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links for 2010-07-28
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Hawaii Tech Update
I have been meaning to blog about our Hawaii vacation, but I have been busy catching up on everything I missed while I was gone. This isn’t that post either.
This post is mostly about the technology of our vacation. I saw my first iPad and iPhones it the wild. I was kind of amazed at how many people have iPhones. I guess that’s what happens in states that you can buy them.
I renting a mifi for my internet access over there. It was cheaper than the hotel’s internet, and I could take it with me. For the most part it worked really well. I did run into the “unlimited” cap problem once though, and had to watch my usage for the rest of the week. Companies should not be allowed to advertize “unlimited” when it clearly isn’t. In the documentation it clearly stated that I have “unlimited” bandwidth as long as I don’t download or stream videos. So I made sure not to stream or download video, and after just one day having iTunes open and downloading my podcasts, I got an email saying I was way over the “unlimited” limit. So for the rest of the week I limited my podcast downloads. In Honolulu my speeds were decent. Slower than what I am use to, but usable. In Hilo speeds were miserable, but for the most part were were out doing stuff, so I didn’t matter too much. It would have sucked it I really needed to use the internet a lot there.
When we got home we were one iPod short of what we left with. The wife left her Nano on the plane. That kind of sucked, but she still has her Touch and Mini, so she will survive. People that clean planes must get all kinds of goodies.
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Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense
It’s all your pseudoscience and nonsense in one simple table. It’s pretty sad that so much nonsense is out there. It’s even sadder all the people that believe in it, and all the people making money off of them. If you believe in any of this stuff…well…you shouldn’t.
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links for 2010-07-18
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10 Year Anniversary in Hawaii
Hello from Hawaii. Actually I am not is Hawaii as I type this, but I should be in Hawaii when it posts.
Today is out 10 year anniversary. It’s crazy that we have been married 10 years already, but even crazier when I think about how long I have known my wife. She was 13, and I was 16 when we first met in 1991. We met about a year after my Mom moved the family from a small northern Minnesota town, to a small town in central Minnesota. She was the cute little neighbor girl that I wanted to go out with from day one. She felt the same about me.
We were both to shy to ask each other out. We became good friends and hung out a lot, but it took five years before we actually started dating. After she graduated high school she took a month trip to Poland to be a teaching assistant with one of her teachers. When she was there she missed me more than her boyfriend. That’s when she knew.
It was probably a day or two after she got back when one of our mutual friends just said, “You know you two like each other, just go out.”
So that day she broke it off with her boyfriend, and I broke it off with the girlfriend I had then, and that was it. My girlfriend and her boyfriend we actually kind of expecting it. It was like everybody else knew we were meant to be before we did. That was in 1996.
We then dated until we were both done with college, and finally got married in 2000. So while she has been my wife for 10 years, she has been my best friend for 19. That’s well over half my life.
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links for 2010-07-08
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Off to Hawaii
We are all packed and ready to head off to the airport on our way to Hawaii. We got the Wife’s cousin staying here to keep and eye on the house, and keep the pets fed. It should be a fun time, but a week is going to be a long time to be away from home. I like being at home.
It’s crazy the amount of technology two people need to take with them on vacation. We have:
- Camera
- 4 disposable water cameras for snorkeling
- Kodak Zi8 video camera
- Two laptops
- 4 iPods (The wife and I each have a touch for apps and internet and another one for music)
- 2 Blackberries
- My iPad
- Our GPS
- and a rented MiFi to share internet to all our devices
It’s going to be a long plane ride, but with my iPad and Audiobooks I have more than enough to keep me busy. In fact I really wouldn’t mind a longer flight. The Wife is another story. I am sure she will be bored out of her mind.
The thing I will probably miss is Twitter. I may find time to post from time to time, but I wont be able to read and keep up with it. Normally I keep up with my Twitter stream during my waking hours pretty easily. It’s going to bug me a bit not being on top of everything, and knowing what’s going on, but I guess that’s what a vacation is for; to get away from it all — or at least most — of it for a while.
My blog will probably be a little quiet for the week. I might use Posterous to post some pictures if I have time, but I plan on being pretty busy just having fun.
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Blogging Platforms
I started blogging in late 2000 when I first got broadband internet. Sometimes I wish I knew the exact date, or even had some of my old archives, but I didn’t bother taking that stuff with my when I switched to different platforms over the years.
It’s kind of amazing looking at all the different platforms out there now. When I started blogging there was basically Blogger, or you ran blogging software on your own server. I started with blogger, but it was a little limiting back then, and it didn’t even allow commenting. Now with Twitter and Facebook is seems like people are blogging less and less, and probably commenting less too. I rarely ever comment on blogs, and really couldn’t care less if I had commenting on my blog now.
Blogger has greatly improved since last time I used it, and there are many other blogging options now. If I was to start blogging right now services like Posterous, Tumblr, or Squarespace would be very tempting.
Posterous has been trying to get people to switch to them these past couple weeks. I really like Posterous, but I just use it to easily post things here. It has made it much easier for me to quickly share stuff on my blog that I otherwise wouldn’t bother to spend the time. That’s really the reason I blog anyway. I don’t consider myself the best writer, or even like writing all that much, but I love sharing cool things I find in the interwebs.
I’m not going to switch blogging services though. As tempting as it may be, I like the greater control I have running my own server.
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links for 2010-07-02
