First, Dailybooth… the picture-a-day site. Well, some people do a pic a week, some treat it like hourlybooth, but I digress. I’ve decided to stay on the Dailybooth site. As you know, if you’ve read my earlier postings last week, you know that I went through some personal struggles, with a friend on that site, that ended with ties being severed. This was very painful for me to deal with, as I had gotten to really like that person. Unfortunately, my wife’s feelings were hurt and she felt threatened by some things that were said and, instead of leaving well enough alone, I tried to make all parties reconcile. Bad mistake; you can never make two people get to know and like one another, no matter what you do. Because of my mistake, and other things that happened as a result, I lost a friend. I was so hurt by this, that I just wanted to leave and never return. I felt that, because of the circle of friends on there that this friend and I share, it would be painful to comment on the same pics and see them commenting as well, and not be able to reach out to them.

Well, I thought that I was doing some long thinking in the decision to leave, but I now realize that when you think about what to do in a situation, while you’re still having strong emotion, you’re not going to make an objective decision. So, after more hard thinking for a week until last night, I decided to stay with the Dailybooth community. Several things played into this decision. First, all of the comments from friends on my “farewell” pic made a lot of sense. For example, GratefulDogZX, a friend on DB and overall good guy, put it best when he explained that all of my other followers shouldn’t have to lose me because of a falling out with one person. Second, a quote from Bill Cosby, that sometimes appears on the random quotes section of my blog sidebar, states: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” It’s so true; you shouldn’t try to be all things to all people. Third, someone else’s feelings were hurt on DB and mentioned that my decision to leave was probably a good route for them to follow. Well, in my thoughts this week, I concluded that no one should have to leave a site because of personal pain over any situation or anybody (and this person even went so far as to say that they missed me and our conversations on DB. That meant the world to me).

Even my wife doesn’t want me to leave Dailybooth, even though she’s gotten pissed about the time I spend on it sometimes!

My decision to stay on Dailybooth is conditional. I got so wrapped up in it personally, that I lost focus on the other sites in my internet existence that are important to me. Even more so, I lost focus on the things that matter to me in real life. This can’t happen again. This blog, for instance, was severely neglected for almost two months! Now I’m reminded that I have to always strive for balance in everything that I do. If that means setting time for this and that and the other thing, then so be it. I value Dailybooth and everyone in it, but I value the rest of my life too, y’know? I say this more to myself, than anyone in particular. The site, and the way things work on it, is just that addictive… even if you’re not even remotely an extrovert by nature. With that being said, I’ll move on to the next topic.

This last week enabled me to blog more, and also catch up with my friends and family on Facebook. This is an area that is also needing some attention, bigtime. However, I will NOT get caught up in those app games on it (such as MafiaWars or other games). I have too many other interests to divide myself with! However, chatting it up with everyone on there this week has been a blast.

I’ll be posting a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account today or tomorrow. I’ll also share some samples and links here. I’ve been using Flickr a lot more because the convenience and community sharing far outweighs that which I have in the picture gallery on my personal site here. That’s not to say I won’t use the gallery here; it will be for more personal galleries and family pictures. This is one area that Dailybooth helped resurrect in me; my love of photography. I’ve been using my camera more and learning manual shooting to get the best out of my pictures. As a result, I have a new, potentially wallet-breaking hobby!

Of course, I still have Twitter, the stalk-me micro-blogging site. My interaction with that will never change. So, go ahead and “stalk” me there, if you’re not already! The sidebar here has my recent tweets, so you can see what I’m up to, even if you don’t feel like visiting my Twitter page.

I haven’t been making videos like I used to. YouTube is still an excellent forum for sharing videos, but I haven’t had much reason to do a video yet. However, I will still make videos on special occasions or when I really have to share/review a new acquisition. All of my recent YouTube vids are in the sidebar as well, so feel free to watch me being, well, boring old me… hah!

Well, thank you all for reading this. I realize I just unwittingly gave myself some goals to work on. However, these are healthy goals and ones that I think I can reach. One more goal for me: write an entry a day in this blog. So far, this week I’ve been doing pretty good with this objective. It shouldn’t be so hard to, at least, devote about 15 minutes into the blog. It can even be an extension of what I’m doing on Dailybooth, since that has been a “blogging” platform of sorts.

