Tap, tap, tap… Is this thing still on?

Well, it’s been around 5 months since I’ve posted anything here on the Furrygoat Experience. While it’s easily my longest blogging hiatus since 2001, I have no idea on even how many people are even ‘listening’ in any more. Anyways, here goes… I’m kicking the tires to see if this thing still has some gas left in it.

While my original intention for my little corner of the ‘net was to share interesting links and drop bits of information hoping that others found it useful, I have to admit that this go around is a bit more selfish: I’m in the process of trying to reconnect.

So on one hand, I’m using the blog as a way to hold me accountable. On the other, I’m also hoping that it helps me reconnect with the things that I’m passionate about that I’ve let slide on by with the daily routines.

In traditional fashion, here’s some other random things on my mind lately:

• Food and Diet. This is a tough one because I don’t eat fast food, rarely consume anything deep fried and typically make healthy choices when eating. I eat grain bread and haven’t had red meat since July (and sure, have the occasional cookie). Yet, I feel like something is still way off balance. My weight is up (need to lose 10 lbs) and I consume way too much coffee. I don’t count, but I’m easily at five to seven shots of espresso a day.
• Health and Exercise. I’m planning a late July or early August climb of Mount St Helens. Having a goal (like a climb) usually helps me get back into the exercise swing. The good thing is that I’ve been in the gym the last 5 of 7 days, so we’re off to a good start.
• Computers. The software industry has changed. It’s odd - as a long time Microsoft developer, I don’t even own a Windows machine any more. I wonder though: does it even matter any more? Most of the time I’m on email or the web and the iPhone handles most of my routine computing and communication needs.
• Simplification. Made great strides in 2008 to reduced my clutter, but it still feels like we have way too much ’stuff’.
• Career. If anything, I want my focus to return to rediscovering what I love about gadgets, software, etc. The so called ‘pundits’ spend way too much time whining, and too little time writing great software and kicking ass. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at big companies versus small ones, and trying to find out where the passion lives these days.
• Overload. There’s just too much of ‘life’ that is online now. I find I often check twitter or facebook while driving. There’s just too much living virtually going on. The funny thing is that it’s all just noise. Seriously - debates on twitter authority? Who really cares.

Anyways, lots of things rattling around my head.. We’ll see where this goes….

Last year (almost to the day!) I decided that I was going to quit blogging for awhile. A few months later, I returned. Perhaps the same will hold true this time around, but I’m just not feeling like the blog is doing it for me lately.

I can be found on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading, and so it goes.

This one cracked me up.

[Jeffrey Zeldman] Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Back in 2001, I started writing content to The Furrygoat Experience for two reasons: First, I wanted a have a place to share interesting links or news items - I figured if I was muddling around with something like building a home theater, playing with embedded devices, working on interesting projects while I was at Microsoft, etc., someone else must be interested in the same thing. Second, I wanted a place to drop little nuggets of information so I wouldn’t have them all over the place - links on my desktop, random emails, etc. In other words, this site was a ‘backup brain‘.

But what happened?

It’s 2008, and as Jeffrey (and Chris Pirillo) point out, the ‘decentralized me’ is taking place - personal content is being strewn all over the Internet. My personal ‘vanity’ site is becoming just that - a placeholder for my online presence and the occasional post, while my live day-to-day content is pushed regularly between YouTube, Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Upcoming, Delicious, etc.

Now, that’s all great, but I’m not sure how I feel about this yet.

On one hand, each site is dedicated to a specific set of functionality, and for it’s particular feature-category (photo-sharing, videos, events, etc), they usually do a fairly good job of managing and aggregating data.

On the other, it drives me nuts to have all of my ’stuff’ all over the place. Perhaps its some basic instinct, but I like to have a centralized place where all my “stuff” is (which is why I have the blog).

Of course, this feeling (obviously shared by others) is what has lead to the rise of the latest Internet craze - the ‘lifestream aggregator‘ class of sites. Great - another website to manage a bunch of websites I have managing my stuff. It’s a never ending cycle, and feels like we’re in a constant pattern when it comes to our data: expand, contract, expand, contract, expand, contract. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Now, I know this can’t be a storage problem - I have over 600gb of free space on my Dreamhost account, with most of the space being unused today. Perhaps it’s just a simplicity problem - it’s a lot easier for me to quickly push some status update to Twitter, or publish a video on YouTube without having to worry about video transcoding, finding a viewer that works cross platform, etc.

Anyways - its interesting times.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make you happy. For me, it’s always been when Rainier Cherries make their debut in the local stores signaling the beginning of summer.

