Xbox360 Wrap Up

Posted by Matt Singley on October 29, 2006 | 6 Comments to Read

We geeked hard last night…played until 2am.  Yes, that is with the adjusted fall-back time.  Eight of us playing Ghost Recon until the wee hours of the morning.  It was fun…until we realized that late at night only uber-geek clan gamers are on Xbox Live and we got whooped big time.  Okay, it was still fun…

RSS and Email subscribers: Go to original post for video of geeky setup with 3 HD projectors and LCD screen :P

You Get What You Pay For

Posted by Matt Singley on October 26, 2006 | 4 Comments to Read

bloggerdownYesterday I was having a conversation with our Communications Team, and Kathy asked me about my opinion of pay vs. free blogs.  My answer?  If you are using a blog in the commercial sense (we were talking about all of our Management Team members mainting blogs…I would consider that commercial use…) then a pay service is superior for several reasons. One things I did not take into account in the pay vs. free discussion is up time.

I tried to log into some blogs that I follow through BlogSpot, and I was suprised to see that they are down…ALL of them are down.  I went to the root URL and saw a maintenance sign.  They have scheduled downtime in the middle of the day for an hour and a half!  BlogSpot is free, so what are people going to do?  Complain? Switch services?  Doubtful.  BlogSpot is the best free service, IMHO, so the users are stuck with what they get.

If Typepad went down for an hour and a half in the middle of the day you can bet they would get a TON of flack about it.  And yes, they would probably lose PAYING customers.  That is why I would be very surprised to see Typepad schedule maintenance in the middle of the day…it just wouldn’t fly.

You get what you pay for.

Blogs vs Newspapers

Posted by Matt Singley on October 9, 2006 | 5 Comments to Read

Every morning I get up early, have a bowl of cereal, crack open a fresh, ice-cold Rockstar and read my morning…BLOGS?

I haven’t read the local fish wrap in years.  For one, it is extremely biased in local news toward liberals and it gets tiring reading that all of the time.  My primary reason however is that blogs provide better and more detailed reporting than my paper does.

It seems I’m not alone…newspaper subscriptions are dying.  How long until Newspapers go the way of the Beta max and the Yugo?

Geek Fun

Posted by Matt Singley on October 7, 2006 | 3 Comments to Read

What do geeks do for fun?  Take the platters out of a bunch of hard drives, spin them up, presumably take a couple of straight shots of Mountain Dew , then watch the fun ensue.

RSS and email readers: imbedded video on original post.

Google Reader Problem

Posted by Matt Singley on | 5 Comments to Read

googlereaderI use Google Reader to get through my RSS feeds.  For you non-geeks, that means I read a lot of blogs all in one place.  Google Reader came out with a new GUI a couple of weeks ago, and for the most part I like the idea…it’s easy to sort through and makes my morning reading pleasant.  Sometimes.

Check out this screen shot.  Please note that the middle feed by Bob Franquiz is being partially obstructed by the feed below it from Robert Scoble.  The two are overlapping.  This is annoying.  Does it happen often to me in the new GR?  Yes.  Is it only on this computer?  No.  It has happened on three different computers now, so it’s not machine specific.  Do I hate it when people ask themselves questions and then answer themselves?   Yes.  Why am I still doing it?  I don’t know.

Have you experienced this?  I’m sure most commenters will tell me of a different reader to use, which is fine, but I’m really interested in knowing if you GR users are having this problem too.  It’s very annoying.  It’s like opening up the morning newspaper (which I haven’t done for at least a year thanks to blogs) and finding all of the print double stamped.