EGLZFAN.com - Random Neural Firings

I was visiting my parents last weekend when I showed my mother my setup with Google Reader.  At this writing I have 38 RSS feeds ranging from Roll Bama Roll to Telegraph’s election coverage to Scott Adams’s Dilbert blog to Charles Krauthammer, all dumped into Google Reader.  In a given 24-hour cycle, I would guess around 300-400 new articles are delivered to me, but since 98% of the time all I care about is the headline, I can typically get through a pile of that size in about half an hour.  I also like Google Reader because I can “star” or “tag” items for archival (either because I really like the article or because I want to make a special point of reading or re-reading it later), and another feature I find myself using frequently is the ability to quickly email any story to anyone I want.

So Mom is standing over my shoulder, watching me click around in Reader, and she asks me, “How did you ever learn about all this?”  I mumbled some nonsense because I really didn’t have a good answer, and then luckily my daughter grabbed our attention, neatly diverting me away from the topic altogether.  But, I thought my answer was unfair, and it seemed like Mom was genuinely interested in maybe learning a bit about how to set it up herself.  So, I decided to post on my setup and let you, the reader, adapt it to your liking.
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Every now and again (maybe twice a year) I find myself in a bit of a rut.  It’s a very general feeling - maybe I don’t like most of my cases, maybe I’ve got a project that seems way bigger than I can handle and I can’t motivate myself to start working on it, maybe people around me are out of sorts themselves somehow.  This is one of those times.

I started looking at ways to break out of the funk.  I enjoy writing and I enjoyed writing on this blog.  So, I started wondering why I stopped.  The main reason was time, but that’s a convenient excuse for not doing anything.  The number two reason, though, was that administering this thing was a pain in the ass, because of comment spam.

So, I finally started digging into the settings for the blog, and cleaning house.  First, all the spam comments have been trashed.  Spam-bot users have been shit-canned, as well.  I also locked down the signup so that every new user has to go through me.  So, if you want to email me to ask me to create a username for you, I’ll be happy to do so, and then you can comment anywhere you want.  Hopefully I’ll be more inclined to post more regularly in the future.

I’ve also recently started becoming Googlized.  I absolutely love Google Reader, and it has replaced every RSS reader I have experimented with over the last few years, permanently.  I’ve also recently been ramping up my use of Google Calendar, which is pretty cool because you can split your calendar into multiple layers - very handy for keeping your work life separate from your personal life, and allowing some to view one but not the other, but still allowing you to see the whole thing in one place.  All of this is probably fodder for new posts in the future.

So bottom line - welcome to my second effort at my blog.

As any of you who have been reading this blog have probably figured out, my brain is cluttered with more useless crap than I can objectively measure. Predictably, my home - and especially my home office - and how I live are an unfortunate reflection of that phenomenon. Earlier this week, something in my head snapped. I am going to slay this clutter dragon now if it kills me. (more…)

“See, it ain’t so fucking easy, is it?”, especially if that cynic was President Bush and he was talking to all the folks at Va. Tech who are catching shit for their perceived failure to properly secure the campus against a massacre perpetrated by (apparently) a pissed-off, lovesick college kid (I’m not going to dignify him or his acts by using his name). (more…)

A lot has been written/said - too much, really - about the whole Don Imus situation. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last week-and-a-half or so, here’s a quick recap: Don Imus was watching the Rutgers women’s basketball team on television and referred to them, on air, as “nappy-headed hos”. This obviously derogatory term should clearly never have been uttered, and it was quickly determined Imus was insensitive and should never have said “nappy-headed hos” over the air. I know this because there has been a media shitstorm around this controversy for over a week now, punctuated by the re-broadcast of the taboo term “nappy-headed hos” over the air several hundred thousand times. For his part, Imus reached out to just about everybody, appearing on Al Sharpton’s radio show to apologize, appearing on national television to apologize, meeting with the Rutgers women’s basketball team to apologize, and generally groveling at every opportunity. For his trouble, Imus - who has 40-odd years in the business and is involved in charity work everywhere, including a “cancer ranch” with his name on it (I’m too lazy to look up the exact name) - was shown the door. (more…)

Okay, I guess I should post about something a little lighter than the national tax issue today. Apropos, LifeHacker has a pretty good article on cleaning out your wallet, which is cool and all, but it led me to Just One Club Card, which is a VERY cool free service. You can take up to eight of those discount/club cards crammed into your wallet and boil them down to one “card”, which is itself the thickness of two pieces of paper. My Kroger, Best Buy, Office Depot, REI, Mens Wearhouse, and PetSmart cards are all out of my wallet, which is now literally 1/4″ thinner. Very, very cool.

Recently I took a family vacation to Pennsylvania to visit my brother and his wife. We drove, which gave me a lot of time to think about a lot of stuff. I decided I needed wanted a blog, not just because it’s the technology-du-jour, but because I’ve got too much shit floating around in my head and I figured I should try to get it organized somehow. Also, maybe my ideas are strange or wrong or right or whatever, and it would be nice to have feedback sometimes. And, who knows, somebody might even be interested or inspired, or at least moved to thought in some way, which is a good thing. So this is something of an experiment, on several levels. (more…)