I figured that I would try out the Posterous autopost feature to see if i could send one email to the service and have it update both my blog and Facebook. I’ll include a couple of pics as well to see how all of the services handle it. Everyone made it home and they will probably all have colds in the morning!
Posted via email from blindsquirrel’s posterous
Since the last one came out so huge I wanted to try one more that was taken with a different app in the iPhone.
Posted via email from blindsquirrel’s posterous
Let’s see how easy it is to send an email to posterous with a picture and have it also post to my blog – all using email from the iPhone.
The first post took maybe 10 seconds before everything was posted. Amazing.
Posted via email from blindsquirrel’s posterous
Over on Friendfeed, Scoble had already convinced me to take a look at Posterous, but I already host my own blog using WordPress so I didn’t really see the value. I’ve really neglected my blog lately but I still post things via Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc. and was thinking it would be handy to be able to post in one place and have it update everywhere that I want it to, including my blog. What makes it even better is that I can easily posting using just plain email if I want – just like I am doing for this post now. I realize that I can use email to post to my blog, or the WordPress app for the iPhone, but this really has a ton of potential to be the single place for posting.
Check out the post at http://thenextweb.com/2009/08/13/posterous/ for more info and get yourself setup for free. I’ll have to try a few posts with different media like pictures, etc as well.Posted via email from blindsquirrel’s posterous
Chances are good your day went better than mine. After a few hours at work today I made the really awesome discovery that I had somehow ripped my pants. After heading home to change clothes I was on my way back towards the office when a terrible screeching sound starting coming from the front of the car. It was a lot like the sound a train makes when it is passing by and the rails are just screaming for mercy.
So I turned around and headed back home, changed my clothes to something I could get dirty, took the front wheel off the car, got the noise to stop, took the car for a test drive to make sure it was OK, came back to the house, changed clothes (again), and headed back to the office.
On the way back I needed to stop at Best Buy to pick up some blank DVDs. I passed a large gray van while looking for a parking space and did not see the Subaru WRX backing out of the space next to it. The driver had to hit the breaks to avoid hitting me. I parked one row over and was surprised to find the woman that was driving the Subaru waiting for me. Then the screaming started. She was really ticked off and ran out of swear words to call me. I think she actually started making up a few.
So I decided to try something new. Normally I would have thrown it back at her with both barrels but this time I just tried apologizing. She kept on yelling. I said it was an accident and I said I was sorry. She kept on screaming. It said, relax, I said I was sorry and I didn’t see you pulling out because of that van. The screaming continued. I tried one last time to be nice about it and even made sure to smile and said, last time – I’m really sorry.
Then it happened. She hit me with one final “you fat f***” and then gave me the finger and drove off. Hopefully it made her feel better.
There are a number of lessons to be learned here:
So the day was not one of my better ones but I’m sticking with the high road. I hope your day was better than mine!
We decided to head out to Toys R Us to do a little browsing and get a few ideas. 90 minutes later it was over. Shopping done for the holidays and I’m pretty sure we single-handedly pumped enough cash back in to the system that we no longer need any kind of bailout.
We were not planning on buying a single thing today, but the sales were too good to pass up. The store was packed to the point it was hard to get a cart around in there.
Looks like the stores are going to get agressive with pricing to get people out there spending.
While driving home from a party the other night I was reminded why I don’t like regular radio in Pittsburgh. The song Morning Train (9-5) by Sheena Easton came on and we were both laughing about how long it had been since we heard that one. Then we quickly realized how awful it was. But, it brought up how much Sheena changed once Prince got hold of her. So we started searching YouTube for her videos and were listening to Sugar Walls when it hit me that I may have just heard the worst lyric ever – “blood races, to your private spots.” Lame. That one gets my pick for worst.
But what about the best? I’m not sure if this one is the best or not, but it has stuck with me the longest. It came at a time when I couldn’t stand Bruce Springsteen but the girl I was dating loved him and forced me to listen to him all the time. I’m definitely more of a fan of his these days and my favorite lyric has to be “is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” from The River.
What are your picks for the worst and best lyrics you’ve ever heard?
I just spent the better part of the night trying to get data back from a friend’s MacBook that had a failed hard drive. Those of you that have had this happen while running Apple’s OS X may know the sickening feeling you get when all you see when you start up is an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark. Sometimes you can get lucky by resetting PRAM and telling the system what disk to boot from, but this was not the case with this MacBook. It was painful and took forever to get any data back at all.
Fortunately I had my MacBook Pro with me to help get through this. I had DiskWarrior on my MBP and figured I would just start up the MacBook in firewire target mode and let DiskWarrior have a look. (You do vacation with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable, don’t you? Yeah, me neither, but I was lucky enough to find one at a Best Buy in Myrtle Beach since everything else had just closed. Unfortunately I paid a premium for that cable from Best Buy, as you do with all cables you buy there, but I was in no position to complain and they were my last option for the night.)
Well, the MacBook had different ideas about how this was going to work and I could not see the hard drive regardless of what I did; hold down the Option key. Nothing. Hold down Shift. Nothing. Hold down Command-S. Nothing. Command-V. Nothing. Hold down C to boot from a Tiger install DVD I had in my bag. Nothing. Hold down T for firewire target mode. Nothing!
As a last ditch effort I decided to make sure I was doing things correctly and tried to put my MBP in target mode and bring up the MacBook using my MBP’s hard drive. It actually worked. I still could not see the local drive on the MacBook, but I was able to run DiskWarrior against the MacBook and it did find the hard drive and did it’s best to repair. But it couldn’t. It was pretty much beyond repair and DiskWarrior gave me one last chance to pull off all the data I could in preview mode, so I copied as much of her data as I could to my MBP hard drive and every USB key I could find. That got us most of the way there. Now she can deal with Apple since it is under Apple Care and they can replace the hard drive. In the end I was able to salvage their pictures, documents, settings, and music.
So here is my simple recommendations for protecting your data relatively inexpensive while still getting backups done in a decent amount of time:
There are other backup utilities out there. Do some light reading on Google and see which one makes the most sense for you. It doesn’t matter to me if you are using 10,000 floppy disks, USB keys, USB hard drives, copying to other computers somewhere in your home, backing up to one of the hosted backup solutions, or using .Mac – just do something! As we put more and more data on our computers the problem just gets worse and worse.
Best Buy has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External Hard Drive on sale for $99 right now. It has USB connectivity and should work very well for backups. I may buy 2. The price goes up if you need Firewire connectivity or more storage, but this looks like a decent size and fit for me. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is to check our backups. It’s such an easy thing to do and none of of do it like we should. None of us. It is not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, it is a matter of when. Good backups will lessen the pain when you have to rebuild that computer, or reload the hard drive from scratch.
I have always relied on the design of others for my WordPress site. There are some really, really talented people out there and I’ve been very happy with the themes they provide. But I decided to play with CSS a little and modified a Theme I found that happened to be a modification of someone else’s theme.
So Nikolaos Maounis started with the Simpla theme by Phu. He modified it and made it widget capable. I then took Nikolaos’ theme and changed colors, fonts, etc. until I found a combination I liked. I wanted something very simple, basic, elementary, two-column, easy to read, with a right sidebar. I’m happy with it for now, but I’m sure this will wear off eventually.
Thank you to Nikolaos and Phu for creating work that the rest of us can learn from. Nice work guys.
