Just Go With It

I tried to resist it for a long time. I critiqued, I avoided, I was mostly perplexed at it all, but in the end, I became a MySpace user.

I had an account login for quite some time. I'm assuming MyPoints or somebody gave me points/money/karma for signing up, but I had never actually even filled in any information about myself on it.

I blame Ryan, among others for me slipping into the grip. Ryan points out this killer mix from Stone Lions, and we ordered a pressed copy of it. To do so, I had to contact them via their MySpace page (you really do need to check them out).

While there, I decided I would just fill in the schools portion of my profile, in case a former classmate wanted to find me or something. Well, one did almost immediately and sent me a message. While checking if my CD had shipped, I went and read the message. She said I should fill out more of my profile, so I did. Then of course I started browsing around, added some friends, and the tailspin begins...

I'm still amazed that MySpace of all places won the social networking battle for people. Their interface and site really are pretty primitive. However, the value of this type of site really lies in the number of people, and they have that.

Now, hopefully you've made it this far. I actually found a pretty cool group on MySpace just yesterday. They happen to be Hip-Hop, and they just so happen to be from Cedar Rapids also. Good stuff from what I have heard thus far, check them out: http://www.myspace.com/beeinz.

Free (as in Ski)

I need something fun and frivolous. This will do.

I hope this needs no introduction. I hope that you had SkiFree on a Win 3.1 box back in the day. You loved the cheesiness, you really loved the abominable snowman that would come eat you. Yes, silly game goodness.

I happened to stumble onto the page for the game the other day. It turns out the guy was a Microsoft guy who basically wrote this as a side project. He retained rights to change the code, so he has built some new versions that work better with WinXP and such. Sweet!

5 of the Eclectic

Some new tunes for you. In this case, most are not new at all. This is a very odd assortment, but it's what I have been enjoying so I thought I would share. Expand your horizons a bit.

Gary Allan - Tough All Over - Life Ain't Always Beautiful

Amazing song, and very obvious the tragedy he has gone through in the last year while listening to this.

Kenny Chesney - When the Sun Goes Down - Anything but Mine

I hate Kenny Chesney. So, why do I have one of his songs in here? Because he somehow got everything right on this one.

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin 1 - Dazed and Confused
THE shit. You want to hear how Rock and Roll, true guitar rock was created? Check this out. Killer bass line, screaming guitars, Page, Plant, Bonham, and Jones. Nothing more needs to be said.

Harvey Danger - Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? - Flagpole Sitta
A wacky fun song from back in my college days. Still good stuff even if he dropped off the face of the planet after this.

Alex Kapranos, Barrington Levy, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien & Handsome Boy Modeling School - White People - The World's Gone Mad

Automator, possibly at his finest. All of his work, especially that with Handsome Boy Modeling School is incredible. Throw in Del, and it's off the charts. Thanks to Ryan for hooking me up with this orginally.

As usual, I was annoyed when I found a song that wasn't available from iTunes when creating this post. I really want to go there for one-stop shopping. Harvey Danger, I can see maybe having a problem getting licensed. Zeppelin? Fix that now Apple, that's just sad. I'm assuming in that case it is a band issue, much like the Beatles and Radiohead, but Jobs and crew just need to work harder (IMO).

NSFW - Nope, don't go there.

A fellow co-worker and blogger pointed out what I think is a rather cool product and website last week.

I now have found the perfect complementary accessory for it. Go here when you are at home, not work, and check it out.

Services, Slick Integration, Score

Somebody started a discussion a while back about how blogs and communities online are not as nicely integrated and connected as they should be. Most places end up being the equivalent of the message board at the local supermarket. Things are posted, glanced at once, and then forgotten until they are completely irrelevant. There isn't much interaction or useful conversation, if any at all.

Lifehacker, that wealth of knowledge, has talked about coComment before as a way to solve some of these issues. I thought it sounded interesting, but still took more effort than I was willing to expend to even check out the site. However, today they throw in the magic words "Firefox extension", so now I have to check it out.