I’ll conclude the blog entry here with this thought. One could just as easily live their whole lives on the internet, as they would in real life… but it just wouldn’t be as interesting as what real life offers us! Cheers!

LL: TCM is showing my favorite movie of all time…Gone with the Wind. I swear, if they remake that movie, heads will roll!

Me: @Lemonlily74 Now that you said that, I’m sure some idiot in Hollywood is going “OMG that’s a brilliant idea!!”

LL: @ChrisW357 …… O_o…..crap.

Me: @Lemonlily74 (incidentally, that’s the best response I’ve ever seen tweeted! LOL!!)

LL: @ChrisW357 Hahaha! Thanks! Hahaha!

To those of you still trying to understand what Twitter’s about, well, this is a perfect example: People posting their thoughts in small bites (what’s commonly known now as micro-blogging). Others people following them because their thoughts just might be interesting. Someone following this “tweet stream” and picking out a random blurb that interests them, and then responding to it which (hopefully) fosters communication. Hence the term, “Social Micro-blogging”

Just like the above example, I’ve had some very stimulating conversations with people on Twitter. And it’s those spur-of-the-moment conversations that are the most precious, because of that spontaneity!

Cheers!

That being said, I’m faced with the prospect of updating my Archives And Links page and I figured I should make a blog post detailing these little internet homes of mine.

My Twitter Updates – This is the big one. Everyone these days is either talking about Twitter or tweeting on it! It really is microblogging at its finest.

My Last.fm music page – This page will show you what I’ve been listening to lately… on my computer’s iTunes, my iPod or my iPhone.

My Dailybooth page – This is a recent addition for me. This is a photo-social experiment that encourages people to post a photo a day, and comment and follow other users as well. Some people, of all ages, snap some pretty interesting photos here!

My YouTube page – Yes, this page started out as a video blog, but it quickly turned into a place to show off my puzzle hobby. I’ll try to make other videos soon!

So there you have it! Micro-blogged updates, music, photos and video. But there’s some other sites that deserve special mention:

My Facebook profile – Of course, you have to actually join Facebook to see my profile and interact with me. Just in case you do sign up, that’s where I am!

My Blip.fm page- I often find myself wondering just when this site is going to be shut down by the RIAA. If you’re like me and you have a mind a-buzzing with the soundtrack of your life done by your favorite bands, this site lets you communicate your musical thoughts.

My page on Geeks.pirillo.com – I used to go there often and update my page, but lately it’s become almost as bloated as MySpace. Bloated, as in making my browser turn into a turtle while my CPU cycles go through the roof. Still, I tend to make semi-regular visits, since I officially labeled myself as a “geek”!

Well, I can’t make promises of “I’ll blog more often”, because I do the opposite quite often, much to my dismay at myself. However, you can look at the mentioned pages and track/follow/pursue/stalk me on a regular basis! At least this gave me an excuse to make a blog entry, but I still have a very late part two entry of our Germany vacation to write here. I haven’t forgotten!

Cheers!

Yes, I had a lot of stuff on there. I had a music player; a really nifty Flash player that played some mp3’s I have hosted on this blog’s server. I had some neat pictures. I had some witty (I think) things about myself on there. I also had a YouTube player on there playing my latest vids. However, all that pales in comparison to the one thing I’ll miss the most. Family. My cousins sometimes talked to me on my account. Maybe this will encourage me to email them more often. Yes, my wife is on there too and, yes, she isn’t happy about my decision to scrap the account. But it was my decision, mine alone, to make.

Maybe I’m just weird. Last night, my wife told me that my sense of humour and taste is sometimes sophisticated and sometimes stupid. So, yes, I can appreciate what quality I can find in all things. However, I personally feel I had outgrown my tastes and perceptions had grown away from MySpace. My needs simply changed, and sometimes we need to do a bit of cleansing to get rid of some of the things we don’t need in order to make our lives a bit simpler.

A while back, I wrote a post about the differences I saw in MySpace versus facebook. I think that was the start of my reasoning and thinking that led me to the decision. Facebook fits more of my needs, so it makes sense to keep that account. Today, during this writing, I’ll also update my list of profiles in the sidebar. Not much has changed; in fact, there’s more of me spread out across cyberspace! Click the links, investigate and maybe add yourselves on to those sites if you want. I’d love to see you all there!

