Monthly Archives: December 2007

Candice is due in a few days! I will be sending updates to our flickr feed throughout the big day. I may update the blog but flickr is where the news will hit first.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ltgedeon/

For those who are technically inclined and wondering why I am using flickr, it is because they made it easy.

Oh, you can subscribe to the flickr feed at: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=18476062@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Or just enter your email in the box below. You will get an email from alert at SendMeRSS asking if you really want to subscribe to the flickr feed of baby pictures. You have to click on the “click here to subscribe” link for it to work.

Hey don’t laugh this is a major accomplishment with the technology I am currently using. If I were doing this often I would get a better phone. This is fine for two posts a year.

I am still trying to figure out wp-mail. This thing is a mess. It looks like they may have had a good idea, but it is not very well explained. If I ever figure out how to include a picture I will have to let you know. Although I would be glad to figure out how to send plain text from my phone.

You will hear more about this, I am sure.

Learning Chinese has the added side-benefit of making all other languages a little more accessible. I have always known that machine translation was available and have used it occasionally, but it was never part of my daily work-flow. I now have buttons for Chinese data entry and auto-translation. Other languages are just a few clicks away.This came in handy today when the only site with information about the problem I was having with a new website was in German. A few times in the past I have run into site in another language and went searching for a different site. Today, since it was easy to do, I let the computer translate.

It worked fairly well. There were a few misspelled words that did not translate, but the grammar and spelling on English language tech sites is pretty poor, making them hard to read too. As a matter of fact, the German site was more helpful and readable than the typical tech-support forum.

The industrial age gave us more stuff than we could possibly use. The information age is doing the same with knowledge. Every moment of every day is recorded in full and boring detail. I try to keep up with friends and family, and at least the highlights of the industries that I am a part of. I also try to keep up with sports because if I do not, I will have nothing to talk about when I am with half the guys in America and an unfortunately large percentage of the ladies.

I simply do not have time to watch TV, so I am sometimes quite unaware of the girl who lost her dog but found a cat with three legs that all the news anchors have decided is the most important thing of the day, but if I chose to, I could read about that and millions of other news events every day on the web.

Twitter and Facebook updates generate information that is irrelevant within hours, but it will around for years. Billions of business transactions are being stored for perpetuity. Less than one in a thousand blog posts are seen again after the first day but they sit there waiting.

Waiting for what?

Shouldn’t all the old useless stuff just be deleted? Who really cares what you ate yesterday?

Who cares? Your great-grandchild… or maybe mine. We are now storing the data that will be used to create a time machine that brings people back to the ancient days of the early web. Children will be able to go back 200 years in time and relive the days of their ancestors in a way that we can only dream about.

And who knows – if we can figure out this health thing, it might be us traveling back 200 years to remember what life was like when we were young.

Could you possibly live in a world where each person had only one square meter to call their own? Fortunately, I am talking only about arable land. No desert or frozen tundra.

Here is the good news. If everybody in the world moved to Jamaica, we could all still have a square meter of our own. If we turn the island into a twenty story building we all get a decent sized apartment.

Wow! It’s a small world after all!

‘Twas the hour before Christmas

And all through the house

Not a person was sleeping

Not even the mouse

The mouse is named Meatball

The bunny, Kaleigh

The pig’s name is Oink-oink

And that is just three

The fourth stuffed animal

Sitting next to the wall

Is a bear named Hoho

The coolest of all

The animals knew that

Christmas was near

The kids needed sleep

Their job was quite clear

But nobody knew how

With Anna and Pete

Phillip and Bethany

To do such a feat

Then all the sudden

Meatball said

If the children were sleepy

They’d go to bed

Kaleigh and Oink-oink

Tried something bright

They jumped and they climbed

To turn out the light

But Hoho was smart

He knew all along

To get them to sleep

Just sing them a song

And as Hoho sang

Each child went to sleep

For the rest of the night

They made not a peep

Take a look at the sidebar. Right below “recent posts” in a section I call “local network” is a new search box. It lets you search everything I have said a topic. And not just on my blog but in a lot of other places on the web. And not just what I have said, but also what my friends have said about the topic too.

To be fair that box may be more helpful to me than it is to you, BUT you can use Lijit on you blog too. Or you can just go to their site and do a search from there. Point is, if you search your own network you will get results that are highly relevant to you.

Ok, it’s another cool tool you do not have time to try right now, but it will be there for you when you need it.

For every problem you have there is a website to help you solve it. For everything you do there is an easier way to do it. There are even websites to make it easier to find easier ways to do things.

I am constantly adding new ways to make life simpler to my shared items list. I am doing this so you do not have to go out searching for information. It just comes right to you.

So why are you not doing things the easy way?

Yes this is a real question. Please tell me what can I do to make life easier for you. I have a really cool tool where I can install a program for you or help you setup an account from here without having to actually be at your computer, so if something seems to hard, I can do it for you and/or show you how. Just let me know what you need.