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I won a Roku 2!!!1!
Like most people, I feel like I never win anything. Well, this morning I was surprised when I checked my email to discover that I won a Roku 2 from Todd over at GeekNewsCentral.com. I’ve been listening to his podcast almost since day one. I have entered many of his contests, and many I didn’t enter because I never seem to win anything anyways. On a whim I enter this one. I thought what the hell, I would give it a shot. I could use a Roku for our upstairs TV.I have the original Roku and love it. I have been thinking about getting one for the upstairs TV for quite some time now. I now will have one for each TV just in time for me to cancel my DVDs from Netflix since I never seem to watch them anyway.
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Sesame Street Muppets Doing Sure Shot by Beastie Boys
via Laughing SquidThis is pretty much full of win.
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Flashback Friday: Ace Of Base – “All That She Wants”
Ok, I honestly hate this song. The only reason I am posting it is that it was a hit back in my early college years, about the same time as my other Flashback Friday’s have been. When this song was big, all my college friends started calling me “Ace of Mace”. It’s kind of stuck with me, and I forever can’t forget this crappy song.
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My take on Lion
I always have to have the latest and greatest in software. Some people hate change, but I love it. So of course I upgraded to OS X Lion yesterday. It was a pretty simple and easy upgrade. It took about 45 minutes, and Lion was up and running with all my settings intact. For the most part it works great. Nothing too revolutionary though. I’m not even sure how much I am going to be using any of the new features.The Launchpad it interesting. It’s like an iPad look of your apps. I think it would be great on a touch screen, but don’t see the point of it on a desktop. It’s much quicker to use Spotlight, or my favorite Google Search Box to launch an app.
Mission Control is pretty looking and makes it easier to set up your multiple desktops. I like it, but I’m not a fan of the new layout of the multiple desktops. I preferred them in a grid rather than a in a line, but I can get use to it.
I don’t really understand the Full Screen Mode that most apps have now. I guess I see if you want to work distraction free, but it just blanks out my second monitor when I go to full screen. It kind of defeats the point in having two monitors.
Then there is the backward scrolling. I don’t know anybody that didn’t turn that off. Again that makes sense on a tablet or touchscreen, but not a desktop. It should have been off by default.
I also wasn’t a big fan of the new layout in Mail, but that can be quickly changed in the preferences. No big deal.
As for the new mouse gestures? I hate the Magic Mouse, so I won’t be using any of them. My Logitech mouse just feels so much nicer in my hand. Apple makes some great hardware, but for some reason they can’t make a mouse that fits comfortably in your hand.
I did have one problem with Lion. It would not connect to my NAS. A quick Google search and I found a workaround, and got it working. A few terminal commanded, a couple reboots, and I connected to my NAS.
Overall I like the look. It’s not drastically different from Snow Leopard, and they have added some cheesy animations, but overall, probably worth the $30 upgrade despite all my complaints.
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Free Tribute to Nirvana’s Nevermind
So it’s been 20 years since my favorite album of all time, Nirvana’s Nevermind was released. Spin has released a “free” tribute album. It’s not really free since you have to like Spin on Facebook to get it, but it won’t cost you any money. I refuse to to like things on Facebook, or retweet thinks when forced to. I usually just ignore whatever it was and assume it doesn’t exist. This album was an exception, and by exception I mean, I used my fake Facebook page to like it.I gave it a quick listen and I love how each band put their spin on on each song. It starts off with the Meat Puppets version on “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. The Meat Puppets probably are best known for playing with Nirvana on their Mtv Unplugged appearance. The Vaselines cover “Lithium”. Kurt Cobain was a big fan of The Vaselines. Nirvana covered a couple of their songs on Incesticide, and played “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” during their unplugged session. It was only fitting that The Vaselines would cover “Lithium”. The song almost brought me to tears. Amanda Palmer also has a song on the album. She does an eerie stripped down version of “Polly” that’s pretty amazing. You can get the album for free here.
