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Tag: delicious

How Facebook and Twitter are killing my blog

by Mark on Dec.19, 2008, under general

There once was a time that I posted multiple entries in a day on my blog, and on a regular basis. My most active month on the blog resulted in 30 posts. That was December 2005, the end of my most active year on my blog, averaging almost 19 posts per month (ppm). I slowed down a bit in 2006, averaging just over 11 ppm, and I averaged 14 ppm in 2007. So far in 2008, I have averaged just under 9 ppm. Since may, I have not had more than 7 posts in a single month. December is almost over, I’ve averaged only 2.5 posts per month since September, and that includes this post! I have managed to always have at least 2 ppm since my first post on February 28, 2003.

Then came October of last year. All of a sudden my wife is on Facebook trying to communicate with current and former students. I decided that if my wife had finally bit the bullet on this, I might as well, too. Pretty quickly after setting up my profile on Facebook, I jumped onto Twitter. Between being able to tweet from my cell phone and getting Twitter to update my Facebook status, I had quick access to microblog on-the-go. Unfortunately for my blog, that meant not sitting down and hammering out posts.

This post is itself an example of this. I originally started writing this post in September, but it had sat untouched as a draft since September 25th. Why? Because it was much more convenient to microblog on Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, BrightKite and TwitPic, than it was to open up my WordPress admin page and finish the post. I even found it easier to just share the interesting things I had read in Google Reader, or post links to other cool things using delicious.

Of course, it didn’t help that I was spending eight hours in class every Saturday and an additional five to ten hours per week on homework. So, I guess in addition to Facebook and Twitter, I can blame my lack of blog activity on grad school, too.

We’ll see if I can bring the activity up a little bit during my short break (only to see the activity plummet again in mid-January as the new quarter starts). We’ll see how that goes.

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Parents can be so cruel

by Mark on Aug.22, 2007, under Uncategorized

I have debated posting about this for a week or so now. I found yet another interesting link via del.icio.us. This is from a blog called Boobs, Injuries, & Dr. Pepper. You can understand why I debated posting about this.

The link I found was to a post made in March called Filed Under: Parents 1, Smart-Ass, Teenage Son, 0. When I found the link, I was at work, and I figured it might be NSFW.

I read the post when I got home, and it was definitely worth the read. The author is a mother of three, who’s oldest son is fourteen. The son had been joking with his mom to bring him to the store to buy condoms. The author finally had enough of her son’s jokes, and she retaliated. Hilarity ensued, and ideas now roll around in my head if I get cursed with a brat one day.

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Daft Punk and groovy dancing girl

by Mark on Jul.05, 2007, under general

I haven’t been writing a lot of what I might consider substantive posts in recent weeks. I guess I’ve just been tired from staying up too late and then getting up early for work. Also, I haven’t been turning the laptop on at home very much lately. At any rate, here is yet another meaningless, but fun, post. There was a video on BoreMe titled "Groovy dancing girl" that showed up on del.icio.us. The video is a well edited footage of a girl dancing to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

I didn’t like the presentation at BoreMe, so I found the video on YouTube. Here it is for you enjoyment:

After having watched this video and the video that Scott posted, I think I’m going to have to get this catchy song. I don’t care if it’s super repetitive, I like Daft Punk.

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Cleaning house

by Mark on Jun.19, 2007, under general

I have moved into the virtual world to do some house cleaning. I just deleted my del.icio.us account and re-registered to clear out all of my old links. Of course, I exported the links that I had before doing this. I’m going to try to clean up the clutter that is my former tagging system. We’ll see how well that goes, and how long it takes me. Wish me luck!

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Where do you want to eat?

by Mark on Jun.17, 2007, under Uncategorized

The standard reply around our house to the above question is, "I don’t know." A couple of years ago, I modified a random number generator that a student worker had made for class so that it spit out random restaurants in the area to help answer the question that could plague us for an hour. Someone has made a Web 2.0 version of that program, but much more helpful.

At Miniature Cube, you tell them your location, the restaurant style, your budget and the cuisine, and click on the Decide! button. The site will spit back a restaurant decision for you. If you don’t like that decision, use the Re-decide? sidebar to have the site make another decision for you. The site is still in its infancy, so the reviews are are sparse. Hopefully the site will grow, and it will become more useful. Only time will tell if it will be another bust.

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Modest Mouse fanatic’s music video

by Mark on May.29, 2007, under general

This video created by a Modest Mouse fan might just cross the line from fandom into fanaticism. The video is an animated collection of 4,133 still images taken by a digital SLR camera. Each of the stills is of various city settings, and in each of the stills is a photocopy of a frame of video provided by Modest Mouse. Some of the stills actually contain the video frames projected onto walls of various buildings. The still images were collected together and animated, then put to the music of the video from which the photocopies originated. While I’m not a big Modest Mouse fan, this video is probably one of the best music videos I have seen in a long time. Check it out:

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Mathematical plants

by Mark on May.13, 2007, under general

Science News Online has an article about the mathematical patterns that can be found in plant life. Most notable is the appearance of the golden angle (approximately 137.5°) and the Fibonacci sequence (the numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …; the addition of the last two numbers produces the next number).

The article does a pretty good job explaining the findings that someone who has had high school geometry should be able to understand it. Hell, you might not even need that much math. Then again, if you haven’t had that much math in school, you probably aren’t going to be interested in the article.

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