I subscribe to a lot of podcasts. Most of my subscriptions revolve around technology news, but I also listen to plenty of shows outside of that topic. My latest favorite is a show called Film Sack. Film Sack is a show by Scott Johnson of Frogpants Studios, along with some other entertaining guys. Scott is one of my favorite podcasters. He’s a great guy. I like his style and his humor. I also regularly listen to his AppSlappy and Hypothetical Help shows, which I’ve mentioned here in the past.
Film Sack is definitely an entertaining listen. Each weekly episode is entirely about a single film. The show is full of jokes and humor, so don’t expect to be too serious. It typically runs one hour per week. It’s been in production since late 2009, but I’ve only been listening for the past couple of months. I’ve been enjoying so much that I’ve been going back and downloading some of the past episodes.
Aside from the humor, I love the movie titles that they review on Film Sack. The movies they have chosen to review is part of what makes the show so great. Such films include: Swamp Thing, Superman 2, Revenge of the Nerds, 2010, The Fly, Beetlejuice, Star Trek V, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and even the ridiculously obscure Killer Klowns From Outer Space! (My brother will get a chuckle out of that last one.) Film Sack does not review new releases or any film that has recently been in theaters. It isn’t that kind of show. A lot their movie selections are ones I fondly remember watching in the 80s, and I easily relate to their nostalgic point of view. In fact, I’m going to petition Scott to record an episode about the 1987 movie Innerspace!
If you’re a movie buff, or have an appreciation for the type of movies in their show catalog, you should definitely listen to Film Sack. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.
A few mornings ago while thrashing around in my bed to stop my shrieking alarm clock, an idea struck me. What if an alarm clock was invented that could be a part of your bed or mattress that would force you to get out of bed? To begin, let me lay out some back story. Hear me out.
I use a traditional alarm clock next to my bed that completely infuriates me every morning when it blares out its trademark wail. It makes me so mad when it goes off. Despite its horrible piercing noise, I can never seem to drag myself out of bed. I always end up slapping the snooze button countless times, pushing the window for me to get up and get ready to the last possible minute. Sure, I could move the clock across the room, but I’ve done that before and it doesn’t work for me. I will still run over to smack it and jump back under the covers.
In addition to the physical alarm, I use my iPhone as a second alarm clock. It makes sense to use my phone, since I have it with me in the bed every night, and it can survive a power outage. It is also a lot more gentle. Unlike my physical alarm clock, which fires up like a bulldozer crashing into the room, my phone sneaks up on me with a pleasant sound. I never beat the crap out of the phone like I do with the real clock. The alarm is my phone’s way of saying, “Hey, peek-a-boo, look at me. Don’t you want to check Facebook and Twitter?” And that I do. Once my phone sounds off, I snatch it to see what’s happening in the world. It gives me a reason stay up and I almost never snooze it. It will often make me stay in the bed for far too long, though.
Neither of my above solutions make me want to get out of the bed. That is the whole problem. This is where my idea for an alarm clock bed comes in. What if the bed itself had an alarm that would not stop alerting you until you got out of bed? It could be pressure-sensitive like car seats or the seat on a riding lawn mower. Perhaps you can set it so that the alarm only activates once you are in the bed, so that if you’re out of town, for instance, it won’t go off. A vibration feature would be nice, but may only encourage you to stay in the bed. The vibration would have to be quite strong to make you want to get out as soon as possible.
This was just a half-brained idea when I thought of it. Clearly, this system would have flaws. First, it would be expensive and unnecessary. I have no idea how you’d set and maintain the time on this bed. If you have a water bed, as I do, then adding electrical components is clearly not a wise idea. Also, if you happen to pass out on the couch, it wouldn’t work. Another pitfall is that you have to be sleeping alone. Obviously, if two people share the bed, or if you have a heavy dog, this concept isn’t going to fly.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea in the first place. Oh well.
It seems to be a universal truth that whenever two men are in a public bathroom together, they are to stay as far apart as possible. This rule is firm, and applies across the board to all bathroom acts: Peeing, crapping, hand washing, and coffee pot rinsing. My problem is that despite having received unanimous agreement from everyone I’ve ever mentioned this to, I often have quite a different experience when I’m in an actual bathroom.
