If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.
First, some context. On average, I:
Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
Send more than 300 emails a week
Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
I’m trying out a new WordPress plug-in that enhances link content. Apture, which I discovered via someone I read on Twitter, is supposed to quickly bring in outside data and media. I, Mike Orren, will be trying it out in my next few posts.
(In other words, this post is just a goofy test and should be ignored.)
Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliion's gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)
I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this post into a therapy session over the myriad problems I’ve had with AT&T over the past month. Specific situations will crop up organically in the descriptions below, but instead of a chronological chapter-and-verse story, I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about AT&T and its processes. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, I can probably be classified as an Apple fanboy. But if you know me, you know my allegiance doesn’t come easy. For my purposes, Apple produces the best computer and phone technology available. But there are lots of companies that produce good technology — It is my human interactions with Apple that make me a loyalist. My experience in buying the new 3G S Iphone is one of, if not the most memorable I’ve had: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been using my Xbox 360 as a media server in our house, but there have always been a few things that made it seem inferior. Based on buzz from folks I trust I’d played with alpha-software Boxee on my Mac a bit to see if it could be an alternative. Last week, Lifehacker ran a piece on using Boxee on an Apple TV. I’d thought for a while about building my own Linux machine to run Boxee, but I found myself at the mall last weekend, and consequently in the Apple store. Having not yet contributed to the Steve Jobs medical fund, I found myself ogling the Apple TV, which I’d originally eschewed in favor of the Xbox. But dammned if Boxee didn’t make it sound more viable; and damned if we didn’t have a big TV in the bedroom that would benefit from the Xbox. Read the rest of this entry »
Partly because of my company’s new lease on life, I’m in a creative mode for the first time in, well, too long. I was making my way to work this morning, amping with coffee and good tunes and was reminded of how much I love songs where a band — usually a band that is generally technically precise — goes off the rails into a cacophony that is both sloppy and skillful. The resulting sound is loose and fun, but also suggests that it is born from an attempt to go just beyond the range of their high level of skill.
Ever seen something that you so thoroughly knew was game changing that you couldn’t even effectively articulate how? Because the language actually changed with the innovation?
My computer crapped out today, and in an effort to find a fix I noticed a huge weakness in search algorithms.
Longevity, traffic and inbound links are all favored, we know. And that generally is good in bringing reliable, complete results.
But when it comes to tech support, say looking for a way to make a bootable emergency disk, old reliable results aren’t what you need. Especially when they’re 2-3 years old and relate to OS features that are obsolete.
Meh. I just want to know that something other than my computer isn’t functioning properly.
Thank you for the latest complimentary upgrade to your Xbox 360 system firmware. I am certain that it represents a substantial investment of time, talent and tender.
Your efforts are apparent not only in the anime-without-the-art avatar that replaced the picture of my dog. There is also the achievement of making one of the most ungainly user interfaces I’ve experienced even more unfathomable. And the bonus of being able to watch Netflix movies with golfball-sized pixelation on my widescreen TV is a treat beyond measure.
If you're happy and you're stylized, put your hands on your hips...
I recently bought Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 on the strength of its reviews. It may have been a mistake, as I haven’t been this addicted to a video game since Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. (I know that GTA 4 was empirically better, but I just never found it as engaging.) Read the rest of this entry »
I have horrible feet and ankles. I don’t mean that they’re particularly ugly — but even when I was in shape, I’ve always suffered from foot and ankle pain and a tendency to sprains and twists.
Last week, the hard drive on my MacBook Pro died. (Don’t blame Apple — it was a POS third-party drive I bought in a misergreedy bid for more space.)
I got a new drive — actually switched computers to a newer Macbook. But what amazed me in the process was that a dead computer just isn’t a big deal anymore. Sure, I had my Time Machine restore on a backup drive, but I couldn’t use it in its pure state– There was a corruption.
But anything I really cared about was in “the cloud.” My email? All backed up in my Google IMAP account. Important docs? On Google Docs and on MobileMe (which I’m testing but soon to drop). App reinstall was done via the web with serials in my Gmail archive.
