Thanks to Dutch giving me a wireless keyboard and mouse that he wasn’t using, I decided to start using the HDMI out to hook it up to my TV. It worked out pretty well:

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this setup, so far. It’s even really nice for writing code. I think the most awesome part about the whole thing is that it can do full 1080p. My previous HDMI-enabled machine could only do 720p. Since the video card is pretty beefy (for a laptop), I’ve been playing a few games in this setup. It’s nice. Just as good, if not better, than sitting in the recliner and playing on a normal console.

Now, I need to get a gamepad that’ll work with it wirelessly …

Windows Advisor is an easy-to-use self-help tool that notifies users about problems on their PCs and helps fix them. Windows Advisor scans users’ PCs continuously, notifies them about important issues, and, when possible, suggests easy fix solutions. The program also provides users with self-help solutions, including a 1-click checkup function that enables them to check their PCs whenever they like; tips and tutorials that teach users how to perform certain actions on their PCs; and a toolbox that concentrates the important tools that are found in the operating system into one easy-to-find location.

I feel like I’ve heard of something like this before … but, I can’t for the life of me remember where …

$5 Million seems a lot smaller, now that Microsoft has stepped into this particular game. Only, Microsoft has a much wider scope in mind: “Windows”

I should’ve expected something like this would happen over a year ago. Of course, I also didn’t expect I’d be more successful now. Only … I don’t have VCs to answer to. Wink, wink.

Thanks Skype. I appreciate this “feature”.

In some cases, I wish that I was …

So Long … And Thanks for All the Fish

Yahoo responded to the letter from Carl Icahn, but I think this is the lead out before the final nail goes into the coffin. Microsoft has said they’ve moved on, though? What happens if this new board of directors can’t get the software giant to bite? I think Dvorak put it best. This squad looks like a great bunch of sellouts.

If Yahoo can’t fend off Icahn, it’s game over. If Icahn does manage this take over, selling out to Microsoft might actually be the best case scenario. Can anyone spot the irony in that sentence? So, we’re looking at the possibility of Yahoo being sold to Microsoft where the clash of culture and technology is sure to eventually doom all of Yahoo’s services … or Yahoo being cut up and sold to the highest bidders … which is sure to eventually doom all of Yahoo’s services. I can’t find the win in this situation, can you? Oh right, I’m not a Yahoo shareholder … maybe I should be.

I feel really sorry for some of the more prominent members of the PHP Community who are currently employed at Yahoo. I can’t imagine that they would have any trouble finding a new home, if they decide to leave after whatever ends up happening. Maybe everything will settle down and nothing will happen, then they’ll get to just keep their jobs in peace. Who knows?

Let’s pick on CNET for a while …

How much is your soul worth?

CNET says theirs is worth 1.8 Billion.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one, yet. CNET covers a lot of technology news. CBS is a major broadcasting company. While this could mean a lot of worthwhile tech coverage could make it onto any of the CBS TV Networks, which would be very cool, the transaction still feels dirty. It feels like a mainstream media buyout of something tech enthusiasts hold dear to them. What if CBS kills CNET? CNET Networks includes the likes of CNET itself, ZDNet, and GameSpot. All of which are frequent reads of mine and plenty of people that I know. I think the best return on this acquisition would be if a lot of this content made it onto the CBS airwaves. Anybody know how likely that one is?

I just hope this one has a happy ending. More tech and gaming content on TV is something I’m looking forward to. TechTV was great. The G4 deal was a disaster. G4 was better before the TechTV buyout. I can hardly stand anything on that channel, anymore. At least we have shows like This Week in Tech, Diggnation, Systm, and a few other cool shows from Revision3.

I’m not sure I like the deal yet, but I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

Wired Technica?

I don’t know about you, but I always thought of Wired and Ars Technica as being rivals. Now, they’re practically siblings. In-laws, of course. It’s hard enough thinking of the two sites as related, at least add the “by marriage” (or massive monetary exchange, whatever) part to soften the blow a little.

I’ll go ahead and stand right up to say that I don’t like this one. I dislike Wired and pretty much everything related to the site. Never been a fan. It might have a something to do with the fact that their website is an unmanageable piece of garbage that looks like a script vomited text onto a plain background. Or the writing style that just grates on my nerves everytime I (painfully) read an article there.

I like Ars. I enjoy reading Ars. The writing style is appealing and the visual style of the site is a lot nicer and easy on the eyes. I just can’t imagine that level of sophistication being shacked up with the likes of Wired. Hopefully this one won’t change too much. If I start to see the level of quality at Ars drop off, I’m going to be highly disappointed. Slashdot has been disappointing me lately, too. With Digg getting less and less tech news (it’s all carbon copied from /., or Reddit at this point), it’s looking like I’m going to have to pick a new tech news site to keep tabs on, before too long.

I’m really hoping to see happy endings from all of these different deals. The Yahoo issue is particularly interesting to me, because of Yahoo’s use of PHP. I think we’ll see some changes at all of these various sites in the coming months.

