Category Archives: personal

Audience Participation

Hey you! Yeah, you. I need your help. I’m seriously contemplating what it might be like if I considered the possibly of maybe or even potentially pondering the notion that it could conceivably be a good idea to revamp this blog. Rebrand it, if you will. In order to make that happen some time during this presidential administration, I’m going to need input from you, my loyal readers. What I’m looking for are the following design ideas.

Should I keep the current title? I’m thinking about making this an eponymous blog. So many refer to this blog by my pseudonym already. Why not just go with the flow?

I’d like some ideas for new quips (the snarky line just below the title). I get bored easily, so I’ll likely be rotating them (as usual), so throw as many at me as you can think of. Be creative (and PG, please). What sentence, phrase, or other collection of words sums up this blog to you?

I’m slightly colorblind. As a resent, my aesthetic tastes tend to differ a little from others’. Add to that fact my rather eccentric personality and you get a parchment background horked from the Vatican with a coffee-house color scheme. If you could rebuild this blog from scratch, what colors and/or patterns would you use?

The Latin’s staying. Deal. Now that you’ve accepted this fact, help me to make it less intimidating.

Three columns? Two columns? One column? How would you organize things around here?

Lastly, do any of you fine folks know of some good pro bono blog template designers (ala Eris Designs)? Blogging’s fun and all, but I’m not throwing any more money into it.

Number Johnny Five is Alive!

blogfest5.jpgLast night was Pittsburgh Blogfest 5. These events just keeping getting better and better. This time, we had a special treat in the form of über-blogger Robert Scoble. Robert is a “technical evangelist” for Microsoft. He also co-wrote a book with Shel Israel called “Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers“. Don’t let his current employer fool you, though. He’s been known to use his blog to dis the 800-pound gorilla on occasion, as well as praise their competitors. Anyhow, Robert was in town to participate in a panel discussion on business blogging organized by the Pittsburgh Technology Council. The event will be podcast and I’ll get you the link as soon as it’s up. Since Robert was to be in town anyhow, someone thought it would be cool to invite him to our blogfest. We celebrated his 41st birthday with a cake and the gift of a Terrible Towlâ„¢. He seemed to have a good time with us. Everyone seemed to enjoy his company as well. I spent a little while talking to him, but I didn’t too deep into anything because 1) I’d be talking out of my tuchus (regarding a lot of tech industry current events) and 2) I would have had to admit that I’d never read his blog (though I’ll rectify that soon). Despite having a pseudo-celebrity in our midst, there was no press presence this time. I’m sure those who saw the horrible picture of me in the Post Gazette are thankful for that. 😉

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PVR PC Bleg

I’m thinking about putting together a PVR
PC from an old PIII 866 with 768Mb RAM. Eventually, I will probably buy a Hauppauge
PVR-350
because it has hardware MPEG2
encoding and decoding. In the meantime, though, I’m stuck with a crappy ATI
TV-Wonder
for video capture. I do have a Creative
Labs DXR3
(aka Sigma
Designs Hollywood Plus
) MPEG2 decoder board. Unfortunately, the PVR software
I’d like to use, MythTV, doesn’t
support the DXR3 for video output. Do any of you fine folks know of either a way
to make DXR3 work in MythTV or PVR software that supports the DXR3? Thanks in advance.

Taking Stock

It’s pretty much inevitable that the end of the year inspires us to take stock of what we’ve done well, what we’ve done poorly, and what we’ve failed to do in the last year. I asked one of my readers to offer constructive criticism. Here’s the response [with links added by me].

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