I’m catching up on my Internetting. Lindsay Lawes
Rands has an interesting blog and has made a couple of posts on what he calls Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder or N.A.D.D. Read the first post and then the second post. It is quite interesting.
I have N.A.D.D. and I think most geeks do, or need to, in order to be productive. It’s just what we do. I need to be have several different windows/applications open on my computer or else I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing much. When is it too much though?
For the purpose of this post, BF = bookmark/favorite. Most people use BFs in their browser to make it easy for them to browse their favorite websites with a single click. They also store the sites so that they don’t have to remember the lengthy addresses some sites have. Whoever invented them made it very easy for the rest of us.
I use the Internet all the time for everything. What would you say if I told you that I don’t use BFs in my browsers at all? Not here at home, not at work, or anywhere else. Since I am around computers a lot, I would need to keep several different versions of my BFs synchonized, which would be a major pain in the ass. I also use several different browsers, especially for my web developing purposes. Some browsers will allow you to import/export BFs, but that just adds to the pain and suffereing of updating more lists. Can you see what I’m getting at? A centralized list of BFs is the solution. Something I can access from any computer that has access to the Internet.
A year or two ago, I stumbled upon a site called MyBookmarks while searching for a solution. It is a free service where I store all of my BFs. I can create and remove folders, add and delete BFs, change the colors of the page where I view my BFs, move BFs, sort them…and the list goes on. You can even import BFs from your browser into your MyBookmarks account so that you don’t have to go through the hassle of typing everything in.
So, instead of keeping track of BFs all over the place, I simply set the home page in my browser as the link to my account at MyBookmarks and I have easy access to all of the sites I use. Whenever I open up a browser, I’m greated by a nice list of all my BFs. It makes life a whole lot easier.
Access your bookmarks online — anytime, anywhere.
Mozilla has released a new preview of their next generation browser. Version 0.7 was called Firebird and 0.8 is now called Firefox. I use it as my main browser.
If you are a web developer, the Web Developer and EditCSS extensions are must haves. Some of the other extensions I use are CuteMenus and Tabbrowser.
Try it out, I’m sure you’ll love it!
…my life. There is no question about it. I do all of my banking and pay most of my bills online. I store all phone numbers in my cell phone. Any addresses I need to remember are stored in my email address book. I schedule all of my appointments on the calendar in my email system. Everyone’s birthday is stored in this calendar as well. At home I use ATnotes which allows me to have Post-It style notes right on my computer’s desktop, instead of all over my desk on little pieces of paper.
I use the Internet to look up everything from movie times, driving directions, phone numbers, and sports scores. I order clothes, toys, and computer equipment online. I did my taxes online. Sometimes, I talk to people online with the use of Instant Messengers instead of calling them. I communicate with my Mom and Dad through daily emails.
What would happen to my life is something happened to my phone and I lost access to computers? I’d be lost. I wouldn’t be able to get ahold of anyone. I wouldn’t know my schedule for the week. I’d forget everyone’s birthday. Seriously…what did people do 20 years ago? I can’t imagine life without the Internet and everything that computers allow us to do.
I’ve joined a social networking site called Orkut (thanks for the invite Matt). It’s a way to keep in touch with friends, meet new people, find dates, share ideas, and other things. You may have heard of sites such Friendster or Tribe.net, which are along the same lines. From what I’ve read, Orkut is supposed to improve on all of these other sites. Orkut is in affiliation with Google, so my guess is that it will turn out pretty good.
One major difference between these types of sites is that you have to be invited to join Orkut. Kind of a neat way to set it up. If you want an invite, let me know.
I’ve had custom error pages on my site since it started, but today I added an awesome feature. It was great that the user was getting an error page with the same look and feel as my site, but I wasn’t getting any information from it.
I’ve added some PHP scripting so that whenever someone gets one of my error pages, I am sent an email with the URL they were trying to access, the referring page that has the broken link, time, date, visitor’s IP address. Now I’ll be able to track down broken URLs and resolve them.
Mr Bob’s Web Design has a great code generator and instructions for setting this up. When you do step 2, make sure to remove any blank lines at the end of functions.inc.php after pasting the code into it. If you don’t, you will get an error message on your error pages that the headers have already been sent.
