superwick.com

Hey! It’s my first “video blog!”

In which I talk about online communication, community building, and a few of the online tools I personally use to communicate online. This is stuff I’ve been thinking about heavily for a while. Much of the stuff I talk about in this video is all pretty basic to alot of people who spend alot of time online, but I felt I needed to share with those that may visit and just not know about some of it.

Links mentioned in this video:
My Facebook profile (friend me!)
My Twitter profile (let’s follow each other!)
My Flickr photostream (friend me!)
Wine Library TV.com
garyvaynerchuk.com

Links to some of my various other online profiles not mentioned in this video:
My Last.FM profile (see what music I’ve been listening to, and compare with your own! Discover new music!)
FriendFeed - a “one stop shop” for all my various profile updates! (it comes in handy)

Sorry about all the weird edits. The original version was almost 10 minutes long. I cut a bunch out because it just seemed too long. I wanted to keep it under 5 minutes. I cut out a bunch of of ranting about how Myspace has become an “online community cesspool”, about some of the benefits of using Facebook, why I like Twitter, finally, and lots more. I think I wanted to talk about too much. I promise subsequent video blogs from me will be more succinct and consistent. :-)

Let me know what you think! Anything you’d like me to talk about?

Yesterday, after realizing I was running out of drive space on my trusty MacBook Pro, and knowing that I’d need a Windows machine for certain upcoming school requirements, I decided to wipe my Windows XP Boot Camp partition from my MBP, and went out and bought an Acer Aspire X1200 desktop PC. I was attracted by its quietness, small form factor, decent specs, and great price.

Now, this computer looks fine on paper. Maybe everyone was right, I overpaid for both Macs that I’ve bought in the past 4 years. Looking at the specs, it’s hard to argue that for $450, this looks like a fantastic deal, and sure beats paying $600 for a new Mac Mini, right?

Wrong.

My short amount of time with this PC has done nothing but remind me why I will pay just a little extra (and sometimes a little less, depending on your research) for a Mac, rather than suffer through a PC hell again.

First off, setup of this little bugger took about 30 minutes. That includes unboxing, plugging everything in, and first boot-up, where Windows Vista ran some sort of “speed test” on the machine to check its performance, and install its bloated mess onto the machine. 30 minutes. I could have been actually USING my computer in 1/6 of the time had I bought an Apple computer. I know from experience.

And that doesn’t include the time I took uninstalling all the crap software that Acer decided to include with the machine.

Oh yeah, this computer didn’t even come with a recovery/restore disc. I had to burn my own.

My old Mac Mini (which I no longer have) took 5 minutes for me to set it up and be up and running. And that was in 2005. I paid about $600 for it.

“Cheap” does not equal “Value”.

Fitting that the embedded ethernet adapter died after only one day. From looking at the customer reviews on BestBuy.com, I’m not the only one that’s had that problem. I’m returning this machine tomorrow for a refund, rather than try to deal with Acer Tech support, who would only tell me to do everything I’ve already tried to troubleshoot the problem.

So, the next time someone tries to say things like “Macs are so expensive, why pay that much for a computer when you can pay so much less for a PC?”, I say again, “Cheap” does not equal “Value”.

From http://komodomedia.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/05/css-png-image-fix-for-ie/

IE6 is a bag of smashed buttholes.

word to that.

Microsoft continues to do potentially shady/questionable things, and the world continues to allow it.

From windowssecrets.com:

Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users’ knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates.

ugh.

Today I was presented with a challenge. In a project I’ve been working on (to be announced soon) - the Matt Sommers Digital Archive, there are musical artists, with many albums, which have multiple tracks. In the app, the tracks are uploaded via a form, and are processed using attachment_fu. What we needed was a way to generate a zip file of an entire album’s mp3’s, with the ability to re-generate it if any of the tracks change, and be able to present a link to make the entire album downloadable. At first, it sounded a little hard to do, but once I found out there was something called rubyzip, it became easy as cake. Here’s how I did it. (Hat tip to the author of this post for helping make it even easier for me.)
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I’m just going to link to it. what a joke.
I’m almost speechless at the level of misinformation, ignorance and general stupidity the author shows when trying to explain the new features of Apple’s upcoming OS X “Leopard” operating system, and how they relate to Windows Vista. This is unreal. It has to be a joke.

Another reason to not use Symantec/Norton Antivirus products. I (again) recommend AVG for Windows PCs.

Since I don’t have cable, or even a TV with an antenna, I must either watch DVDs or watch shows I’ve retrieved from the internet, which I find myself doing more and more. I actually prefer it now, as I can watch stuff on my own time, and besides - my Dell 2005FPW looks better than my 10 year old TV (which is actually in storage at the moment anyway).

Wanna do the same? Here’s a list of your current (legal) options.

I should note that I have been known to obtain shows via Bittorrent if I can’t find them elsewhere… Take note, TV networks….

As reported by Will Sturgeon on Silicon.com, people (in general) just don’t seem to care about the security of their workplace’s computer network. An experiment was conducted on Valentine’s Day where people who were commuting to work were handed CD-roms for free, while being told the discs contained a special Valentine’s Day offer on them. An overwhelming number of people actually ran the disc on their work computer, even ignoring the warnings provided about installing unauthorized software. The discs actually only contained code that reported back to the study-maker’s HQ how many people actually ran the CDs. No other information was transmitted. But that’s because it was just a study.

Imagine if it were really spyware or virus-laden discs being handed out. Imagine the potential destruction of a company’s network security and data… It’s pretty scary.

I’m not suprised this happened, but it’s pretty scary at the same time.

It appears a new nasty work called Nyxem.E is infecting more and more computers each day… time for you Windows users to double-check your Anti-Virus software for updates and scan DAILY.