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My take on Spotify
I’ve been playing around with Spotify for the last couple days, and it seems pretty good for what it is. For some people I see how it can be totally cool. You can listen to almost any song you want whenever you want. It’s great for the casual music fan that doesn’t care whether they own their music or not. With the free version you are stuck to listening on a computer, which for people that work it an office, might be all they need. Currently you need an invitation to get the free version, so I’m not sure if it’s temporary, but it is ad supported. For $5 a month you can get rid of the ads, but really, if you are going to pay for it you should pay $10 a month and get the mobile features.I don’t think Spotify is really for me though. I like to own and collect my music. I have well over 1300 cds, and I want to be able to listen to them in the future. I have my entire music library on a 160 GB iPod Classic, so I can already listen to almost anything I want whenever I want. That being said, just because I pay for Spotify doesn’t mean I have to stop buying music. It might be tougher to buy music when I know I can listen to it for free, but I will to keep my music library growing.
I think I am going to pay for it for at least a few months to get the full experience, and see how well the streaming works. Often times what I want to listen to isn’t on my iPhone because of limited space. With Spotify I will have a much greater selection of music on my iPhone. I was surprised with Spotify’s selection. For most people they will probably find everything they want, except for The Beatles. There were quite a few bands I couldn’t find, but then I tend to listen to more obscure stuff. I was mostly shocked that they only had one Punchline album. WTF? I will just have to make sure the bands they don’t have are on my iPhone. I’m sure over time their selection will be better. I remember when I couldn’t find any of my bands on iTunes, and now everybody is there.
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Flashback Friday: Hole – “Miss World”
I’m not really a Courtney Love fan, but I loved Hole. Every Hole album is pretty amazing.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Adventures of an Astrophysicist”
I just watched a lecture that Neil deGrasse Tyson did at the University of Washington back in May entitled “Adventures of an Astrophysicist”. It was so good. Neil deGrasse Tyson is so good at explaining science and making it exciting. I try to watch and read everything he does. It’s all so great.
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Drinking homeopathic bleach
via youtube.comYes, this is how ridicules homeopathic medicine is. Why people believe in this stuff is beyond me. Why it’s even legal to sell homeopathic medicine also boggles my mind.
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Social network overload
I feel like I’m getting a little social networked out. I love the new Google Plus. I have been on it since day one, and it seems to be getting better day by day. I just don’t know exactly what to use it for. I use Facebook for my family, and people I know in person. It’s mostly non-technical people and I only check it once or twice a day. Twitter is more my throw away comments. My Twitter stream goes by pretty fast. I dip in every so often and catch what I can catch, but I probably miss 80% of the tweets that go by. Google plus on the other hand, people seem to be posting longer posts, and it’s easier for more conversation to occur there. It may threaten Twitter, and Facebook, but I think it could kill blogging. Kevin Rose has already forwarded his kevinrose.com blog over to his G+ account. I think that’s crazy, but I totally get it. People are hanging out on G+ and not kevinrose.com. Nobody really comments on blogs much anymore, but there on tons of comments on G+. People aren’t using RSS as much anymore either, so you they aren’t seeing blog updates, whereas they are seeing G+ updates.
I was thinking about putting this post on G+, but I still want control of my content. I still want my thoughts, and however lame my writing is, to be on my site. I want to be able to look back at it 20 years from now and know it’s still here. In the past I wasn’t good at preserving my archives, but now I want to more.
So what should I use G+ for? I’m not a fan of cross-posting, so I’m not interested in sending my tweets to G+. That’s one great thing about G+ now is nobody is cross posting things yet. I think it would wreck G+ if Twitter streams started showing up. If anything, I might start cross posting my blog posts to G+. Nobody really reads my blog, so it wouldn’t be that spammy.
So Facebook=real friends and family, Twitter=short throw away comments, Blog=longer thoughts I want to get off my chest, G+=somewhere between Twitter and my blog? Will I be able to keep up with three social networks and my blog? Only time will tell.
BTW this was written in the cool new “Full-Screen” feature in WordPress. Great job WordPress dudes, I love it.
