Layered Thoughts

Drove up to Simi Valley today for the Thanksgiving weekend so before I left, I emptied out my trunk and found my old PSP in it.  I haven’t used it in forever so I grabbed it and charged it up and have been playing with it a bit over the last two days.

I’ve decided that I’m going to install some hacked firmware onto it. Why? Because it allows me to install emulators for old game systems, which means, yes, that I can play NBA Jam wherever and I whenever I damn well feel like it.  So awesome.

The hacked firmware will also allow me to play downloaded game ISO files from the memory stick (Going to need a bigger memory stick).  Pretty nice since I do not play video games enough to warrant spending what little money I have on new ones.

I’m also going to use it hopefully for watching some movies on it.  I’ve downloaded a Windows app that makes it really easy to convert .avi files to psp formatted files so all of that will be simple once I get to that point.

Finding this thing has provided me a few good article topics for this blog that I’m hoping to publish in the next two weeks or so.  I’m thinking about writing these articles so far:

1. How to install the latest hacked firmware onto a PSP
2. How to play ISO files on a PSP
3. How to convert movies to watch on a PSP

I’m also thinking about writing about whether or not great graphics makes a video game actually better.  I mean, I generally only play old school games that I grew up with, so I’m under the impression that it’s not the visual quality but the immersive quality that makes a game great.  I’m hoping I can explore this idea in a post soon. I think it’s funny that I have these 4 posts lined up to write and I’m not even that into video games.  Oh well, good hacking stories at least.

Real quick post for now. Put up a new free download, the Abstract Priorities Poster I had made a while back.  Figured it’s pretty cool so I’d unleash it on the world.  Check out the downloads page and steal that bad boy. Other than that, just been spending some time with friends this weekend so didn’t get much work done, but soon I’m going to do a few writeups on some new techniques I’ve learned how to use in Ruby plus I’m hopefully going to unveil a new website that I’m planning on launching as soon as possible.

I have to start this off with the picture as none of my own words could ever do it justice… So we’ve all used a toaster oven before, that awkward appliance that is not as quick as a regular toaster and not as powerful as a real oven.  And no doubt you’ve seen this warning message before as I know I’ve seen it a few times myself. But just think about it for a second.  The people who engineered the toaster oven are acknowledging that shit might catch on fire if you use their product.  Rather than figure out a way to prevent this from happening, the engineers just slapped this warning message on the machine and said “Be a fucking man and unplug the oven when it starts burning.” Their instructions are pretty serious as well, considering if you did open the door you would start a mini backdraft that would make it even harder to tell the newscaster why your hair is still smoldering. I would love to meet the engineer who said “we don’t need to fix this problem, we just need a sticker.”

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I get back to my car from school using the trolley, which gets me to my car right around 10pm.  One of the radio stations down here plays “Love Line”, a show I grew up listening to on KROQ back home but now its on a K-Whatever station that I can’t remember at the moment. I used to listen to Love Line when it was Dr. Drew and Adam Corolla and I don’t know if the reason I liked it back then was because I was like 13 and anything about sex was the coolest thing ever or if because the show was truly better back then.  But now I just can’t listen to it. First of all, the fact that a psychologist is giving out sometimes serious advice to kids who have deemed their problems bad enough to warrant calling into a nationally broadcasted radio show to ask about them seems sketchy enough. Granted, most of the calls consist of kids calling in saying “I was tossing off and some got in my eye, should I go get tested now?” But then there are much more serious questions. Like tonight, a girl called in saying that she had to share a bed with her dad a few nights ago because they had family in town and she had nowhere to sleep and that she woke up in the middle of the night and the bed was rocking and though she didn’t look to see, she thought it was because her dad was masterbating.  The girl was literally telling this through tears.  While she’s saying it, Stryker (the guy who replaced Adam Corolla) is mildly chuckling as he’s asking for more info.  Dr. Drew starts his response in a serious manner, asking if she actually did see anything or if there has ever been any other abnormal activities from her dad before, which she answered no to both. Both hosts then proceeded to laugh as they finished their responses, telling the girl to give her father a break, it was probably nothing, and even if it was something, it was probably in his sleep anyways. What kind of fucked up 30 second pschological assessment is that? They know nothing of the father, nothing of the girl, and end up laughing at her on a very popular radio station after she fearfully told a story about how there was a possibility that her dad’s masterbating had woken up a few nights prior. While it is pretty odd that the girl (22 years old) shared a bed with her father, I don’t find it that odd depending on the quality of the father daughter relationship up to that point. But to laugh at the situation just straight up appalled me. The show has seemed to have lapsed to a state of merely laughing at everyone who calls in, with some of the people actually having real, sincere problems. What a waste of air time.

