The ScooterBlog

Found a good post on Digg today which talks about good plugins to add to Wordpress, and I’m rather tempted to add a few in here. Most of them, the end user would never notice, but they could help increase the amount of flexibility the site has. Here’s the quick list of my favorites. You may see ‘em soon.

• WP-Notable - Adds links to popular social bookmarking sites to the bottom of your post (in a simple graphical way)
• Wordpress Related Entries - Does what it says it does. Points the user to similar posts within the course of your blog.
• PXS Mail Form - Adds the ability for users to send you e-mail for feedback, all through the site. Very cool!
• Google Sitemap Generator - Generates a Google Sitemap, which is supposed to help get your site indexed by Google better and faster.

If anyone else uses these, I’d love some feedback on how well they work.

It almost sickens me to write this, but I filled up my gask tank yesterday for $2.37 a gallon, and it felt like a deal! Of course, based on what you hear in the news, I should treat this like a deal because the idea of gas being what it was three or four years ago is just unrealistic … but there’s still a shred of me that hates thinking that this is a bargain price.

Of course, to put it in perspective over when it was $3 … this will save me ten bucks every time I come to Cincinnati and back.

Something that has always caught my interest is the idea that web applications can take over a lot of the day-to-day tasks that a basic word processor once could. Realistically, unless you are putting together more detailed documents involving styles, columns, and presentation type things, then you can easily just use web based solutions and be fine.

I am seriously thinking about trying out some of the online spreadsheets soon for an upcoming tournament, as I think they can do just as good of a job as Excel can, and can be web browser compatible too. Both Zoho and Writely (and Google Spreadsheets, which I now seem to have access to) can do those basic tasks for me now, provided I do back them up every now and then, because as great as the web is, having something on YOUR disk and not theirs is nice too.

But I digress … the full web suite is truly the next step. There’s four such groups of apps that I’ve seen be thrown out there: Glide Effortless, Goowy, YouOS, and DesktopTwo. All four should work in Firefox or IE, and I’ve played with them all. While I’m undecided on whether or not they will take over my standard desktop usages, they all do offer a nice set of applications built in (one of them even has OpenOffice in its full form through Java, nice touch!) that will allow for productivity anywhere … although maybe not on my iBook G3. Since they’re all heavy on Flash and Java, my older G3 will choke on these badly.

Sign up for these, and let me know if you do, I’m all for trying out some of the collaboration pieces of these apps. (Links are forthcoming. In the meantime, read this article from CNet)

As a follow up, my Anchordesk e-mail had more on cool Web 2.0 tools today, so this may be worth checking out too! LINK

Found a very cool promotion over at GameFly today, where I just re-subscribed (in the realm of 360 games, it’s so much cheaper then just renting from Blockbuster, where they want insanely too much for 360 rentals!). If you get 5 friends to join up and become subscribers, you get a DS lite!

So, I don’t know if even 5 people read this enough to want to subscribe, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Help Scooter get a DS Lite!

… and for that matter, send me your Gamertags too so that we can play online with the 360. I may play a little bit this evening.

So I broke down …. only had $100 to go to get the system, so I decided to do it. So now, I am the proud owner of an XBox 360 system! I’ve already put a little bit into accessories and other various goodies for it, so I will go down the list:

• Bought Burnout Revenge with the system. Danielle absolutely loves the game (so much so that I can’t get the controller out of her hands when she plays!), and I’ve always loved the series. Already met about 4-5 very cool people through the system there to game with too, so the Live friends list is once again growing (and parsing away old names)
• Rented Prey and Call of Duty 2. I’ve played Prey, and I’m stuck about 4 levels in (FPS’s haven’t been my thing since Quake, so playing it single player is fun, but not over the top awesome), and I’ll play some COD2 on Saturday most likely.
• Bought the Nyko Intercooler, and got my only disappointment … one of the fans is broke and causing the fan to not work properly, so I’ll have to ship this back to Game Junkie and have ‘em fix it or send me a new one.
• Downloaded the free Texas Hold ‘Em game last night. So far, it has been pretty fun, although I agree with one of the reviews, there are some issues with the control that could make it even better (a.k.a. you almost KNOW when someone is placing a bet because they have to use a meter to reach the bet amount, which takes time). But hey, went from $5,000 to $27,500 in the game’s persistent yet fake money last night.