The only thing that really causes me to want/need a hard drive anymore is my music library. If someone found a good, secure, cheap solution to that — one that seamlessly handled 30k+ tracks, the drive would be superfluous.
If anything, changing computers allowed me to weed out a lot of plugins and apps that I’d collected like weeds because I constantly test and discard new stuff. Maybe I need to erase my computer every six months just for spring cleaning. Certainly ’tisn’t a hardship anymore.
When I first made my return to the land of Mac n’ honey a couple years back I installed Adium as my chat client. We use Gtalk in our outfit more often than we vocalize, and Apple’s iChat couldn’t handle the underlying protocol (Jabber).
When iChat became Gtalk compatible, I gravitated to it because of its video chat capabilities. April and I thought we’d use it a lot, but it was so unreliable, it just wasn’t worth it.
In the past couple days, a new version of Adium came out with support for Facebook chat. I’ve been using FB a lot more lately, because of the iPhone app as well as the fact that the service seems to have hit the hundredth monkey stage — reconnecting me with lots of old friends in just the last month. (That’s a topic for another post.)
So I switched back to Adium today. It wasn’t until it was installed that I realized how much I had missed it. Let me count the ways:
Customization: Themes, icons, etc
Better Growl support
Better integration of disparate accounts. iChat puts them in separate windows; Adium goes for one window with sections.
Secure, OTR chat
Did I say customization?
I was also impressed with the thoughtfulness of the install: Seamlessly imported my iChat transcript archives.
This is my personal bastion of blather unrelated to my business, including but not limited to: family pictures, cool gadgets, music, pop culture and moderate media punditry unrelated to Dallas / Fort Worth. If I haven't posted lately, it means I'm busy on the day job. You can follow me more frequently on Twitter. More details and contact info here.
Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one. — Mark Twain
Best of…
Banjo, The Best Dog Ever™
There’s an old saying that “I wish I could be half the man my dog thinks I am.” That’s a good one. But someday, I also hope to become half the man my dog was.
The Wedding Toast I encounter far too many people in this world who are dead behind the eyes — Houston isn’t one of them. He is a real man in the greatest sense, and his powers of perception and his constant search for what is real and genuine in a fast-food world will continue to enrich both your lives.
Why I think the economy is even scarier than I thought Pegasus News: "Square Pegs" 10/9/08 Peter is at the door. He's broke and pissed and Paul is off on one last exotic resort junket before he goes into court-ordered rehab.
Search, data and the responsibilities of news orgs Pegasus News: "Square Pegs" 6/16/08 Technology is allowing us do things that seemed a pipedream three years ago. Along the way, we need to reflect on the downsides of the upside.
Why I love local Pegasus News: "Square Pegs" 1/27/08 ...if local is a sentence, lock me up and throw away the key
The State of Journalism Duke Magazine 9/10/07
[Kevin] Sack might be surprised to see our database of every candidate, official, and contributor in our region-something the newspaper does not provide. He might be appalled to learn that mere citizens reported on elections in towns that journalists eschew. When we cover mundane things, we get hundreds of responses and thousands of eyeballs-partly because of technologies Sack fears, delivering unique and wanted information to each individual.
Mud starts flying in Dallas District 9 Council race Pegasus News 4/21/07
When we put up our political database, we certainly hoped to generate thoughtful discussion and debate about local elections. We didn't expect to become a battlefield of leaked information, mis-information and confusing whodunits.
Lessons from the launchOnline Journalism Review 1/17/07
...we launched a prototype entertainment site; won an EPpy award; nearly fell to pieces; and made more mistakes than we can count -- But we’ve learned some invaluable lessons about local digital media along the way. Here’s a sampling of some of the things that we think we know now.
If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
I have horrible feet and ankles. I don’t mean that they’re particularly ugly — but even when I was in shape, I’ve always suffered from foot and ankle pain and a tendency to sprains and twists.
