Diary of a Network Geek

Right, so last week, we had a sci-fi book-picker.

This week, it’s a flowchart over at SFSignal designed to help you pick the next science-fiction television series to rent from Netflix.  (Or, wherever, if you dropped Netflix due to all their foolish marketing stuff.)  And, I have to admit, there are several on the flow chart that I haven’t seen yet.  Though, again, if you haven’t seen Firefly or the newest Battlestar Galactica, I’m always in favor of those.

So, go ahead and check it out.  After all, it’s Friday and you don’t have anything better to do than pick out what you’re going to watch this weekend anyway, so jump to it!

Dearest Search Engine Optimization Experts:

Please stop e-mailing me unsolicited requests to “help” me with my search engine placement.  You found me via a search engine, because I’m damn good at SEO, so I don’t really need your help.  Nor do I want your “help” cluttering up my blog with scripted, canned, generic posts written, no doubt, by starving college students and/or starving IT workers displaced by the economy.  Nothing against them, or your services, I’m sure both are brilliant, but this is kind of what I do.  Also?  It’s kind of how you found me in the first place.  So, you know, logic dictates that if you could find me to fill my inbox with unsolicited advertising, then people who actually matter to me can find me, too.

I understand that I’m not really your regular market, so maybe you were trying something new with me.  Well, please, stop.  It’s not working.  I don’t want to hear from you or know about you or have to delete your pitch for whatever internet snake oil you’re selling today.  Really.  I don’t need it and I’m not buying.

So, really, thanks for thinking of me, but, please, go away.
I don’t need advice about adding keywords to my titles or headers or what metatags I should include in my code.  I don’t really need someone to write articles designed to pump up my Google juice.  I can do that myself.  All of that.  (Also?  Metatags haven’t mattered for years now.  Honest.)
Anyway, your offer was very nice, and what little bit I read seemed well written enough, but, honestly, no thanks.  I’ll just stick to what works, what helped you and your snake-oil-selling brethren to find me in the first place: I’ll just write relevant articles and continue to produce the personalized content that only I can produce.

Thanks!

(P.S.  Also?  No, I don’t want to make extra money writing for you and your internet snake oil business!  Now, stop sending me the damn email!)

So, you may notice a bit more output here.

Frankly, some of it may be of questionable quality.  That’s as planned, to be honest.
See, I’ve suffered from a kind of writer’s block.  Not only here, in what I think of as my public, non-fiction world, but in my creative world, too.  The photography has helped that, but, not in the way or quite as much as I had hoped.  But, recently, several things that I’ve been reading and paying attention to all sort of came together to send me a message:

JUST WRITE!

I tend to worship the written word, mainly because I love it so much.  But, as a result, I have all kinds of really terrible ideas about how those words get written, or at least, how I should write them.  The net effect, of course, is that nothing gets written, as long-time readers here have no doubt noticed.
Then, I read “Talker’s Block” on Seth Godin’s blog.
The idea, in brief, is that no one really gets up in the morning worrying so much about what they’re going to say that they voluntarily remove themselves from all conversation until they can think of the “right” thing to say.  (I suppose the case might be made that people who are autistic do that, but I don’t think they actually worry about it.  It’s just something they do.)  No, his argument was that we get up in the morning and go about our business and talk, mostly without considering it much, because that’s what we do all the time.

Now, apply that to writing and the answer to getting over writer’s block is to write.  All the time.  Even poorly.  Just write and keep writing.
So, that’s what I’m doing.  And, I hope the end result will be that you see more output here.
Don’t worry, though, I won’t send all my posts through Twitter and Facebook and all that.  Some will come through, just not all.  And, I suspect that, for a while, they’ll keep coming through, for search engine placement purposes and marketing and the like.  But, they’ll taper off eventually.

Thanks for your attention.
You can go back to whatever internet gewgaw was wasting your time before me.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
   --Oscar Wilde

Science is cool.

Okay, let’s be real here; some science is cooler than others.
Seriously, all that stuff about finding faster-than-light particles is awesome, but, it’s mostly invisible to us.  As a kid, one of my favorite places in the entire world was the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  I loved it because it animated science and taught the principles and ideas in such a creative way that many of them have stuck with me as an adult.
One of the coolest exhibits was around soap bubbles.  Well, soap bubbles filled with natural gas.  From this exhibit, I learned that bubbles are round, no matter what shape the tool used to create them is, because they’re an equalization of pressure inside and outside the bubble, which always forms a sphere.  I also learned that natural gas bubbles explode when they hit a flame.
What can I tell you?  I’ve always loved fire and this museum played to that.

So, in partial homage to that exhibit, here is a bubble display of a slightly different kind: Bubbles and ferromagnetic liquid.
They don’t explode, but it is pretty damn amazing to watch.
Besides, it’s Friday and if you’re reading this, it’s not like you have anything else to do, so go ahead and check it out!

No, not today, but soon!

Monday, September 19th is the official Talk Like A Pirate Day.  It’s an internet holiday, which means you still have to show up at the office, but at least you can talk like a pirate!  Yeah, that’s pretty much the whole thing.  It’s a day to celebrate talking like a pirate, created by the internet.

Happy Friday!

(Hey, what do you want from me?  It’s been a tough week, okay?)

Do you have a lot of music?

I’m not a huge music person, really.  At least, not in the pop-music on the radio all the time kind of way.  But, I am sort of a digital pack-rat, which means I’ve actually got a surprising collection of MP3 files.  And, of course, moving those from computer to computer means I’ve ended up with a surprising number of duplicates.  So, what to do?
Well, now there’s DupeGuru, music edition.  Pretty much what it says; a program to help you remove duplicates and this one is the “special” edition for music.  Though I have to admit that I’m not sure what the difference between the editions could be, really.