Basically coComment is a way to centrally track the various blogs and conversations that you have interacted with. Now, with the extension, Firefox can even let you know that there is new activity on a conversation in which you have participated. When you post on a supported blog, you can say "track this", and even tag it to create categories of conversations. All very slick.

The Firefox extension is well-written, looks nice, and just plain works. You don't use Firefox all the time and can't make use of this? Wow, how do you keep from the monsters in the closet eating you every night? Go download it and save yourself. Quick.

You don't really care about any of this, think Internet conversations are dumb, and just want things to stay as they are? Go back under your rock.

Testing. I'm in beta, watch out!

I mostly despise computers. Really, I do. I like using them as tools, I do it all day long for work, and often far too much at home. However, I don't actually like mucking around with them anymore.

Case in point, I started reinstalling my main machine last night. Too many years, too many odd things, have made it start to act funny. Plus, I wanted to upgrade a drive in it anyway. Man, I hate reinstalling.

However, despite all that, sometimes I like trying out new, silly software. Today's silly software is a piece of blogging software by none other than Microsoft. I really should find out some day how some of these little side projects actually get released as a Microsoft product. I know how hard it is for me to get a company product released, I'm not sure how they let these slip through.

Anyway, just announced today is a beta of something they call Windows Live Writer. It is of course aimed at their new Live site. However, they have nicely included support for other blogs. Not just for posting either, using the crappy Blogger API they were actually able to pull down my previous posts, and my visual style.

Now, rather than using the horrendous Blogger web interface (Google, you're sleeping at the wheel, yo), I can use a familiar interface. Supposedly this may be a small foreshadowing of the Blog support to be included in Word 2007. I really don't care, I just hope it doesn't have the standard Word annoyances, thus far it hasn't.

Oh, did I mention that now the spell check uses your system dictionary, so all that stuff you have taught it in Word or Outlook is still there. Nice. Plus it actually saves drafts for me, rather than eating them.

Well, if you are reading this, I believe this program has accomplished all that I wanted from it. I'm pleased.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the app. Also, here is a review that has already been written, linked from UneasySilence.

...and a screenshot for Ryan:

Sweet Interoperable Goodness

I've expounded before about my interest in Google Calendar, and how useful I find it (probably to a level that borders on fanboy). So, when I went to setup the next installment of the CRAPT (our occasional rotating poker game), I knew I wanted to involve calendar.

I started with an old invite in my Gmail account, so that I could just copy and paste for the new event. Then, I clicked the "Add Event Info" link in Gmail. However, it didn't allow me to enter everything I needed, so I clicked the additional options button and ended up on a calendar event form instead. I found all of this a bit confusing, and it took me a couple of times before I had it right. Next time, I will cut out the middle man, and just start in Google Calendar.

Once it was all done though, I was pretty happy with the result. I had the list of all invitees in the event for all to see, and I could now sit back and receive accepted or declined invitations, and see updated status on my calendar.

However, I was truly amazed at how well this all worked with Microsoft Outlook. I have quit using Outlook except at work, however my wife still uses it. I had sent her an invitation partly to get her on the list, and partly to see how an invite looked in something other than Gmail. Here is how the invitation looked to her in Outlook:

Note a couple of things of interest. First, you'll see that upon accepting the invitation it correctly got added to her calendar. Simple sure, but I was still amazed. Of course, once it was in the calendar, it could be treated like any other Outlook calendar event, forwarded on (as in the screenshot) and so forth.

The thing that really blew my mind though was that she didn't even have to click the yes/no/maybe hyperlinks at the bottom. The actual Outlook Accept/Decline buttons correctly added it to the calendar, updated the Google Calendar and notified me by email.

All in all, score one finally for interoperability. I expected this out of something like iCal, which uses the iCalendar format natively, but not out of Outlook. Very promising.