Waggle Dance

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I’m not so much against the January 1st resolutions to do better, it’s the January 2nd failure to follow through that I hate. But this year has to be different. The last year has been one of contestant changes and challenges, adding a new member to the family, new responsibilities at work, at church, at home, and on line. Without a concerted effort to get organized and better manage the little details, 2008 is shaping up to be a real cluster.

To that end, I’ve started to used a number of web services that should help:

1. Goggle Mail - I’ve been a gmail user for about two years, but just recently, I have begun to use their IMAP and POP3 services to consolidate a number of email accounts I have, including my home account. The search engine makes finding emails a breeze (what do you expect from Google?) and the ever growing list of add-on services and Firefox plugins make integrating gmail into the rest of my life easier and easier.
2. Google Calendar - another great Google service, makes a good central hub for managing my time and keeping other up to date on what I’m doing.
3. Remember The Milk - A very cool task list organizer with tons of options for reminders and integration with Google calendar.
4. Jott - I just stumbled on to this web 2.0 beta - call the “866″ number on my cell phone, leave a message, and it get transcribed into text and delivered to myself, a friend or even my Google calendar or RTM task lists.

Integrating these together, I can voice dial Jott, send a task to RTM, get reminders via my jabber account or SMS and view my calendar, a number of shared calendars, and my tasks all together on my Google calendar.
Of course, January 2nd hasn’t come yet, but 2008 is looking a little less chaotic from here…

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“The computer won’t start.” My wife announced from the other room. My wife and kids share an older athlon 2300+ based eMachine for day-to-day computing. There are few things I dread more than at-home tech support issues, the customers can get so cranky and it’s hard to get them off the line in three minutes. But I knew better than to deprive Mrs. Jackson of her email or my youngest daughter of her Reader Rabbit (running under wine, BTW)
I had swapped out the hard drive recently with one I had on the self and taken the opportunity to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I waited a day or so, thinking my shelf spare had died as well and I would need to go shopping, but when I finally took a closer look, I was getting no BIOS messages on the screen. Great, it’s really dead. Knowing the natives where getting restless, and would not be likely to standby patiently while I played musical parts so I pulled an old, retired server I had from the basement pile. It’s a dual CPU, PIII 550Mhz Tyan Tiger 133 with a Matrox G400.

I knew the hard drive in the server was bad, so I plugged in the 80gig from the wife’s desktop machine just to make sure the box would fire up, and lo and behold - It booted! I scrambled to plug in keyboard, mouse and network cable just in time for Gutsy to quiz me about what resolution I wanted to use on the Matrox card and minutes later my wife is booting me off to do her email (I think she needs a 12 step program for email…)

Think about it… The monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive are the same, everything else, mother board, CPU (two CPUs!), video card, network card, amount of memory, and sound card are all different, most of it older hardware and it just worked. No reinstall, no driver hunting, no phone call to the OS vendor to prove I’m not a software pirate, no nothing!

Thank you, Ubuntu!

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I have been praying quite a bit lately about following a chronological reading plan through the bible in one year and blogging it as I go. While the reading isn’t all that intimidating (I have done one-year plans before) all that writing is. I know in the past, I’ve skipped forward, fallen behind, played catch-up, droned through some of the boring parts (OK, which bugs can I eat and which ones are destestable??) and hovered too long over some of the good stuff. While I know it’s called a One Year Plan - I don’t think it would be breaking the “rules” to get a head start so I can queue up some bog entries and see how it goes. Gospelcom and E-Word Today have a variety of plans including a chronological one I believe I will use.

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I added the BlogRush widget to this site a while back. My hits when up, but almost as important, I really liked the quality of the links being associated with om site. I couldn’t help but checkout a few of the links myself (I hope this isn’t against the rules ). I have been following BlogRush’s blog as they are rolling out a bunch of new improvements, with some excitement but a little concern. Inorder to keep the quality of the links up, the BlogRush team have been reviewing allow of the site currently registered by hand, eventually removing over 10,000 blogs from the system. For some reason I thought I might be a candidate for removal since they kept talking about removing “low quality” blogs. With such a subjective metric (at least they weren’t letting on what the criteria was) I could help but worry about my low post rate (really, I plan to post more…), my lack of readership/comments/backlinks (why doesn’t anybody like my blog…), even my grammar (Hey - I am from Maine, after all…) and wonder it I would make the cut.

Well, the waiting is over, they finished the audit yesterday and I can still see my little BlogRush widget. I made the cut! I’m not sure what that means, I don’t plan on letting it go to my head, but it’s nice to know someone looked at my blog and decided it Sucked Less(tm) that at least 10,000 other blogs.

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Myself and my oldest son where promptly kicked out of the house last night as a steady stream of reagally dressed teen, pre-teen, and pint sized princesses arrived to celibrate my 8 year old daugther’s birthday. As the guy’s-night-out, we ate a ton chinesse food wne went to see The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.
What is it that attracts our girls’ to the life of a Princess or our boys’ to the mission of a hero with magical powers meant to save the world? Is it cultural or is the desire to be special build into each of us by our Creator? He sees each of us as special, unique individuals, knowing the number of the hairs on our head. In the absence of the revelation that He sees us each as princes and princesses, sons and daughters of the King, heros and warriors in His service tasked with bringing light to a dark world, we attempt to fill that built-in need with dreams of Harry Potter and Cinderella.

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