So… what do you, my readers, think? Have you had, or still have, a MySpace account? Did you ever think about deleting it? If not MySpace, what social networking site do you most frequent and what do you like about it the most?

(Social) Cheers to all!!

Anyways, let’s get down to the reasons for this post’s inflammatory title…

1 ) facebook = social engineering (practically) down to a science. MySpace = social disease that has a rather painful cure.

2 ) facebook seems more maturely oriented with less chances of running across questionable people/groups. With MySpace, you can be sure that every bit of sleaze is going to be promoting itself to you in the form of friend requests.

3 ) facebook user pages are much less customizable. This may be seen as a bad thing, but consider this; you may have (as have I) run across some MySpace user pages that had embeds that did really funky things to your browser, thus making your processor temporarily go into a fit. Tie that in with the fact that MySpace pages are more easily configurable to enable phishing attacks.

4 ) Going along with point 3, the main way of customizing your facebook page is through the use of facebook apps. MySpace, in an effort to compete, enabled the use of these kind of apps on their pages. However, these apps can interfere with some of the customization that the user has already implemented on their page. As if the typical MySpace page doesn’t look jam-packed enough!

5 ) facebook gives you the option of letting people find you based on your educational and work history, and it makes an effort to show you people that you may know. This is what it’s there for! I’ve had my facebook account open in much less time than the MySpace account, and I got reconnected with a dear high school friend through facebook. MySpace is mainly geared towards making new friends and self-promoting, and it definitely shows.

6 ) With all this in mind, facebook is geared more toward an adult, or mature teen, crowd. I’ve joined groups in both sites, and I’ve had more stimulating conversations in facebook. MySpace, on the other hand, is more for the immature, party-hardy mentality. (Disclaimer: I’ve nothing wrong with partying and you can be mature and let loose, but I guess I’ve met more immature people with that kind of mentality.) IDK… Maybe I’m just a boring clod!

7 ) How about privacy? I’m an open book to even my casual acquaintances, but I like the fact that users have a greater range of privacy settings on facebook. MySpace is more limited on privacy but, to its credit, has gotten much better on privacy issues.

8 ) Last point, and this is about look and feel. facebook just seems much less bloated and jury-rigged together, unlike MySpace. Maybe facebook simply has the benefit of being a newer site; MySpace is one of the first, and still the biggest, social networking fish in the cybersea. facebook just feels much cleaner and faster than MySpace.

Maybe I was nitpicking through those points, maybe not. However, anything that I can say good about MySpace, I can also say about facebook. In fact, anything that I love to do in MySpace, I can also do on facebook! If any of you run across this article, and want to share your thoughts on these two social-net giants, please do so in the comments. I’d love to hear everyone’s take on the issue!

Cheers… and have fun connecting, or reconnecting, with friends!

1. What’s too spicy for your tastes?

As some of you know, I love spicy food. I usually make my blow-your-nose-off chili, complete with jalapenos, habaneros, chili powder and a extra ingredient that I’ll mention in a bit. However, it needs to have some flavor; it can’t be hot for hot’s sake. That being said, the extra ingredient I put in a pot of chili is a couple of drops of Dave’s Ultimate Insanity hot pepper sauce. It’s very close to qualifying as an extract, really. Many mortals have regretted putting a small drop of this stuff on their tongue, resulting in liberal chugging of water or milk. I won’t dare do it!

2. What’s too sweet for your tastes?

Anything that’s geared to give you high energy due to the sugar content. I’m hypoglycemic, so I have to watch the sugar intake and eat sensibly; snack often on complex carbs and protein to keep my blood sugar going. If I have too much sugar at once, my body crashes and I’ll be dragging myself on the ground for the rest of the day. Sooooo… unfortunately, most candy bars and energy bars are off limits for me. Energy drinks like Monster and Red Bull are dangerous for me to have. But I can have a dessert-type item when it’s getting close to bedtime. I just can’t go nuts with it. However, I’m a sucker for anything with dark chocolate in it!! Now I’ve gotten to the point where Diet Coke w/Splenda is as sweet as I’ll go. If someone accidentally hands me a fountain-dispensed Coke in a restaurant, I can (almost, if it’s mixed right) tell immediately, as it’s sickeningly sweet to me!