For instance, I can be behind closed doors in a bathroom stall when lo and behold, some idiot struts in and cozies up to the urinal that is directly adjacent to my stall. He’s so close that his shoes practically penetrate the boundary of my personal space. I can literally stare at his twitching foot while I’m sitting on the commode. This is horrible! Why do men do this repeatedly, when there are other toilets that are farther away from me?
Continuing the Men’s room rule: If there are a line of urinals in the bathroom, do not for any reason come and stand next the one I’m using. Everybody knows that! Everybody, except for half the men I encounter in an actual bathroom! What is wrong with you people? Let me be clear. I never want to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone and urinate together. Ever!
Furthermore, men, when you’re reliving your bladders, it isn’t necessary for you to deliberately force out a fart while you do it. I mean, really. One may slip out here and there, but to proudly fire off your farts amongst strangers isn’t the least bit appreciated, I can assure you.
I’ve also noticed that a man who is occupying a stall will start blowing their nose when I walk in the bathroom. They’re obviously making a halfhearted attempt to cover up the sound of their sputtering ass. I have news for you fellows, you’re not fooling anyone. You’re noses are almost never clogged, and besides, I can still hear the painful echos of your bloody diarrhea throughout the bathroom.
And another thing. If I’m already in a stall minding my own business, don’t come waltzing in the bathroom and fiddle with the sink for 10 minutes. I have this experience regularly. Men walk in the bathroom and begin rinsing the coffee pot or their lunch containers, and run the water at full blast for what seems like an eternity. All while combing their hair, or staring in the mirror performing some other mindless ritual. This is a public bathroom, not a shower or a kitchen! Get the hell out!
I can’t imagine a single man disagreeing with me on what I’ve just wrote. Still, I say this knowing that tomorrow, one of the terrible sequences of events mentioned above will inevitably transpire before me yet again. Good grief.
Google this number: 241543903.
Then click Image Search.
Then stick your head in a freezer.
I read the above instructions on Twitter, and did just that. This is a gag that has apparently been making the rounds online for a while. Basically, people have been taking pictures of their head in a freezer and uploading them with the tag “241543903.” It’s such a specific search term that all you see are these silly pictures.
I had to make one myself! My brother was in town and helped me stage some funny pictures with my freezer. Adding to the amusement, my cousin got on-board and coaxed her son to put his head in a freezer, too! Hilarious! I uploaded my best photo to Flickr and tagged it appropriately. Now I have to sit back and wait for Google to index it.
Below you will see the picture of my head in my freezer. Even better, what you actually see is a printout of the picture, stuck to the front of my freezer, and staged with my awesome Photoshop refrigerator magnet set! That makes it a double joke. I’m quite proud of this creation!
A long time ago when my brother Chris and I were kids, we played a text-based adventure game on our Commodore 64 computer. Prior to owning a Commodore 64, we had an even older computer, the Commodore VIC-20. I am uncertain which computer we played this game on, as it was available for both machines. The game was called Voodoo Castle and it was released way back in 1980. At the time, there were no graphics or special effects to speak of. As I said, this game was text-only. We had to use the power of our imaginations to create the imagery in our minds. In many ways, it was like participating in a “choose your own adventure” book.
This past Christmas, in 2010, my brother and I recanted tales of this long lost game. At first, we struggled to even remember what the game was called. After doing some online research, we are now certain the game we once enjoyed was indeed Voodoo Castle. I don’t exactly know the time-frame in which we originally played it, but it was popular in our household at some point around 1983-1984. This game is probably where I mastered my typing skills as a young lad.
Voodoo Castle was released on a plastic cartridge that you plugged into the back of the computer (image below). As such, there was no way to save the game! Once we turned off the computer, all progress was lost. If you’re too young to have used a computer in those days, I’m sure you can’t even imagine what that was like. Well, that was the reality for games that were released 30 years ago. We simply didn’t know any better!
I have no recollection of how the game ends. I do vividly remember repeatedly reaching a point in the game where it told us, “You are lost in a maze of passages.” At that point, you are virtually screwed and no exit can be found.
