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As if you needed any further reason to be super careful about what you say and do on any publicly viewable website (sexting is out), the EFF has released some documents that show how law enforcement and other governmental agencies are trained to use social media sites like Facebook and Google Street View to research and investigate people. And before you get your dander up, it’s all very legal, because all of the information that they are using is publicly available.
The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information. Its policies generally limit employees to using publicly available information. The good example set by the IRS is in stark contrast to the U.S. Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Neither organization found any documents on social networking sites in response to EFF’s request suggesting they do not have any written policies or restrictions upon the use of these websites.
So, if you’re going to do something that is possibly illegal, it’s best if you kept your mouth shut about it on social media sites. Explaining how you exploited a loophole and “found” an extra $10,000 tax return is likely not a very good idea in the first place. Now, we know Big Brother is watching.
I was just reading this: Chile Quake moves city more than 10 feet over at CNN and couldn’t help but share.
The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that rocked the west coast of Chile last month was violent enough to move the city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west and the capital, Santiago, about 11 inches to the west-southwest, researchers said.
10 feet! Can you imagine? We all walk through our lives with certain preconceived ideas. One of those would be the location of our home town. Sure, 10 feet isn’t much, but it’s an entire town! And it’s 10 feet further to the west than it was before!
And if that isn’t enough to blow your mind, read this:
NASA scientists have also credited the quake with shifting the Earth’s axis enough to create shorter days. The change is negligible, but still worth noting: Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
Yep. Now it’s affecting the length of the day and the rotation of the earth.
Gives me a whole new realization of how powerful earth quakes can really be. And makes me glad I live in a relatively fault free, earthquake free zone.
Everybody has ‘em. Little relationship nuggets that they swear by that lead to happiness and utopia. (Nevermind that they are invariably flawed.) And just like dating, SEO and marketing have some rules that are better lived by.
- The Grass is Always Greener: Remember that hot twitter star (@lisabarone) that you had your eye on? How your infatuation got in the way of your relationship? Then, when the relationship was over, that star wasn’t so bright? Sometimes it’s better to be focused on what you’ve got rather than the hot new thing.
- It Still Pays to be Nice: Unless you really are the leather wearing, Harley riding, Marlboro Red smoking, bad boy of marketing, it still pays to be the nice guy on the block. Nobody likes an a$$hat. No doubt, there is money in blackhat, but white/gray hat is still the right thing and will get you further. Besides, do you want to be looking over your shoulder all the time for the father with the shotgun?
- Chocolate Helps: Just because you’re the nice guy doesn’t mean that a little bribery isn’t in order now and again.
- Cut Your Losses: Sometimes the relationship is just doomed. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the two of you are just not meant to be together. And, while it probably is a bit taboo in dating, selling your site is an option.
- Pay Attention: Sitting at your PC and gaming all the time is a surefire way to get dumped. It’s also a good way to not get anywhere, and not sell anything.
Treat your business like a good date and you’ll have success most of the time. Remember though; Sometimes it just isn’t a match. Until you decide that, put your full effort into the relationship and make it bloom!
I’ve been using my Blackberry for almost a full year now and for the majority of that time, I’ve been using an application called twitterberry to access my twitter stream. It works, but has some major failings for me. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow for multiple twitter accounts. Not that big of a deal for most people, but a downside for me. Also, it seemed to load pretty slowly, and the customization is pretty limited. So, with those things in mind, I went looking for something a little bit better. What I found was UberTwitter.
UberTwitter is a great app. It does multiple accounts. Not as well as I could dream, but well enough that it satisfies my needs. Loading still can be a bit slow, but it does it pretty well and when it does update, it remembers where I was in the stream. That’s very helpful. There’s plenty of customization (most of which I haven’t even touched on.). It’s got a “add location” feature that I found a bit annoying. That’s because it automatically added a link to my location on to each twitter posting. I quickly figured out how to turn that off, and now I can add it if I so choose, but it isn’t on every post. It also has the ability to modify the font size which allows me to reduce the size and see more of my stream at once.
There are a few other things that are completely unnecessary for me, but are probably pretty cool for other folks. For instance, the “who’s twittering near you” feature. It takes the location of your device and finds others who are within a certain mileage from you. In a bigger city, that’s probably a pretty cool feature. Here, in rural North Dakota, it’s nearly useless.
Overall, I’ll be sticking with the UberTwitter app. At least until I can give the official RIM app a try and see if it’s any better.