I’m thinking about giving Thunderbird a shot to see how well it manages feeds. I’ll report back with my feelings on its performance and whatnot. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.

What I think is absolutely fascinating (and maybe really, really stupid) is the fact that Twitter is receiving Venture Capital … To the tune of about $20 Million, for their third round of funding. For the uninformed, Twitter is a completely free service. They don’t even serve advertisements on their site. Again, for the uninformed, VCs are looking to see a return on their investment. A big return. In order for them to feel more confident about their investment, they usually place their own selected individuals in C-level or higher, often Company Board, positions within the company. That last point is the sole reason why Omega Vortex is against taking VC money.

I suppose I’m curious as to how Twitter expects to monetize a free service in a way that doesn’t severely anger their userbase and doesn’t include a buyout. Twitter has taken enough VC money at this point that buying options probably look unattractive to most would-be interested parties, because the price would have to be so high. Just serving advertisements on the website wouldn’t be enough income, because everyone that I know that uses Twitter rarely spend more time on the website than to start following new people. There are quite a few Twitter clients available, Spaz being the one that I use.

Speaking of severely angering the userbase, can you imagine what it would be like if Twitter tried the absurd idea of sending adverts through their own service? On second thought, would people even notice? Additionally, would they actually care? Spaz lets me keep up with all the latest from the people I follow, but if I get really busy and stop paying attention to it, quite a number of tweets can go by before I look at it again. Plenty enough for several advertisements, if they were to come every few hours or so, to go right by without my even noticing them.

People already hate advertisements. If they’re going to be there, they need to be mostly unobtrusive. I wonder how well people would cope with “Twitter Spam” … not to mention what kind of data mining it would take to send targeted advertisements, if the ads were to be targeted at all. Google’s done a decent job at serving up targeted ads that don’t get in your way or on your nerves, if implemented correctly. Ads that aren’t targeted are just annoying, these days. All ads are annoying, but those are certainly the worst.

Back to the thought of a buyout, what would the buyer actually be getting? Going back to the earlier mention of Facebook, neither Google nor Alexa seems to think that Twitter is all that interesting. Twitter’s traffic rank on Alexa is 780. Sure, that’s within the top 1000, but with still no obvious way to monetize the service, who’s going to throw a worthwhile bid at them? Obviously, Twitter isn’t going to take an offer that won’t make up for their investment money and leave plenty behind for the people behind the madness.

Twitter’s an interesting concept and it’s a nifty way to keep people in the loop on whatever it is you’re currently doing. Since mobile updates are as easy as a text message, Spaz easily lets me update without having to go to some webpage, and it updates three locations at once, it’s easy to remember and use.

With that said, I don’t think it’s worth $20 Million in Venture Capital.

Overall, it’s a relatively accurate little program. It lets you tag your own applications and sites, so you determine what’s referred to as “personal”, “procrastination”, or “work” to take from a few off my list. As you can see, I haven’t been working very much on my computer for the past couple days. I classify “work” as time that I spend doing things for Omega Vortex. Planet AT&T is one of my tags and will probably appear on my top 10 eventually, the more I use my laptop for day-to-day tasks at the store.

My only complaint is it seems to do all of its data management in YAML and it often chokes on various things. It also seems to completely lose the data intended for the request it tried to send when it does choke. Right now, I’ve only got a little over 8 hours logged into RescueTime and I’ve spent way, way, way more time on my computer than that. Edit: As a followup to this, it just tried to process another update and failed because it didn’t like something about the blog. So, it just randomly loses data. The whole last 30 minutes went without being logged. Hurrah. Maybe it’ll lose less data if I make it send updates more often, but they’d probably hate me if I spammed them with updates every 5 – 10 minutes.

Another complaint is that, from the error messages, it seems to be written in Ruby … but, I won’t go there.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with it. It just needs some work on its data delivery and not completely losing data when something goes wrong. I’d be cool if it threw out the offending entry in a parser error, but it seems like it just bails out on the entire request and doesn’t try again.

I’m hoping to use the time tracking in conjunction with my new phone to hopefully get myself more organized. The time tracking will be a motivator to stop procrastinating and doing other things when I should be working. The phone is a very easy way to keep track of important times and dates, because I’m very forgetful. Especially, when I get involved in something and lose track of time.

So, here’s to hopefully becoming more productive. I really need it, about now.

Case in point, I was reading Planet PHP this morning and a 2-year-old entry that outlined the ongoing childish attitudes some people within the PHP Community have resurfaced. If I hadn’t checked the dates on all of these particular blog entries, I would’ve thought this was new material. Since this entry served as a gateway to another blog entry that was a specific attack on Chris Shiflett, any random passer-by who thinks this is all new stuff is going to a) have negative thoughts about the “whiner” in question; or b) have negative thoughts about Chris over something that’s two freaking years old.

I implore you. If you’re the author of any blog software, stop doing this. Not only is it extremely annoying to get repeats of old crap in my RSS Feeds whenever someone edits something, it can lead to potentially hazardous things like this resurfacing and causing unnecessary damage to one or more people’s reputations.

I guess it could be worse.