up for all that work with a thanksgiving weekend of sloth and gluttony. now we are trying to get all that life/work/play back into some sort of balance in advance of the christmas storm.

today’s question: preferred blogging software? while i do want cred* for the fact that i hand-coded my blog in the beginning, the truth of the matter is, blogger makes my life easy. but then i start to wonder what else is out there that i might be missing, all these years i’ve been together with blogger.

for example, who out there uses wordpress, and do you like it? there’s an obscure widget that i’d like to use for the nike+ that is only available for wordpress. but is there something about having to pay to publish to your own domain? and also listed among their “premium” features is customizable CSS. does that mean that i’m stuck with their stock templates unless i pay a fee? their website = not so helpful, which gives me cause for concern. it might be silly for me to think of dumping blogger over one widget. like leaving the good, safe, slightly-boring boyfriend for a guy with a motorcycle and no job.**

*when i started slithy-tove, i hand-coded it because 1) i was a software engineer back then, and 2) blogger hadn’t even been born yet. also, we still called them weblogs. yes, i am old.

**yeah, cause i’ve never made that mistake.

catch up installment of come here, go away

{03 August 2007}

1. come here, vacation in idaho
the schedule was thus: wake up with the sun, 7 or whenever. go for a run on forest trails or logging roads. see some deer or other wildlife. come back, shower, breakfast. spend the morning reading or doing chores around the cabin, or sitting on the back porch with my ibook and wireless internet. forest, meet internet. internet, meet forest. maybe nap. late lunch, then bike into town. swim in the lake, then go to the grocery store and plan the evening’s meal. cook dinner with family and friends. spend the evening throwing a frisbee on the golf course, walking the dog in the meadow, watching movies, playing speed scrabble with my brother and sister-in-law.

2. go away, coming back from idaho
my boss is off getting married so that means that i get to be the boss for a while. it turns out his work suits me. what doesn’t suit me is doing his job and mine. where’d my summer go?

3. come here, veronica mars
season one has hijacked all of the time i would have otherwise spent reading books/sleeping in the past couple of weeks. curse lau for loaning me the complete first season! i finished it last night, but it turns out she sent me home with season two, also, so i’m not out of the woods yet. the fact that i know the series was abruptly canceled at the end of season three, however, makes me sad even as i invest in the first season. WB dramas, i love you.

4. come here, pandora
how did i not know about www.pandora.com until now? i’d vaguely heard of it before, but never really bothered to try it out till this week. i heart it.

5. come here, ultimate frisbee
i have a new love. take that, track workout! i’ve begun counting ultimate frisbee as speedwork for marathon training. we play saturday mornings, which means that i have to do my long run alone on sundays, but i don’t care.

6. go away, stinky hot weather.
i get home from running at 7am and i literally can’t stop sweating for the first 15 minutes or so. my body has become a sieve.

7. come here, 400 mile merit badge!
last week i ran my 400th mile since marathon training started. this is peak mileage month; if all goes well and i stay healthy/uninjured, i should hit 500 by the 25th or so.

8. go away, repetitive stress injuries
tendonitis and soft tissue strains and stress fractures are circling one another warily, growling low in their throats. on the upside, i got to see an x-ray of my foot (and no stress fracture after all!). there’s something fascinating about seeing a picture of one’s own bones. like, that isn’t just a black and white picture of foot bones on the screen, a theoretical image of what feet look like, those are mine. that’s me.

9. come here, awesome car-free weekend:
date with a cute boy on friday (i beat him at darts! turns out drinking beer actually IMPROVES my aim). ultimate frisbee on saturday followed by a double at ye olde corporate theatre gig. pick up organic veggie farm share with the first sweet corn of the season. sunday morning an easy 10-miler, followed by brunch at Over Easy with an old college friend. afternoon margaritas and chips and salsa with A and J, then 500 clowns‘ 365 project. finished the evening watching poi fire dancing at foster street beach – take out sushi and smuggled-in PBRs and crazy hippy drum circle, while the full moon rose over the still black lake. kept the car parked and rode my bike all over all weekend, and as a karmic reward, enjoyed excellent public transit timing every time i looked for a bus/train.

10. come here, popularity dialer
.

addendum

{15 May 2007}

per an anonymous hipster, i mean, tipster:

http://www.tellme.com/ has a competing free SMS directory service.

to be fair, i conducted a test by sending the exact same search to 83556 (TELLM):

university park condo chicago il

and received the following results:

Local Listings: University Park Condominium 773-324-1414 1451 E. 55th St Chicago, 60615

response time was about 10 seconds faster than google. the info returned was exactly the same, other than the fact that the phone number was listed before the address, which put it above the fold (good, in this case, since i was looking for the phone number and didn’t have to scroll down below the address to find it, but ultimately an arbitrary choice).

HOWEVER, tellme.com doesn’t do trivia like google does.

texting:

translate hello to french

to tellme resulted in an error message:

Sorry, no results. Check spelling & location and try again.

while google sent back:

Translation: ‘hello’ in English means ‘bonjour’ in French.

now, i don’t know how often i might need to translate things into french when i’m on the go, but i think for this match the score remains google: 1, tell me: 1.

you need this

{14 May 2007}

continuing the thread of helpful tip posts, is there anyone who doesn’t already know about google’s sms service? for those of us who don’t yet have web-enabled phones (come here, iphone!), this is the best.

just text the thing you’re trying to look up to 46645 (googl), and in about 30 seconds, you’ll get a text back. example: yesterday i need to call the management office of the condo building where my company houses visiting artists, but i was stuck in traffic on the dan ryan. i sent the following message:

university park condo chicago il

and immediately got a reply:

Local Listings: University Park Condominium 1451 E. 55th St Chicago, 60615 773-324-1414

and it does all forms of info lookup, not just directory listings. foreign language translations, weight and measurement conversations, weather, driving directions, and general trivia. if it’s on wikipedia, google can text you a 160 character summary.

i heart google.

handy internet link of the day:

{04 May 2007}

http://www.gethuman.com/: how to talk to a human a quickly as possible on the 500 most common tech-support and service call centers.

cause, is it just me? as soon as i start speaking to a call center robot i feel myself getting defensive. i get my hackles up even before there’s a problem. i generally try and escalate my call to a human as quickly as possible. directory trees are for suckers.

come here, apple iphone

{10 January 2007}

ohmigod i want one of these right now! i’ve been ranting for years about how i want apple to produce a ipod/phone/pda, and finally they’ve announced the iphone. now i have to wait until JUNE to get one?? agony!