3. What’s too salty for your tastes?

Dairy Queen has this bad habit of topping some of their sundaes with salted peanuts. I’m sorry, but salt and ice cream doesn’t go together for me. Yuck! I don’t really even add any extra salt to anything I cook, unless I really have to, which is rare.

4. What’s too bitter for your tastes?

I take a Ginko Biloba supplement every morning with my vitamins. I’m very careful not to let it hit my tongue, as the taste of that stuff almost made me vomit on a few occasions, even though I have a very strong stomach.

5. What’s too sour for your tastes?

This is one I have to think about. Straight lemon juice, which I still have to use on occasion to help unblock a problematic salivary gland.

Well, I hope all my readers learned more about me than what they wanted to know, heh-heh! I’ll come back and write another entry this week, hopefully really soon. As of this moment right now, I’m having too much fun hanging out with our birds and jamming to some Epic Rock Radio!

Cheers, and enjoy some good eats for me!!

The problem with this is time. Last night, between trying to get through this, talking to others in chat and making and eating dinner, I couldn’t solve it before I just got too tired. Today, I’m doing it, but I have to abandon the poor Gigaminx because I have a birthday celebration to go to (Happy birthday to Bill K., my dad-in-law!). I will solve this thing soon; it will just take some time. Unfortunately, you can’t save your progress… if it’s abandoned, you’ll have to start all over again!

If any of you out there want to try this challenge, head on over to this address: http://users.skynet.be/gelatinbrain/Applets/Magic%20Polyhedra/dodeca_f8.htm. Word of warning… please be prepared to set aside a few hours if you really think you can do it. Just hit the “Scramble” button and go crazygonutz with it. Make sure you also set aside some time for brain-rest breaks!

Rotsa ruck!

When I met friends who did their own tapes, we often traded and got exposed to other music that we may not have found on our own. You could say that was the social music revolution of the day, akin to how Last.fm and iLike.com work today (but without the personal touch of trading; you can only look at and sample what others are listening to!). When I started dating, I often made mixtapes of various lovey-dovey songs that were special to me, or that reminded me of the girl I was dating at the time, and of course gave those tapes to them. Some thought it either cool or silly, but… that’s besides the point! Also, when CD’s became the standard album format, that made it so much easier to make these tapes rather than holding the FF/REW buttons on the playback tape to find the right spot to start the music. (I’m 35, so I grew up around the time when tapes were king, the 8-track was all but dead and vinyl was dying a slow (kicking and screaming) death!)

For me, this continued until some things changed in my musical life. Along with getting a couple of portable CD players, I finally could afford a CD writer for Christine’s computer when we were engaged. So, tapes went into permanent storage and the almighty CD became completely standard for me. This also meant… mix-CDs! I mainly made these for myself and Christine. However, as my working relations grew around me, I did enjoy making mix-CDs for my friends and co-workers with whom I talked music with the most (which I still do; I just made one recently for my fellow work partner!)

Now, as of 3 years ago, the iPod and other portable media players have replaced the almighty CD, which has now been relegated to permanent hard-copy use (music) or rewrite-able recording and playback (video). Once Solid-State Memory (SSM, or flash memory) goes way up in capacity and way down in price, that will herald the death-knell of the CD format. I’m sure some who read this will be, like, “Well, DUH!”

So why am I writing all this? Because a new music site just took me back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when I experienced the satisfaction of making and trading mixtapes. Muxtape.com is a free storage medium that is set up like your own personal “mixtape”. All you do is upload songs to it (a maximum of 12 files, each one with a 10MB limit) and it gives you your own account URL to share your virtual mixtape to others. This is a very simple, bare-bones interface (I think it’s AJAX), that is even RSS-enabled. It only allows for 12 songs on one account, so it’s not like having a bunch of blank tapes to work with, but I can understand this limitation, given the (albeit dropping) costs of online storage. Of course, another difference is that you can skip around to other songs at will, unlike riding the FF/REW buttons on a tape deck. You can pause songs, but not skip or jog to parts of songs, which is somewhat bad IMHO; I encounter lots of songs with lame beginnings that end up being great songs afterwards. However, this is a promising service with some room for growth.

Well, I will share my Muxtape URL with all my readers here: http://chrisw357.muxtape.com/. Not only did I try to use all my favorites, but I also included songs from diverse genres and sub-genres. When you do listen to it, I hope you will enjoy at least one or two selections. It even has a length of almost an hour, just like one of those beloved blank tapes!

