Since around the beginning of 2009, I’ve used Wordpress.com Stats and Google Analytics to track traffic at The Thang Blog. I’m a fan of statistics and numbers; even though I I never really expected this blog to have a huge following, I figured the graphs would be fun to look at.
So it surprises me when – on days like today – I see that Wordpress.com Stats shows The Thang Blog has been viewed 50,000 times in the last year or so. And it really surprised me to see a graph like this:
February is only half-way over, so its numbers are looking pretty good, too
Continue reading 'Statistics and milestones'»
I finally got a Google Voice invite, and set it up on my Droid. I used the ‘keep your old number’ option, which means it only changes my voice mail functions. I don’t have multiple phone lines I need consolidated, so going the ‘new number’ route seemed excessive.
But, even as just the voice mail, it’s great!
Continue reading 'Google Voice(mail) is nifty!'»
Pretty!
I picked up a Motorola Droid yesterday morning, and figured I’d take some time off from transition-related running commentary to share my thoughts from the first 48 hours.
I’m coming from an HTC 5800, which I’d been using for the past two years. It’s a Windows Mobile phone, which I had fun rooting and upgrading to 6.1, along with various other tweaks. However, until recently, Verizon has been locking down their phones – not that they offered amazing phones to begin with – so I couldn’t do all that much with it.
The Droid is Verizon’s flagship in their new push to appear as a company that doesn’t try to keep a stranglehold over their phones, and as a company that doesn’t only have a good network, but good phones as well. (What a concept!) It’s running Google’s Android operating system, and is the first (and thus far, only) phone to run the 2.0 version of the OS.
I’ll get to more specifics after the break, but I’ll cut to the chase: I really like this phone. It’s almost certainly the best phone I’ve ever owned. That said, while I’d definitely recommend it to tech-savvy friends, I wouldn’t recommend it to, say, my mom. I’m not convinced this is a bad thing, though.
Continue reading 'Motorola/Verizon Droid Mini-Review, 48 hours later'»
I’ve been using OSX (Leopard) for about a month now, and I’m still (mostly) enjoying it. It’s pretty, it’s smooth, iPhoto is growing on me, and it was a good decision. Particularly since my old computer simply didn’t work anymore… Anyway, now that it’s been a while, most of the annoyances I had at first have passed. But not all of them! So I thought I’d share the few things that still consistently bother me.
Continue reading 'Mac frustrations, a month later'»
(Excuse me while I geek out.)
My friend managed to get me the G5 he’d been mentioning, and I’ve been having fun the last few weeks getting it up and running. I’m even getting used to keyboard shortcuts and some of Mac’s eccentricities. But last night I spent an hour fighting with it, and the battle reminded me of all the things I dislike about Apple.
I purchased a Sony HDR-CX12 last summer and, on the whole, have enjoyed using it. The video quality is solid, although I haven’t played with the high-def video. I know I’m not getting the most out of the camera by doing so, but I bought an HD camera more for future-proofing than to use it right now.
Likewise, I’ve been playing with Final Cut Pro on the Mac (thanks again to my friend) and enjoying that, too. I had experience using it in college and so it was nice to get off of a PC and back onto a more sophisticated media editing platform.
Except…
Except the CX12 shoots video in MPEG-2, a video format that isn’t super-common, but also isn’t particularly rare.
Macs won’t play MPEG-2 video.
Continue reading 'Incredibly Frustrating'»
I know I haven’t posted for a few days, so I figured I’d send out a few minor updates.
First, this past Monday, I performed in The Homo Show, a variety show put on by About Face Theatre. It was tons of fun and, although I was really nervous, it went well. I performed a piece based off this post, although with a more positive ending. I got lots of positive feedback (and apparently made one woman cry, which is a first for me…) so it charged me up as I work toward my December performance.
On a separate note, I’m typing this on a shiny new (old) Power Mac G5 – one of the more advanced pre-Intel Mac desktops. I’m still getting used to it and all its quirks… For example, I know “different” and “stupid” aren’t the same thing, but some of the Mac keyboard shortcuts are just flat out stupid. As far as I can see, there’s no rhyme or reason to why some shortcuts use Ctrl, some use Apple, and some use Option.
If anyone knows of any logic behind Apple’s shortcut choices, I’d love to hear about it…
Continue reading 'Some quick updates'»
I’ve mentioned my status as ‘geek’ on more than one occasion. As it relates to computers, I have a laptop (which I’m using more and more as it’s nice to sit in the living room and write blog posts about how I’m able to sit in the living room blogging) and a desktop (which I use for media storage and playing games).
Unfortunately, it seems like the desktop is on the way out.
Continue reading 'Silly computer…'»
Anyone else recently upgrade to Wordpress 2.8 and lose the ability to use visual text editing instead of HTML? As fun as manually doing paragraph and link tags is, I’d prefer to use my fancy GUI…
I’ve mentioned before that I use Ubuntu as my primary operating system on my laptop and desktop. They recently released version 9.04 and, after taking a deep breath, I took the plunge and upgraded both of my systems.
This is the first upgrade I’ve had where more things went right, and work better, than went wrong or outright broke (and I’ve been using Ubuntu since 5.10). Now, to be clear, my appreciation of Ubuntu has obviously kept me with it, but I have to give shoutout for this release. The system boots much faster, visual effects are smoother and work better (windows fading in and out, moving between virtual desktops, doing a Expose-like window display, and so on), everything just feels like it’s tighter and more polished.
And, wonders of wonders, my desktop’s aging graphics card (an old ATI) not only didn’t break with the upgrade, it works better now! Still no working Steam, which is sad, but Deus Ex is (at long last!) working under Wine! Deus Ex is one of those supposedly-great games from when I was in middle or high school that I never had the patience to finish, but am now hoping to. (Along with others such as System Shock 2, Fallout, No One Lives Forever, and so on.) Because upgrading the full system upgraded a bunch of components, including Wine, there’s no way of telling exactly what made things work, but I’m happy something did! (It’s a lot like alchemy in that regard…)
If you’ve been thinking about giving Ubuntu a try, 9.04 is definitely the smoothest experience I’ve had with the system thus far. So go for it!
-R
Have any other bloggers noticed a huge spike in comment spam over the last week? I’ve gone from a few a week to 20-30 a day! I’ve been using Akismet, a Wordpress plugin, which has caught them really well, but it’s still rather obnoxious. Boo!
-R
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