Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Twitter

Over the past year I’ve slowly become more and more hooked on Twitter. For me it started out slowly and grew. At first I didn’t really understand the potential, but the longer I’ve used it the more I see the beauty of it. Although it’s called micro-blogging by some, I don’t see it as a blogging tool. Instead I see it more like a group chat. Sometimes the topics are funny, sometimes random, sometimes rhetorical, sometime helpful and sometimes thoughtful, or insightful or inciteful; but always interesting. 

The trouble with any group chat is that the more people who are talking at once the higher level of noise there is. Some people can go back and catch up on older tweets, but for me Twitter is like the Matrix, you have to look at it live and raw. Because of that I tend only follow a few people, lest I never get anything done. Even though I don’t follow as many people as I’d like, I can receive tweets from anyone who puts my twitter name in a tweet (as long as I haven’t blocked them). Which, by the way I do block spammers and shady characters of all kinds.

If you’re trying twitter for the first time, chances are you already know someone using it; find out what their twitter names and follow them. Also look at who they follow, chances are they are following other people you know. I suggest you give it enough time to let it sink in, see if makes sense to you, chances are it just might.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/ebuford and see who I follow as well. Happy Tweeting!

iPhone Fanboy?

Well I guess you wouldn’t call me a fanboy but I’ve become an iPhone evangelist over the past month. From my experience it’s light years ahead of the win mobile phones as a PDA and it’s a pretty good phone to boot.  I predict that you’ll either buy an iPhone or look seriously at buying in 2009.

…and nothing to wear.

In my closet there is a stack of T-shirts 3 feet high. I have T-shirts that are gifts from my daughter, my sons, my friends, my relatives, vendors, from a game show, from work, from kayak races and from paintball tournaments. All of these shirts have someone else’s logo or pithy saying  I have identified myself with many of these shirts from time to time and some of these shirts have been my favorites at different points in my life.

I realized something recently and it’s become a road block to getting dressed in the morning. I was amazed to discover there is not one T-shirt that I own which was picked out by me. Now most people who know me are used to seeing me in T-shirts and blue jeans, but it’s strange to think that some people may have been trying to understand who I am by decoding my T-shirt collection, which technically isn’t mine.

Now when I come to the simple task of choosing a T-shirt, I’m dumbfounded, I can’t choose a shirt that is me, because none of these shirts were ever really me.  So like a totally  overwhelmed traveler standing in shampoo isle at the local drug store , I feel paralyzed and I can’t make a simple decision; seconds seem like minutes, minutes like hours. This simple process has broken down for me because I’ve been a passive player in my wardrobe collection. Now its’ time to become active in choosing my wardrobe without crossing that most feared line of MetroSexuality.

Elves among us

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

A Tribute By Guest Author

How I see him may not be how you see him... but here he is!

Create your own FACEinHOLE

Keynote for Blackboard conference

Laura got me a spouse's pass for the Blackboard conference which includes Steve Wozniak's Keynote presentation. Looking forward to the presentation I hope I get more out of Wozniak's presentation than I did his iTunes :-)

Thinking of my friend

When I saw this car I couldn't help thinking of Jason Powell and how he should have a chance to play with a toy like this.  Just in case you don't know, his driving skilz are dope!

Las Vegas - we made it.

Yesterday we were tying up loose ends to make the trip to Las Vegas for Laura's BlackBoard Conference. Finally about 24 hours ago we headed out to Midway to catch our flight out. Since the Keynote doesn't start till tonight we were in no rush and just took it slowly; good thing because the plane was way late.

When it was time to board a very inebriated little man (I'm guessing in his fifties) got in line in front of us. You couldn't help smell the alcohol on him, and he held on tight to the wall up the gate ramp. 5 minutes after we were seated the Flight attendants asked him to come with them.... I was praying for him. I don't know what they did with him but as soon as they walked him off, the door closed and we backed out. I was glad to see he didn't put up a fight.

The flight was uneventful but long and the shuttle was painless enough. When we got to the hotel there was a problem getting us the king size bed we had confirmed, but after much effort we got a room on the strip with the same sq. footage but with two queen beds, we don't mind since we have a queen at home anyway. The hotel we're staying at is the Plazzo tower at the Venetian. The place is swank these pictures don't do justice.

here's our room:

This is out the window.... phone camera doesn't know what to do with all the lights

We finally got our room, it was 2:30 am our time. We walked through the casino floor to get to our elevators and there was a nasty stench of old cigar smoke, the people seemed as mechanical as the slot machines they were operating.

When we got to our room I was dehydrated and needed water; the hotel water was the worst I've tasted.... and I've had some bad water! I went down to get some at the closest coffee shop in the hotel and paid $4.50 for a liter of H2O... I was mad, I knew it was late and that I was over reacting, so I stuffed my madness down wherever madness goes when you try to put a good face on it and retreated to my room to drink my life's savings away.