I just finished installing TFS Statistics on my web site. The configuration was a breeze and the instructions were top notch for the installation.
From their website:
TFS is a Web statistics package written in PHP.
Features: Web site statistics by day, month, year, OS, browser, bots/spiders, referrers,last visitors, last bots/spiders, page hits, visitors by country, average visitors/bots and % function on all counters. In the last bots/spiders and last vistors overview you can click a link so you can see what pages are requested by the visitor, spider, or bot. Referrers are listed by domain if you click on the domain you will see the pages where your site is listed. You can also exclude ip adresses, so they will not show up in your statistics.
I did run into a conflict between their code and WordPress. I was getting “is not a valid MySQL-Link resource” error messages from some of the WP queries, but the errors went away when I turned off the TFS includes. I ended up finding a fix for the problem and documented it on their forums.
So far it looks like a great package that gives me all of the information that I want about the visitors to my site.
Instant messenger (IM) programs have had a large impact on communication. It is a form of instant communication like talking on the phone or in-person. We can send a message and get an immediate response from someone else. We can hold conversations (or chats) with several people at once, which we cannot do on the phone or in-person.
The most popular IMs are AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and ICQ. I have accounts on all four (I’ve never used my ICQ account), but prefer them in the order I’ve listed. I also have the most contacts/buddies/friends on each IM in that order.
Back in the day, to have a conversation with someone that was online you either had to respond back and forth through email or join a chatroom. Both are a pain in the ass. IMs have improved this immensely and have added a lot of extra features. The greatest advantage IMO is the ability to see when other people are logged into the service and if they are “away” or not. Away messages could be a whole new topic in itself. AIM has the most customizable away messages in my experience.
I can remember being back in college and instead of walking into the next room or yelling to a roommate, we’d chat on IM. We didn’t have to go find the phone and call downstairs to find someone who wanted to go grab some food. We could just switch over from the paper we were writing to IM and hit up multiple people at once. It was a whole new definition of laziness. Because of IM, the “freshmen 15” has turned into the “freshmen 20.”
IM is so convenient and easy that I can’t think of something that could take it’s place. I’m sure that someday something will (maybe some new form of video chat), but it will have to be easy to use, full of features, and just amazing. IM is here to stay for awhile. Send me a message…what are you waiting for!
I’ve been enjoying my holiday break a great deal. At the same time, I miss being back in Saginaw at my apartment, but this is a nice little get-away. I’ve been sleeping in until at least 10 every morning and I didn’t even leave the house yesterday.
The big project yesterday was to get a page up with poker chip tricks tutorial, and so far the page is getting a lot of attention. According to my web hosting stats, almost 500 visitors stopped by my site yesterday, which is amazing since I’ve never had 200 visitors in a single day before. My brother Isaac helped me out by doing most of the camera work on the videos. We used my digital camera and it worked out pretty well. Once the videos were done I wanted to compress them a little bit and I removed the audio to save some space. I used a DivX 5.1.1 codec for the compression, which seems to be giving a couple of people problems viewing the videos. Later tonight I hope to work on getting another video format posted as a 2nd option.
Update: Those having problems are now able to view the videos after installing the DivX 5.1.1 codec, so I will not be adding a 2nd video option for now.
Today I went and contributed to the Ryan family college fund. Doc. Ryan is my dentist, who I’ve been visiting frequently since I got my own dental insurance. I think I’ve bought half the equipment in their office by now. They filled two big cavities on upper left teeth. The numbing is starting to wear off and I can feel some pain coming on. It’s funny how my teeth never hurt until after I go to the dentist, even though my chart shows red marks on just about every tooth. As a kid my teeth were always hurting, but over the past 5 years or so I really haven’t had any pain. Maybe I’m simply used to it.
In a few minutes we are off to Cheboygan for Isaac’s varsity basketball game. I’m not even quite sure who they play, but hopefully the Hurons will come out on top. It’s a mini tournament they are playing in, so I’ll be going back tomorrow for either the championship or the consolation game.
When I get home tonight I’ll be working on the poker chip trick videos like I mentioned earlier. Maybe Isaac will even want another ass-whoopin in March Madness. I’ve only lost one time so far in the game…any challengers?
Nick Momrik 