Starbucks is a funny place.  I came here this morning with the plan of probably staying here for most of the day as I have some projects that I need to get a good amount of work done on.  I’m sitting against the wall at a small table at the Bucks closest to my house.  It has a mediocre view of Garnet Ave, a street that is ridiculously full of drunk 20 somethings at night but is almost completely empty during the day.  In front of me is a man who managed to use up both power outlets on the wall until I got up and asked him to plug my computer charger in (At which time I discovered he was Scottish so that it made all better) and who has decided that instead of doing the right thing and and answering his cell phone, he will instead stare at it as it rings loudly all the way through to his voicemail. Next to me is a man who has a box of Crayola markers (You know those ones from kindergarten?) and is coloring little models of pirate ships.  There’s not really much else I can add to that description that could paint a better picture.  He’s just coloring in pirate ships using children’s markers. Behind me is a man who is getting tutored in I would guess Biology (they keep talking about DNA) by a kid that probably isn’t even half his age.  I guess I have some respect for that considering the older man has the ability to swallow his pride and ask for help from a college student.  But they’re kind of loud and the work I’m supposed to be doing doesn’t have anything to do with alleles so I wish I could slide my two foot table just a foot farther away. Meanwhile, I forgot my headphones, leaving me surrounded by about 5 different conservations with the soundless gaps filled in by milk steamers and blenders. And yet I still feel more productive at a coffee shop than at home…

I decided this weekend that I’m going to start giving away stuff that I’ve made to better help other people who might be looking for the same things.  Whether it’s contracts or agreements or organizational stuff or maybe just a poster or design I put together, if I decide it will be free, it shall be free.  So as I come across more things I want to give away, I’ll put up posts saying I did so and then link over to the Downloads page so you can go check them out and download them to your heart’s content.  As if a Project Time Tracking Spreadsheet could really make your heart content.  You get the point.

The title says it all.  When I decided to start up this blog, I took some time to go through the plugins section on the Wordpress site to see if there were any plugins that would really make my blog great.  Obviously this was just a blind shot in the air because I had never used Wordpress nor did I have a reason to need anything more than what comes with the default install.  But here we are anyways.  So these are the plugins that I picked to add to Wordpress install in the last few days: Broken Link Checker

Automatically checks broken links in your Wordpress blog and notifies you of any that it finds.  Broken links don’t help anyone, so I figured this was a good little maintenance tool

Google Analyticator

Makes embedding the Google Analytics tracking code really easy.  Granted, copying and pasting the tracking code is something a preschool kid can do so long as he eyes and an index finger. But still, it makes it trivial.  It also adds some settings that would require at least two fingers to change manually so that makes it totally worth it.

SEO Smart Links

SEO is pretty dull.  But it’s necessary if you want your site’s traffic to grow organically.  So any plugins that do this stuff for me gets an A in my book.  This plugin automatically searches through all of your posts and identifies tags and categories and parts of the body that are shared with other posts and pages on your site and turns them into links.

Since Search Engines crawl your site using your sites internal links, it helps to have a good web of links set up to make the crawling go as easily as possible.  Plus, I don’t have to do it.

Sociable

Sociable adds icons to the bottom of every post that makes adding that post to the popular social news sites a single click operation.  After setting up the plugin, I was presented with a list of news sites I had never heard of, but after a minute I found the ones I use pretty frequently (except for Hackers News unfortunately).  I added this plugin in the hopes that one day someone will submit me to Reddit or Digg.  I’ll probably end up doing it myself in desperation but still, it’s there if someone feels so inclined.

Video Quicktags

I set up this plugin because of my second post.  I had embedded the video, which was from Blip.tv, but then discovered that it was set to autoplay. I fucking hate autoplay.  So I set out to stop it.

I couldn’t figure it out from the Blip website.  Usually I’m good at that stuff, but that day I was failing pretty hard.  So I found some other video plugin and used that to embed the video and it worked great.  Then last night I went to my blog to check things out and discovered the video wasn’t working.  After a few minutes I just decided to toss that previous plugin and subsequently found Video Quicktags.