We got up early vegas time and took showers and enjoyed the nice room. Then headed off to Denny's for breakfast.... lots O food, cheap prices. Also we stopped at a drugstore and bought a couple gallons of water on the way back.The walk down the strip left me feeling very sad for both the people who live here and those who are drawn here. The place is crass and there is something that seems to remove dignity from faces of the people I've seen.

Happy to be relaxing at the moment - More later.

Anything Goes

ICANN just announced they will ease the restrictions on top level domain names. This means in the near future you might see DNS names like Granger.Church or M3.BMW. Although this might be a good thing in the long run, I believe this will mean much more confusion for the less than savvy Internet user.

ICANN is also tossing one more wrench into the works, it is going to allow non-Roman characters as part of the DNS address. Soon there will Arabic, Croatian, Chinese, you name it, characters as part of the naming convention. This will mean much more overhead for DNS servers which will not only have to run unicode but will need to have all character sets loaded.

I’m a bit concerned about the new character sets for several reasons, first I’m afraid they will offer more attack surface for the nefarious. Secondly, I’m afraid of the beast the web browsers will become because of the added overhead. And finally I fear these character sets will make it even harder for content filtering to stop unwanted content from reaching our children.

I guess all we can do is wait and see…

Twitters b0rked again

Seems like every time I want to tweet, Twitter is down again. First they get you hooked and the next thing you know you're jonesin to tweet. I wonder if they have some other drug they're selling?

I like Comcast

Indiana Weather

If you've ever wondered what the weather in Indiana is like, this pretty much explains it:

Internet Cafe

My wife went with a team eye care specialists (I Care International) to Guatemala to give glasses to people in this very poor country. People lined up hours before they opened each day, and in four long days they dispensed over 2000 pair of glasses and the surgeons preformed 40 operations. She's been relatively unplugged the whole time with the exception of a few treks to an internet cafe to email me and chat on IM when we could. Here's a picture of the computer at the cafe she's been using:

Good Job Laura! Come home safely!

where have I been?

I won't answer that question in one post, in fact it would take several posts to come near to answering that. I will tell you that the longer I went without posting the harder it's been to post. I've thought about it for a long time now and I've decided to get  back at it.

Stay Tuned!

Remembering Bobby Fischer

I was sad to hear that Bobby Fischer died yesterday (Jan 17th 2008). He was one of my childhood heroes. I remember watching the televised event of his match with Boris Spassky in 1972, he was simply amazing. It's strange to think I've outlived most of my heroes......

Windows Live Writer out of Beta

The Windows  Live Writer is finally out of Beta. I've enjoyed using it as a Beta Product for the past year and have seen it come a long way. You can install plug-ins to allow you to embed video and other fun things. Oh and by the way it is a great tool for SharePoint blogs as well. Check it out:

 

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,SharePoint Editor,Blog editor

Jing

Tired of writing lengthy documents to explain something that you could more easily show someone? Jing might just be the aspirin for that headache. With Jing you can create a quick video including voice. It saves it as flash so you can open it with almost any browser, and it takes a lot less time than creating a doc with screen shots. The best part is that it's free... check it out.

 

Technorati Tags: Jing,Documentation

SharePoint Training - Road Trip

Life has been so busy lately that I just didn't get a chance to post about the Church IT SharePoint training, and now it's here already. So Sunday Jason and I set out for Peoria Illinois with our good friend Dave Mast, who drove up on Saturday. We'll spend this whole week in training, and from what I witnessed today, it's both exciting and scary (see manuals at Jason's blog). SharePoint really is a beast!

I'll be posting more as the week progresses!

Google IMAP = Win / Win

I live in Outlook and I really like the way it's laid out; maybe Microsoft conditioned me, whatever, it works for me. That being said, if you're an Outlook user, you can understand why I don't like the Gmail interface.... I've used it for a long time now but still it's lacking and it's rather slow.

So today I decided to give Gmail's IMAP service a shot. Now I love Gmail !!!

The setup was easy and they have nice screen shots.... and here's why I love my Gmail now:

• It is so much faster
• I can create folders and pull stuff into them - it uses Googles Tags but it works flawlessly
• I can drag things out of one account and into another
• It keeps my email on the server
• I can send from the Gmail account in Outlook

Here are the instructions if you want to try it for yourself.

 

Technorati Tags: Gmail IMAP

Tippmann A5 Upgrades

I picked up a new Tank for my paintball gun today. It's a PMI carbon fiber tank. The carbon fiber is really lightweight and yet it holds 4500 PSI. Also this tank  holds 68 cubic inches of compressed air, so I should get roughly 900 shots off a tank of air. Compressed air is much more stable than C02 so the overall accuracy should improve greatly.

I also picked up a J&J Performance Ceramic coated 16" barrel not to long ago.

Here's some pix of the new tank and the new barrel on my gun. Can't wait to get out and shoot it  :)

 

Technorati Tags: Tippmann A5