In any case, since I’m sure you’re not working on a Friday, you might as well check it out and get your music sorted for the long weekend!
Enjoy!

But, sadly, not for the software Kindle apps.

Okay so these two tools I’m going to share only work for the Kindle, and mostly rely on the ability to e-mail documents to your Kindle, but SendtoReader works with a Manual Delivery option, too.  SendtoReader is a web app that lets you send any webpage to your Kindle for later perusal.  Though, as I mentioned, you need to have an actual Kindle if you want to update it without synching via a PC first.
I have to admit, I was all excited about this web app, until I went to sign up for it and discovered that the Android app on my ColorNook wasn’t able to get e-mail directly from Amazon’s on-line document delivery service.  Still, if you’re using an actual Kindle, this would be a killer app.

And, ToDo list for Kindle is, well, a to do list that you can send to, and update, on your Kindle.  So, you know, pretty much what it seems like it would be from the title.

So, there you go.  Two free web apps to get more out of your Kindle, just in time for the weekend!
Enjoy!

Personally, I find both to be delicious!

But, that has nothing at all to do with this post.
I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff this week.  Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about creativity and photography.  So, instead of just bringing you one link today, I’m bringing you two.
First, a little about creativity.  Some time ago now, Paul Zii wrote 29 Ways to Stay Creative on his Tumblr.  It’s worth reading.  I can’t promise you that it will fix your creative slump, but, really, the novelty of trying anything from that list is likely to stir something for you, even if it’s not today.  Besides, what can it hurt?
I’ve been thinking about creativity, primarily my own, for a little bit now.  My photography, I feel, has been getting stale.  For a while, going out shooting with other photographers seemed to help me, but, now, I find myself more stymied by them than inspired.  I shoot what they’re into, not because I’m all that interested, but because I’m with them.  Not that it’s a bad thing, by any means.  They’re mostly a good group of photographers and pretty decent people, too, so hanging out with them has been fun.  But, due to some interpersonal “stuff”, I found myself asking if that was really what I wanted to be doing with my photography.  Did I really want someone else to drive what I shot and why?  As it turns out, not so much.  So, change and its relationship to creativity has been on my mind a lot lately.  And, of course, I thought back to Paul’s list.  Some of those things, I did or have done, before.  Some are entirely new ideas.  All of them stimulated my thinking and creativity.
If you’re in a slump, try them.  They may help!

Second, a very creative idea for cameras.  Pinhole Egg Cameras.  Yeah, that’s right, it’s an article about making pinhole cameras from eggs, developing the photos from them and displaying them.
I have never done film photography, really, just digital, so these absolutely fascinated me.  In fact, seeing these made me give serious thought to taking an old-fashioned film photography course.  I have a film camera and I know it works because I’ve lent it to several people at the office when they were taking photography courses.
Well, maybe one day, when I have more time….

Until then, though, you might as well enjoy the links!  It is, after all, Friday!

You may have seen this already…

If you travel in the same tech circles on-line that I do, you probably have seen a lot of the same things I link to here on Fridays.  So, why do I still do it?  Well, for a couple reasons.
First, because maybe you missed it.  Or it didn’t seem like it was what it is so you didn’t actually look at it.
Secondly, because, well, I liked it, so I want to link to it so I don’t lose the link, even if you don’t like it.
And, thirdly, of course, because it adds search engine optimization “juice” to my tiny, little marketing tool, er, I mean, blog.

So, anyway, now that the business is out of the way, here’s the real stuff.
You all should know by now that I’m a little bit into photography.  (Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s like saying Shakespeare wrote a couple plays, but, still, you get what I’m saying here, right?)  And, of course, digital photography is “where it’s at”, as the hep cats say.  Well, as ubiquitous as it may seem today, it wasn’t always so.  Don’t believe me?  Okay, then hop over to ExtremeTech and check out their History of Digital Photography and see if that doesn’t change your mind.
Also?  It’s Friday and you’re obviously slacking if you’re reading this blog anyway, so you might as well go see something fun.

Regular readers may be familiar with my photography obsession.

A number of years ago, I spent some money I’d hoarded on an entry-level Canon DSLR, instead of some medical bills.
I’ll be honest, sometimes I worry that I should have spent the money on the medical bills, but, my shots are getting better.  I take great comfort in the idea that it’s the photographer, not the camera, that takes the photo.  Mostly because the majority of my gear is, well, let’s just say, not “top flight” and leave it at that.  But, still, if my camera were stolen, I’d be quite devastated and I’d want to find it again.  Well, that’s where the Stolen Camera Finder comes in.

First, you should know that this is NOT something you install on your camera.  Nor is it some kind of insurance.  Rather, it’s a webpage.  And, it’s free.
Here’s how it works: You get a photograph which you which you took with missing camera.  You take that photo to the website I linked to above and drop it on the target, per the instructions.  Then, the website does a search, based on the metadata from you photo, which includes the serial number of your camera, to find all the photos it can which match the starting photo.  If, or when, it finds photos posted by someone else that have the same serial number embedded in them as your source photo, it shows you the sites.  You can then go track down the person who used your stolen camera to make some of those terrible Facebook photos, or, I guess now, Google+ photos.

How you handle it after that is up to you.
All that matters is that Stolen Camera Finder helps you find your camera.

Okay, maybe not the “funnest” Friday Fun link I’ve ever posted, but, still, helpful if you’ve had a camera get stolen!