This plugin adds links to the top of the posting box for all of the major video sites that make posting a video a cut and past operation.

Plus there’s no autoplay.

WP-Spamfree

As I wrote in my previous post about WP-Spamfree, I chose this plugin over Akismet simply because it required less effort to setup.  That’s it.  I just didn’t want to put in the effort.  As long as it doesn’t block real comments, I will consider it a success.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Kind of like SEO Smart Links, this plugin attempts to create a list of 3 links at the bottom of every post that point to other posts that are the most similar on your blog.  Some more SEO link building basically.  It’s supposed to run through every part of your posts, from the titles to the body to the tags and categories and use a special algorithm to choose the most relevant posts to link to.  This is all great, but you just need to make sure you have enough posts for this plugin to run through to really see success with this one.

XML-Sitemap

This is supposed to create a sitemap for your site after every post you make and then submit that to all the major search engines.  I know Sitemaps are important but I’m not sure if sending one after every post is really a best practice.  Plus, from what I’ve read, Sitemaps are only necessary if your site is hard to crawl for search engines.  If I find out this plugin screws anything up I’ll toss it but until then, I think it’s fine.

So that’s the list.  Not too many plugins there, and I feel like they all serve a specific purpose that should help me in some way down the line.  I’m sure I’ll be deleting some and adding some as time goes on, so I’ll write about that when it happens. Hopefully someone can use this list when they’re setting up their own Wordpress blog one day.

Decided against Akismet for now basically because I’m lazy and installing it requires going to a page and filling something out then getting a key and yada yada yada so I just blew it off and found a different plugin to block spam. Supposedly it blocks 99% of all automated spam.

WP-Spamfree

I’ve actually installed a shitload of plugins that I decided would make me the greatest blogger the world has ever seen so I’m planning on putting together a post that lists them all and their function and why I justified installing them.  Probably throw that up here this weekend.

WP-Spamfree is easy, just download it from the link above, upload the zip file into your Wordpress plugins folder, uncompress it, go to the plugins page in your Wordpress blog, click activate next to WP-Spamfree, and it supposedly just works.

We’ll see if those Canadien web hosting bastards can get to me now.

It has happened.  Getting spammed on day 3.  Here am I, waking up to an email saying I have a new comment, stoked like no other because people like me, and it’s an ad for Canadian Web Hosting.  While they might have gotten me if I lived in Canada, I instead live in one of farthest American cities from Canada.  Good try you web hosting Canuck. So how am I going to stop this spamminess?  Well I am going to install Akismet.  It’s a spam blocker for this here Wordpress thing.  I don’t have the time to install it right now, but tonight I will so I will do it and take some screenshots and write up a little tutorial on how to do it. In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for any web hosting north of the border, go ahead and get clicky on that link in the comments of my first post. Seriously though, don’t click it. Seriously.

A company I really admire in the world of business and technology is 37signals. They have created a handful of very powerful business collaboration and management products and have become very successful doing so. They have also become pretty famous for being the guys who do what they want despite what’s the fad in the industry. They have defined themselves outside of the quickly changing fads of the tech world and because of that have become notable figures in the universe they contrast. (Sorry about that last sentence sounding like the thesis statement from an essay by an 8th grader) Recently, one of their cofounders, Jason Fried, gave a presentation about how to market a product or business through educating your customers. First of all, here it is (It’s only about 15 minutes long): [blip.tv ?posts_id=1442785&dest=-1] What I took away from Jason’s talk was that most businesses today are afraid of anyone knowing how they do things and instead are focused on paying to market their product through advertising in order to gain new customers.  They are doing the work of searching for new customers. Jason is advocating that businesses should instead strive to educate their customers on everything pertaining to their how their product works and how it will help thm.  By teaching people about how you solve problems and make great products, you’re bringing people in as fans of your business.  And when you make a name for your business, you’re making a name for any products your business might create. And I think what’s most interesting about what he is saying is that he’s pointing out that if you’re good at what you do, you’ll succeed even if you’re telling everyone how you do it.  By making a name for yourself and helping those who are looking to solve the problems your products solve, you’re creating a brand loyalty that is unattainable through traditional media outlets.