While I’ve always thought heading down to Pike Place Market and picking them up is a better deal (and more fun), having them available in the local QFC is just downright convenient. This summer, the contest will be to see which is more expensive: gas prices per gallon, or cherries by the pound.

Right now, cherries are slighty more expensive at $4.99/lb, local gas is at $4.41/gallon for regular.

I bet this flips by July 4.

Brought to you by Where the Hell is Matt?

Direct link to video

[Wired] The movie is also an example of how effective a slide show presentation can be. Presentations are a powerful way to get your message across both verbally and visually.

While I agree with the key points that Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design makes about presenting (knowing your audience, usage of images and fonts, etc), I feel that it’s my duty to point out that while I really enjoyed it, my wife fell asleep while watching An Inconvenient Truth.

Ya know, the new Clone Wars movie may actually turn out to be pretty cool.

[TV Squad] I’m convinced they were parodying the Legion of Doom’s methodology from the Challenge of the Super Friends which ran from 1978 to 1979 on ABC. Their simple goal was stated in the opening credits: the conquest of the Universe, with a subordinate goal of the destruction of the Super Friends. They failed every time, and I think that’s partially due to poor planning.

As I read through today’s headlines on Techmeme and Technorati, peruse my social networks and tweet my life away, I can’t help this overwhelming feeling that all of these Web 2.0 companies have business plans that are no more credible than the Legion of Doom’s plan to ‘travel back in time to prevent the most powerful Super Friends from existing’.

Where have all the software companies gone? Does anyone make products any more?

Perhaps Tyler Durden is right: “Only after disaster can we be resurrected“.

It looks like the pain of last summer has returned - moles.

Coincidentally, my neighbor decided to put in a sprinkler system this week. I wonder if all that digging and noise (there was a concrete slab they jack hammered) in their yard sent those little creeps straight back into mine.

Looks like an early morning run over to Home Depot to pick up some weapons to help me in this seemingly never-ending fight is in order.

As usual, the pre-WWDC Apple predictions and hype is now in full force, so I thought I’d throw my own in.

Here it goes: I predict that I will buy whatever iPhone or iTablet is announced.

(Photography: ‘6strings‘, creative commons license)

I’m somewhat of a pack-rat when it comes to old email.

While I don’t keep every deleted and sent item (unlike others I know), I have a pretty good archive of email that dates back until early 1998 in several Outlook PST files. Over time, I’ve found that keeping interesting links, documents, conversations, etc., in mail is one of the best ways store and easily find information. Using IMAP, it’s also a great way to keep things automatically synchronized between my mail ‘access points’: phone, laptop, web.

Additionally, the folder metaphor for mail organization broke down for me a long time ago - Now I just keep everything in a folder by year, and keep my Inbox relatively empty. Who cares how messages are organized? Using mail’s built in search (especially Spotlight) enables me to find things way faster than just looking around for a mail in a specific location. David Gelernter wrote (thanks to Michael for the link):

“If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.”

While talking about file systems, the same applies to mail.

Now that I’m on a Mac, having all that data locked up in .PST files left me with only one choice to move them forward: Using Outlook under Fusion, I cracked open those old dusty archives and dragged them into year ‘folders’ on my IMAP server. The process was incredibly easy, now I have to deal with a few winmail.dat files (TNEF Enough looks like it should do the trick).

What am I going to do with all that data? Frankly, I have no idea. It’s nice having it around and easily accessible, and it makes interesting reading to see what you were thinking about 8-10 years ago. Although, I think it’s safe to delete that Costco renewal email from 2000…

[ValleyWag] Want to see Paris Hilton’s MySpace profile? How about Lindsay Lohan’s? Don’t worry about those pesky privacy settings. Thanks to “data portability,” a faddish technology movement that the Valley has been buzzing about for months, you can see any profile you want on MySpace.

Security between two endpoints is as only as strong as the weakest link.

While users should naturally demand and expect privacy, we live in a world of the social network du-jour. Now, I’m not saying that data portability shouldn’t be blamed or that users shouldn’t feel comfortable living in the world of the ‘cloud’, but users really do need to become more aware about the hazards of being online. They shouldn’t be so giving of their personal information and publishing private details to every social network under the sun. The only way to guarantee that it doesn’t go all over the internet is not to put it there in the first place.

I was just checking out the website for Windows Server 2008, where they have a “mascot” robot named IT 24-7.

For some odd reason, IT 24-7’s head reminds me of another famous Microsoft legend.