I’m excited to announce that the complete game is now available on the Internet for free. You can play it in its entirety in your browser via a Java applet. I have played it, and it really took me back. Try it yourself!
I love location-based services and I’ve been turning others on to the idea as well. I always call out Foursquare, but they are not the only player in this game. Others include Gowalla, Loopt, Facebook Places, Google Latitude, and more. I don’t care much about the others, as Foursquare is by far my service of choice.
Foursquare now allows its users to view their complete check-in history! Simply add the word “history” to your username URL at Foursquare and you can view every place you’ve ever been with the service. For example, the address would read: foursquare.com/username/history. In addition to your past locations, your history includes your comments, tips, photos, and a list of other users who were checked in there at the time. Cool!
A few days ago I wrote a post called “My Advice To Twitter,” where I suggested that Twitter add an archive view of users tweets. The URL structure I suggested in that post is the same as the one that Foursquare has now enabled. I don’t know when Foursquare officially launched their new history view, but I was not aware of it at the time when I wrote my post about Twitter. I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
If you want to see my complete history, you’re out of luck. You have to be my explicit friend on Foursquare, or be logged in as me. Random Internet passersby cannot view any of my location history. This is true for all Foursquare users and this cannot be changed. I’d say that is a smart decision by the company.
Foursquare has done it right. I applaud the company for creating this new complete history view for its users. It is an awesome way to look back at everywhere you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. I wish that Twitter would take notice.
“Assault and Battery.” Needless to say, I was in a silly mood this morning.
I’ve been using Twitter for over two years now. It is one of my favorite online services. However, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated lately with some of its shortcomings. My frustration reached a point that I recently posted this tweet: “Sometimes I get the feeling that if I entered the Twitter headquarters, all I’ll find is an empty room with a hamster on a spinning wheel.”
My tweet was clearly over-the-top, as I often am, but I do have genuine thoughts on this matter. Therefore, I have crafted and submitted the following list of advice and suggestions to the “powers-that-be” at Twitter.
Faster Pageloads
I would like the “New Twitter” site to be a little more responsive and serve faster page loads. I can’t help but feel like the Twitter website as a whole has gotten slower over time; even more so since the redesign this year. I am well aware that their servers process a mind-boggling mass of data every second, but the end-user experience at my computer can be less than ideal at times. This is one reason why I like to use external Twitter applications like Tweetie, and not use the website unless I need to.
Exporting Features
Twitter seriously needs to offer better exporting options for users accounts. I want to be able to download a complete archive of all of my current Twitter data in a variety of different formats at any given time. I’ve grown tired of fiddling with Twitter backup companies, and I’ve used several of them. I’ll say outright that Tweetbackup doesn’t work at all. I’ve never had that service work for me even once! Backupify is a reliable service that conveniently archives all of my tweets on a schedule, but I can only download that data in CSV format, which I have to load as a huge spreadsheet in Excel.
More importantly, exporting in general is currently limited by Twitter to your last 3,200 tweets. That is all you can view or access, period! They promised some time ago that this artificial cap would ultimately be lifted. To date, that hasn’t happened. As users accounts grow ever larger, this issue needs to be addressed. Longtime users can have upward of 10,000 tweets. Today, those users are left in the cold if they want to roll back to the tweets in their early years. Fix this now!
Archive View
I would like for the Twitter website to add a new dimension where you can view all of the tweets in your entire archive in an elegant presentation. One example of this today is Tweet Nest, a solution to archive your tweets on your own web server and display them on a page. The resulting page looks clean and has a wealth of information. Twitter doesn’t have to copy this model, but it is an example of what I’d like to see them create for its users. Users could access this theoretical new archive display by adding the world “archive” to their URL. For example: twitter.com/username/archive. I think this is a fantastic idea, and long overdue.
Longer Tweets
I still insist that tweets could be a little longer to make use for longer links and retweets. As I’ve said in a previous post, I’d like to see the current 140-character limit raised to 160 (thereby matching the traditional phone text message limit), or even all the way to 200. I’ve already mentioned this in detail in the past, so I won’t go on about that again here.