Take care, all!

Nintendo Wii

In one of my postings before last Christmas, I was pining for this system. I was also being realistic; I didn’t expect to get one as long as retailers kept jacking the price up because of near-unavailability. Well, since Nintendo boosted production on the Wii, the store I work at finally got them in at the regular price. I just had to buy one that day, especially since one guy earlier in the day was trying to buy all of them!

If you’ve read anything about this console, I don’t need to tell you how cool this thing is. However, for those who haven’t paid much attention to tech matters like this, I’ll fill in the gaps here. This is probably the very first console to have an emphasis on actual physical movement while playing some of its games. Wii Sports, the game disk that it comes with, has five games on it that make full use of this functionality. The bowling, golf and tennis games were rather low impact, but the boxing and baseball games actually made me break a small sweat! There’s virtually no lag time between swinging the wireless controllers and movement on screen, showing just how far this kind of technology has come for home use. Thus the reason why I haven’t been blogging lately… I’ve been on my feet playing video games and being somewhat active at the same time. (speaking of which, I started rollerblading again… but I digress!)

There’s more to the Wii than just its own games. There’s built-in online functionality, with access to Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel… a place that, admittedly, had me asking my wife to chain down my credit/debit card! You can buy points there, which enable you to get applications and games for download into the Wii console. The games are part of Wii’s Virtual Console, and the shop has access to lots of older games from classic systems, with more being added every week. That leads to another feature; the Wii is backwards-compatible with my GameCube games! Add those things to the Wii’s main home screen, which has other channels such as news, weather and social interaction channels (all free use!), and you’ve got a great diversion from everyday life.

Games And (even more!) New Cubes

In addition to going a bit crazy on Wii’s Virtual Console, buying three classic games, I got two new games for it (ow… my aching wallet!). The first one is The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Yes, I know I already have it for the GameCube, but the Wii version is somewhat different. First, the entire game is right/left inverse and, second, the game makes full use of user movement with the wireless controllers. The first time I swung the sword around with Link, I broke into the biggest grin my face has ever endured! The second game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It’s a game where famous video game characters (mainly from Nintendo), duke it out in arena-style combat. It’s a very enjoyable game, with an immense challenge factor. Also, it makes use of the Wii’s online capability, enabling you to play against other players from around the world.

I also finally got the new cubes I had talked about in my last post! These are different than the 4×4x4 and 5×5x5 cubes I have with the Rubik’s name. They’re made by a Far East company called Eastsheen. I’ve worked with them for the past three days and I have to say that they are made better than their Rubik’s counterparts; they turn much smoother and tighter, due to different internal mechanisms. Because of this, my times have improved to around 5 minutes on the 4×4x4 and 11 minutes on the 5×5x5. So what’s going on with my shattered Rubik’s 5×5x5? Well, I’ll probably put that back together and just have it for display, with minimal use.

I won’t be getting any more puzzles or games for some time now; I want to save for better things. However, if I can find a Pyraminx at a good price, that will be the next puzzle. Rumor has it that, in September, a company in Greece is going to be mass-producing their new Rubik’s-style cubes. These will go by the name of V-Cubes, and they have had working prototypes of 6×6x6 and 7×7x7 configurations. Look them up on YouTube; I already featured the video of internationally-known cuber Frank Morris solving their 7×7x7 prototype in an earlier blog entry. If and when these become available, you know I’m going to be in line itching to get my hands on one!

Before I leave, I have one tidbit of useless trivia for you, garnered from Wikipedia and the original paper on the subject. Did you know that a 5×5x5 puzzle cube has approximately 283 trevigintillion combinations in it? Just to give you an idea of the size of the number we’re talking about, that’s 283 followed by 72 zeroes. A research paper stated that the number is also a very rough estimate of the number of hydrogen atoms in the known universe!!

With that thought, I bid you all a good day. Cheers!

Another video blog entry… this time, I was trying out a beta feature, for editing, on YouTube. It didn’t work out, so I re-did the whole thing on iMovie. It really bites not having the correct processor speed for running both iMovie and a separate cam effects program. I wonder if anyone can point me to a free picture-in-picture plug-in for iMovie?