Like many of you out there, I turned Google Buzz on the second I was able to give it a go. When Google releases a product, it’s a bit like when Apple releases something new. Everybody lines up around the block and camps out for days on the concrete to get their hands on it. And just like those Apple addicts, we all should have just waited for the, ahem, buzz on Buzz to die down.
Turns out, Buzz was a bit of a buzz-kill. (I’m going overboard on the puns, but I can’t help it.) First and foremost, it had/has some very serious privacy concerns that caused an uproar among the more intelligent early adopters. Further, it doesn’t add anything new to the market. What it did do was tie a few other Google products together along with several of the more popular social apps like Twitter. Whoopty Do. There was no significant difference that it brought to the table. What it really comes down to is Google doing something they don’t usually do. Playing Catch-up.
As far as Buzz is concerned, Google is to social media as Microsoft is to Search. Always the bastard child that’s late to the party. Everybody knows that you’ll never get to dance with the prom queen that way. Google needs to go back to being innovative. I’m beginning to wonder if Google, like Microsoft, hasn’t taken the complacency path for corporate development. Let everybody else do the hard research and then just buy them up. It’s worked well for Microsoft hasn’t it? (I’m only being slightly tongue-in-cheek here.)
Bottom line for me, I don’t need yet another social app begging for my time. I turned Buzz off.
I’ve heard Jamie Oliver’s name once or twice, but usually related to his cooking shows. I don’t know that I have ever actually seen any of them. He was recently at TED and gave an amazing presentation on Obesity and the actions that he is taking to fight it.
(*note: The video is a bit larger than the layout here, so to see it properly, you might want to click on the ted logo in the upper left or the link under the video*)
Jamie Oliver at TED on Obesity
Incredibly well done and well worth the 20 minutes.
Part of the reason that it’s been so awfully quiet around here is that I’ve been struggling a lot with coming up wih content. When I first began writing here, it seemed easy. And in fact, it usually was. Now? Not so much.
What changed? Me. I think. I used to be ok with trolling around the internet looking for the latest thing and trying to piggyback onto it with a comment or two. I think I still am. For the most part. However, I seem to be having one heck of a time finding anything that I’m even remotely interested in to comment on. Let’s see. There’s the iPad. I can’t stand Apple. I can’t even tell you why other than I think there’s a part of me that hates them because they are the cool kids and I never was. Add on to that the fact that the iPad is not much more than a fancy ebook reader, and I have a hard time finding any real comments on it.
Lately, there’s been a fair amount of talk (buzz, if you will) about Google Buzz. I’ve been playing with it a little and am still waiting for that lightbulb to light up when I figure out why it’s any better than any of the other services out there that I already use and already have set up the way I want. So far, that hasn’t happened. In fact, at the moment, I think it’s inferior to most of the services that it’s trying to replace.
There just is very little that I see that really entices me and jumps up and down yelling “Hey, Blogger! Write about me!”. So, I wander around going through my list on Google Reader, watching my feeds on Twitter, and even popping on to Facebook now and again for something other than games. If I’m desperate, I might even pop over to Digg, Techmeme, or Technorati.
So, how do you find your content? Where do you find your inspiration? Tell me. Share with me.
This site, in one iteration or another, has been around for very near to 5 years now. Even with my somewhat lacking posting habits over the last year or so, there are over 740 posts. As you can imagine, any small change to the structure or linking of the site has the potential to break a great deal of the site. And that can lead to some issues. Some of them are little things that are not necessarily worth your time, but some are quite large. One such is the breakage of links. When your links break, any thing coming into them gets a 404 page instead of what they are looking for. That can be a pain and it can cause for a bounce rate that is quite high. Not good.
Several months ago, this site fell victim to a obnoxious hack. It wasn’t anything serious, but it did mangle the links and permalinks. After fixing and cleaning, I had to reset the permalinks for the site. I did so, but also decided to change the permalink structure a bit. The old structure had looked like this: http://www.thatedeguy.com/archives/01/2010/post-title and the new structure looked like this: http://www.thatedeguy.com/01/2010/post-title. Notice the missing /archives/ in the url. I didn’t like it there anymore. All new posts have the new structure, so they never had an issue. However, any old posts would now load with the new structure, and any links with the old structure were getting 404 messages.
Using Google’s Webmasters tools, I was able to pull a list of the URLs that were linked to my site and that were actively being clicked through. From the dashboard, you can see the “not found” entry and the number of URLs that google was having problems indexing.
As you can see, there were 66 URL’s that were not found. Clicking on the “Not Found” link gives us a list of the troublesome URLs.
