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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I always feel weird figuring out what I want for my birthday because I become plagued with indecision and too many options. This year my mom was good enough to give me a combined birthday/Chanukah financial gift going toward my hair removal, but I couldn’t figure out what to ask my dad for. Well, after our recent discussion, we were back at my apartment and talking about more mundane things, including the video camera I bought over the summer (which was funded in part by the artist’s stipend from the mentorship program I’m working on). At the time I was torn over a video camera and a still camera, and decided on the Sony CX12 because it can take solid – if not amazing – still pictures and serve well as a standard and high-def video camera. I’ve been happy with it on both accounts, and some of the picturesandvideo I’ve posted on this blog were taken with the CX12.
Well, I realized a nice still camera (or splitting the cost of a still camera, as I think it’s unfair to ask for things beyond whatever the general established history of gift costs) would be a perfect thing to ask for, and yesterday my dad and I went to a camera store and I came home with a shiney new camera.
Feel free to ignore this post if you’re not a computer geek and/or have no interest in computer geekery…
I use Ubuntu as my only OS on my desktop and my primary OS on my laptop (where XP is still installed as a secondary OS ‘Just In Case’) and I wanted to take a moment to sing Ubuntu’s praises.
First, with the exception of get newer video games to work, I can do everything I could imagine on Windows and, in some cases, more. I can watch DVDs, videos online, listen to music, transfer songs to my used iPod mini, etc, etc, etc. I have Azureus (well, now Vuze) automatically downloading TV shows I like via torrent RSSes, and the video files shared to my XBox with XBMC through Ubuntu’s Samba server so I can watch ‘em on the TV in the living room. I can rip DVDs via DVDShrink through Wine, and burn the resulting ISOs with Ubuntu’s file manager. (Something Windows still can’t manage, grr.)
(The video games are a function of my old video card not having good drivers, something I hope to rectify by the end of the summer by upgrading. I could buy the components of my current computer, which I bought new for about $1000 about 3 years ago, for about $400. I think spending $200 for a new mobo, RAM, CPU, and video card isn’t too shabby.)
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