Tweet Counts
In my experience, Twitter’s total tweet count for me is fluid and seldom completely accurate. This is especially noticeable with the count in the Favorites feature. I can log in on the site and have 25 favorite tweets that I’ve previously starred. After I’m finished reading some of them and unstar a few, it takes a very long time (hours) for my Favorites count to show lower than the original count of 25. It’s annoying, and I wish something could be done about it.
Having said the above, the count numbers get even whackier when using the Twitter iPhone app, where it sometimes takes days to reflect a profile picture change or update my total tweet count. Why this this? Surely Twitter itself must be deliberately limiting calls for this data in its API structure. Can’t this policy be changed to allow more accurate information?
In Closing…
This is just a few of the ideas and suggestions I’ve sent to Twitter. The tweet count issue is complex and really not a big deal, but account exporting and a complete archive view are both essential. I’m growing tired of relying on countless third party solutions to compensate for Twitter’s built-in limitations. I hope they heed my words and make my suggestions a reality.
It’s Christmas time again, the season for spreading joy and merriment. With that spirit, I present to you the most charming and adorable holiday image in all of human history. Consider this little gem a gift from me to you. Enjoy.
Over the course of many years, I’ve dabbled on and off in the art of keeping a personal journal. Overall, I think it’s a good idea to write in a journal. I find it to be beneficial for my writing abilities, self expression, and personal reflection. I only do it once in a while, when I have some significant thoughts to get out of my system.
Back in my younger days, if I wanted to keep a journal, it was likely bound to paper. Paper has a few benefits, but also carries many drawbacks. First and foremost, a journal is meant to be private. That isn’t possible in physical form. Fortunately, today there are many avenues to explore for keeping a virtual private journal.
I have complained for years that there was not a good solution for maintaining a journal on my computer. I always found the crop of journaling software to be outdated and lackluster. Old journaling programs would trap you in with limited exporting abilities. I tried a few Windows clients in years past, but never liked any of them. I suppose that one could use a simple text editor or Microsoft Word to write entries, but that practice would not be secure, nor could you easily search across multiple files for segments of text. This all makes me wonder what computer program Doogie Howser was using back in 1989? Hmmm.
For the Mac user, the best journaling program by far is MacJournal. I’ve used it several times in trial modes and it is great. The problem for me is that it has too many features. It’s extensive features threaten to turn it into more of a virtual scrapbook than a simple journal. Personally, I want to type words, and words only. I don’t want to embed video clips, web links, fonts, and all that fluffy jazz. MacJournal is also a pricey $40 to purchase. The software is superb, but I don’t want to invest that much in an activity I only occasionally engage in.
An online cloud solution seems to be the way to go for most users today. A few benefits are that your data is safely stored offsite and backed up, plus you can use more than one machine to access or write to your journal. I’ll mention two that I’ve had experience with.
LiveJournal has been around for many years. It is a decent off-the-cuff solution, but the service is geared by default toward sharing your content. You have to deliberately change your account settings to make all entries private and to hide your profile from site searches. The default stance of this site encouraging public engagement turns me off a little. LiveJournal does let users export their entries into a monthly CSV format, which is a nice.
The online journaling service that I like best is Penzu.com. It’s been around for a few years now. Penzu is solely aimed toward complete privacy. It is a very private experience, not a social one. It also has a clever interface that lets you go old-school and type on lined notebook paper. Free users get unlimited storage. Though, to be able to export your data, you have to pay for a Pro account at $19/year. Penzu exports to PDF, XML, and TXT formats. Penzu has a lot of clever features and falls very much along the lines of what I’ve looked for in a journaling solution. The interface and slickness of the website as a whole make it fun to use.
Having said all of the above, I’ve saved the best for last.
I read about the following solution recently and it is brilliantly simple: If you are a GMail user, simply create a “Journal” label in your mail account. When you want to write in your journal, write yourself an email using the new label. This solution is free, secure and amazingly simple. If you think about it, your email account is already its own journal in many ways. You can already look back through messages and read what you were up to and the mood you were in at any given time. Therefore, adding the direct “Journal” label and writing yourself a simple email of private thoughts makes complete sense. Boom! It’s funny how the simple solution will often elude us.