You can see the URLs on the left with the /Archives/ part of them circled in orange. Obviously a problem. On the right, you can see how many links there are in Google’s index that point to that URL as well as the date that the link was last attempted to be crawled. Circled in red, you can see that there were several of the URLs that were fairly popular. My hope is that fixing the issue will help with organic traffic from Google.
How did I fix them? Simple. A 301 redirect. I added the following line into my .htaccess file that resides in the root of my webspace.
RedirectMatch 301 ^/archives/(.+)$ http://www.thatedeguy.com/$1
One line of code to rule them all. Now, when someone enters in one of the URLs with the /archives/ in it, it gets redirected to the new structured URL and they no longer get a 404 page. It will take a few weeks (or months) for Google to get around to recrawling those URLs, but the errors should eventually go away when they have been successfully crawled.
I have a very love-hate relationship with The Great Googleymoogly, but Webmasters Tools are one of the things that I find to be incredibly useful. If you aren’t using it, I suggest going and giving it a try. You never know, you might find a few things to fix and help your self out a little.
Jake and I went and watched the new Star Trek last night for the second showing. I was a bit surprised by how few people there were to see the show. Previously, when we went to see the last Harry Potter and when I’ve gone to see the last three Star Wars movies, there were lines in the 10-30 people if not more. Clone Wars was at least 50. Part of the problem, we decided, was the lack of advertising that it was opening on a Thursday as opposed the customary movie opening night of Friday. I can only assume that they were trying to get a big 4 day opening weekend total.
A little back story, then on to the movie. I’m not old enough to remember the first couple of Star Trek movies when they came out. I am especially not old enough to remember watching the original T.V. Series when it first aired. Aside from the Henson epic, The Dark Crystal, I cut my Sci-Fi teeth on summer re-run marathons of Kirk and crew. I do barely remember seeing the last two “original crew” movies (three if you include Generations) in the theatre. And I’ve seen the others several times on DVD. I honestly never cared much for the “Next Generation” movies and only sorta cared about the series. I am, at the heart of it, a fan of the original Star Trek crew.
As a fan of the original crew, it was with some trepidation that I entered the theatre to watch the new “old” crew on the screen. Armed only with a cup of Cherry Pepsi, a kiddie popcorn and some candies, I found my seat and awaited the show. There was some stupid commercial for the new Honda hybrid. Who decided that commercials before a movie was a good idea? Probably the same goon that will decide that a commercial every 30 minutes during a movie for a break will be good too. Also, previews for G.I. Joe, Transformers 2, and the new Terminator. G.I. Joe still does nothing to impress me. It might help if they weren’t perverting the storyline so much. The Joes are G.I.s. American Soldiers. I could care less if your global audience will respond better to a global force. It’s not U.N. Joe. And why must the Transformers look so “shard”-y? What happened to the good old clunky transformers of old? These new ones aren’t even recognizable as the same transformers. There’s only one good thing about that movie. Her name is Megan. Terminator actually looks like it’ll be alright. Likely a rental for me, but that’s better than the other two will get.
Enough of that, on to the movie. Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t seen it yet and want to remain innocent of the details, stop reading here and come back afterwards.
The movie opens on the U.S.S. Kelvin. This is the ship that James T. Kirk’s father was the captain of. This is also the final few minutes of the timeline that we are all familiar with. Shortly, a Romulan named Nero causes some rather drastic timeline changes. George Kirk ends up flying the Kelvin into Nero’s ship to try and save his wife and their newly born baby, Jim. We then jump many years into the future to a 11-12 year old Jim who has apparently stolen his step-father’s antique corvette for a joy-ride. This is where the car over the cliff part from the trailers is from. This is actually one of the first of several “goosebump” points in the movie. Kirk jumps from the car as it goes over the cliff, pulls himself back up, and a cop that was chasing him arrives. Kirk stands up and says to the officer, “Is there a problem Officer?” The officer asks him his name. He straightens his back up an proudly declares that he is “James Tiberius Kirk.”
Again, we jump forward. And we begin to start meeting the crew. Ohura is first as Kirk is hitting on her at a bar. We also get to see Kirk take one of his first signature “beat-downs”. Captain Pike shows up and tries to convince Kirk to join the Federation Fleet. Says something about being an officer in 4 years and a captain in 8. Kirk shows up the next morning at the take off for the cadets, sees Pike and says “Four years? I’ll do it in three.”, then boards the ship. After he boards and finds a seat, another of the crew shows up, ranting and raving about how dangerous space is and how easy it is to get sick, and starts rattling off ways you can die in space. Meet “Bones”. We also get to meet Spock in there, but on Vulcan as a child and then again when he makes the decision to join Starfleet.
