Mandolin Camp 2009 Weekend




Having passed 1,000 followers on twitter this past weekend has gotten me thinking of twitter and how I use it.I use twitter daily for a variety of reasons. Part IRC chat, part live newswire, part magic 8 ball, twitter is many things to many people.My testimonial for twitter usually goes like this: I'm a news hound. I update all the newsites many times a day to get the latest.Recently when there was an earthquake in California, do you know where I heard about it first? On twitter! People in California sent messages like 'did you feel that?' and soon there was a groundswell of up to date information on what happened. When I called my friends in LA to ask about it, they were shocked that I knew because it hadn't made the news yet. Twitter is as real time as real time gets.Here are some random observations:
Email defaults to 1 person to 1 person. You have to do something special to mail a note to more than one person usually by CCing or BCCing or sending to a group email address.
Twitter defaults to 1 person to many people. You have to do something special to send a a twitter message [tweet] to just one person. How do you send a twitter message to just one person? By prefacing your message with a D for a direct message [that is truly private] or @ message which is public but directed at one or more people.
It's a very interesting time to be discovering twitter because there is a lot of action in the way of new sites, applications, and interfaces into what twitter does. For the old timers who have road tested twitter in the real world, twitter has become part our daily information intake.Here's my twitcard as an example of what people are doing with twitter data.
It's that time of year. Spring has come in full force. Of course here in Central NJ, we were greeted with snow flurries but I digress.
Now is the time of year to start our seedlings, rake our lawns, and start on those spring cleaning rituals.Rob and I were dismayed to find out that we will need a permit to accomplish a spring project we've been planning. Yes here in Central NJ we need a permit just to put up a little tool shed in the backyard. To add insult to injury, not only do we need to get a permit from the Inspections department, we need to get approval from the Zoning department as our shed is over 10x10 feet.So this shed will not be done before May is my guess. We were hoping to have it done in April. Funny how the best laid plans get reworked.On the topic of spring, I've impressed my friends with my little seedlings that I've started for the first time. While it's not nearly as exciting as this video, there is a simple pleasure in watching things grow from seed.Have you any gardening plans this season?So Rob and I bit the bullet and got a new kitchen floor put in. We hemmed and hawed because it was a lot more expensive than we thought it was worth but it had to be done. In fact, I've been waiting for a new floor from the day I bought the house 8 years ago!The old floor had what I referred to as ghetto vinyl tile. It was horrific and it was coming up pretty easily. The previous owner obviously had a dog which put lots of scratches in the floor and those scratches trapped dirt and made it very hard to clean.Some of the things that we did in preparation for the flooring were shopping around. Thanks to some great net tools like servicemagic.com [highly recommended] and the better business bureau website at bbb.org , we were able to get a number of estimates from reliable and highly rated sources. That certainly gave us a level of confidence in our final vendor selection.Have you heard of servicemagic.com ? It's a service we've come to use for all of our home improvement projects. It works like this:
The last few days have been full of twitter messages to @wefollow with hashtags like #creative or #technology.You may be asking yourself what is that all about? Well it turns out that the young entrepreneur behind digg.com Kevin Rose has launched a new service that is quickly gaining traction in the world of twitter.The new site is called wefollow.com and it is a directory where twitter users tag themselves with 3 attributes via hashtags [the #something ] and this website collects all names with a similar hashtag and sorts them by popularity.This service is pretty useful and solves a few shortcomings with twitter. Twitter is all about real time interaction but it doesn't show people a way to find other users that have shared interests without a lot of trial and error. Wefollow.com solves this vaccum pretty elegantly Just tag yourself with three things that describe you and then others will be able to see you in the directory and if they choose they will follow you.How did I tag myself you ask? I chose #gay #mba and #pmp It will be interesting to see how tags change over time and whether the limit of three will ever be raised. More than one person has bemoaned that rather arbitrary limit.Check out wefollow.com and give it a spin
A friend in Australia shares this video of a drive on a lonely highway in Oz.
This footage is amazing to me.I've never seen a dust storm like that and can only wonder what it was like.Amazing huh?
Have you heard of netbooks?
If you haven’t yet, you will. A netbook is basically a smaller notebook computer that is CHEAP and miniaturized. How cheap you ask?
Well I just picked up an Acer Aspire One this weekend from Staples for $299 US [Model: AOA150-1635]. This model included a 120 GB HD, webcam, 2 card reader slots and that includes Microsoft XP home as part of the package [which aint free!]
Why the Aspire One? Well I tried the EEE PC that Target had for $249 US and was horrified at how unusable the keyboard was. Sure it’s got to be smaller than a normal keyboard but it also has to be usable! That and the build quality left a lot to be desired.
Some folks recommended the Dell Mini 9 netbook which is getting a lot of press. The Dell looks like a good machine but when I added in all of the peripherals that the Acer had the price shot to above what I wanted to pay. My price point for a netbook was sitting at around $300. Above that and it seemed to be too close to the price of full laptops nowadays.
When I stopped in at my local Staples store, they had the Aspire One on display and the build quality, looks, and keyboard feel were way ahead of the EEE PC making it well worth the $50 premium over the EEE PC. I got mine in blue.
Being somewhat of a glutton for punishment, within hours of taking the Aspire One home, I was installing the Linpus lite distribution that Acer created for the Aspire One. I would have bought it over the XP version Acer sells but no one had it locally so I had to install it as part of a multi-boot system. After a few hours of tinkering and with a lot of reference material from the excellent aspire one users forums. After a day or so I had a triple boot system that had XP Home, Linpus Lite, and Ubuntu.
Of course my glory was short lived when Nerstalker a.k.a. @aforonda said:
“meh, get mac os on there then i’ll stand up and salute”
Not today I wont. ![]()
You may be asking, as some friends did, why a netbook when you have a Macbook white 13″?
Well, to be honest, I use the macbook as my main machine. Having to unplug it and plug it when I want to browse and tweet from the couch was overkill. That plus the heat of the machine made it uncomfortable for extended use on my lap. It is just too much machine for the light browsing and tinkering one does when vegging on the couch. That plus it is not really one to throw in the bag when travelling without feeling like you’re taking your life in your hands. What if it got stolen? Of course I do time machine backups but who wants that drama?
I took the netbook into the city recently and couldn’t help but notice that my anxiety about having a computer on the road was greatly diminshed. The difference between having a $299 laptop or a $1200 laptop stolen is HUGE. These netbooks are as close to disposable as one can get while still being useful.

One of the unexpected benefits of getting older is the ability to reminisce about how things used to be.As a young gun growing up in and around New York City in the 1970's, one thing that made the 'CITY' magical was how many characters there were everywhere you looked. By characters, I mean colorful people that defied what a normal person should look like, speak like, or behave. Sometimes these people were strange and scary to a little one like myself but more often than not, they were endlessly entertaining to watch and think about.