We see Kirk in his usual cocky self when he defeats the Kobiyashi Maru situation. Spock accusing him of cheating in front of the academy board. Then we get notice of some sort of space storm and some funny goings on at Vulcan. The cadets all scramble and board transports up to the waiting starships. Kirk is still under suspension due to the cheating allegations so is unable to board, but McCoy gives him some illness and is able to use starfleet code to get him aboard. Kirk then figures out that the space storm is just Nero’s ship and that they are headed into a trap.
A small battle ensues, there is a space drill attached to Nero’s ship that is boring a hole into the core of Vulcan. Pike goes to “negotiate” with Nero and covertly drops Kirk and Sulu off near the drill. Kirk and Sulu manage to disable the drill, but too late as Nero has already deployed the “red matter” into the core of the planet and creates a black hole at it’s core. Bye-Bye Vulcan. With Pike gone, Spock becomes captain of the Enterprise. He also gets into an arguement with Kirk and ends up stranding him on a planet. Where he meets old Spock. Learns what really is going on. Time travel and such. Then, one of the other great moments of the movie, we meet Scotty. Scotty and old Spock (Spock Prime) set up the transporter to transport Scotty and Kirk back to the Enterprise.
At this point, Kirk has already been told by Spock Prime how to gain control of the captains chair by getting the new Spock to display some emotion and resign his commission as captain. Which of course he does quite well. Then new Spock beat the hell out of him. After taking the helm, Kirk takes them back after Nero. He and new Spock are able to transport to the Romulan ship and create some half-baked plan that Spock declares has only a 4.3% (I think. That might not be the actual number he used. It was that small though) chance of working. Which, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is Kirk speak for it does. They are able to destroy the ship, save Captain Pike, and get back aboard the Enterprise.
Back at the Academy, Pike has been promoted to Admiral and Kirk is being promoted to Captain. New Spock meets old Spock. Oh, and Spock and Ohura have a thing. That’s new.
My thoughts: It was really fun to see the “new” cast of the crew take on the old personalities. Without exception, they all did a wonderful job. You really could imagine them all growing older and becoming the crew we all grew up on. They managed to get a McCoy “I’m a doctor not a xxx Damnit!” in. Also a “She’s giving all she’s got, Captain!” from Scotty. And at least one “Fascinating” from new Spock. I know I’ve likely missed a few things, but those were some of the key things that I noticed. The Ohura/Spock love thing was a bit odd. Mostly because there isn’t any hing of that in any of the other Star Trek movies or series’. The only explanation we could come up with is that it’s a different time line. Poor excuse really, but the only one I think they could use.
Overall, this was an awesom movie. 4 1/2 or 5 stars. The actors portrayed their characters nearly perfectly, but also made them their own. The graphics were great. And who could argue with the nice views of the Enterprise we got.
If you are a Trekkie, you really should try and get to the theatre to see this movie.
If you ask Kevin Trudeau, a “Debt Cure” (especially a Debt Cure he wants you to know about), is merely a collection of information designed to help you rid yourself of debt. Perhaps that is true. But what information and at what pace?
Trudeau’s book talks about legalities and ways to get the companies to either completely write-off your debt, or significantly decrease the balance. Sounds nice, and it might get rid of your debt faster, but in the end, it only leads to more debt. Making those agreements with your creditors gets reported to the credit bureaus and can have a rather severe affect on your credit score. And if you get the easy way out, your much more likely to get yourself right back in that problem.
So, what exactly is a debt cure then? In a previous post, I suggest reading the book “Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey. I still suggest that, as it is still the foremost book in legally and responsibly getting yourself out of debt. And I have to think that the odds of recurrence are much smaller after having gone through Dave’s TMMO than following the advice of Kevin Trudeau.
The only way to truly cure debt is to properly educate yourself on the way that personal finance works and take positive action towards your personal finance goals. Taking responsibility for the debt that you’ve incurred is a good step, but you also have to formulate a plan for paying it off and keeping it off.
If you’re interested in learning more about personal finance, I write at another site called Beating Broke and you’re welcome to stop by and read for a while. I’ve also written a Free guide to your credit score and how it works that you can get at Beating Broke. Please come take a look and begin your journey to being debt responsible.