And what’s all this worth from a Gamerscore sense? 105 points so far. As soon as I can figure out how, I’ll be adding my GamerTag to this here blog site. Send me friends requests, I need more cool people to play with!!

After this week, I have respect for anyone working 10 hour days doing pretty much anything …. cause it takes an awful long time to see the end of the tunnel from a work day sense. I’m doing this for the week at my job so that I get Friday off without having to take a vacation day.

Now, before the “Slacker” crap comes in, it’s not like this is new, it’s just the first time back at it for a little while. The Cincinnati days were typically 15-hour total endeavours, 11 of which were work and 4 of which were driving (From my house, one hour to work, work 8 hours with a lunch, drive another hour, work three hours at Game Junkie, drive home). And, when I work the Halo 2 Tournament at the game store this weekend, I’m expecting it to be another 13-hour to 14-hour day.

But, when it’s the main job, it’s a different thing altogether. So, let’s hope I get a lot done today, tie up all the loose ends, and get out of dodge for five days of some idle time, and a lot of vacation bliss!

More on a couple of those things I’m doing in a later post.

First, the comical thoughts:

• Colin Farrell is so much better in this then he was in Alexander … then again, how could he be any worse?
• This movie looks a ton like Collateral … oh wait, same director, never mind!
• One of the bad guys looks like the spanish version of Matt Matson. I’m serious! Someone find me a picture of Matt-GJ and I’ll prove it!!
• Somewhere about halfway through, you see tons of Mario signs …. was that the Haitian electronics district? Was that a Game Boy Color I saw advertised?!

Now for the truthful thoughts …

• I have to give it a hard time for totally leaving the ending wide open. Sure, you find out the outcome of one character … kinda? And the other end of the story is left completely hanging. There’s no true resolutions.
• Colin Farrell was alright, Jamie Foxx was very good as he usually is. The plot was good, but not great. The action has good moments in good locales, but not awe-inspiring by any account.
• From a guy perspective, too much teasing of skin and not enough skin shown! Oh well, you can’t have it all.

I paid $3.50 to see it, and that’s about right. Not worth full retail, but certainly a good afternoon showing movie, or good for the cheap theaters when this arrives there.

… and look for Miami Vice 2, cause it’s coming, it’s SO coming! Of course, it may be held outside of Miami more then it is IN Miami. Name change, anyone?

Well, like any good piece of software that some small guy makes and it gets big, it gets bought up by some much bigger company, leaving the thought of it staying as good as it was in total limbo. Enter Hamachi.

My favorite utility for making small private VPN’s that will stretch through anything just got bought out by the company that brings you logmein.com. Nothing against their new owner, but nothing on this new site is free, thus the fear that soon, there won’t be a basic free version of Hamachi either (the program does have a premium subscription model, but but people who don’t need more then 16 people per network, free is just fine). So far, the forum chatter suggests little will change, but who knows.

Should this awesome program die, I will be more then happy to help everyone find a new cool program ASAP!

The first commenter did point out that there is LogMeIn Free. I must have just missed this (or more likely, saw the registration and Flash Demo of it and thought all that was free was the demo, which wasn’t right). I’ll have to give this a shot and review it here soon. 

So what does a ScooterWeekend consist of right now? Work, Go-Karts, and salsa dancing. Slightly eclectic mix, but hey, it works!
Anyways, Friday night was salsa dancing. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t completely into it, but I got out there and danced a little bit (what I remembered at least) and didn’t look like a total putz, so I can be perfectly happy with that.

Saturday was the Karlsberger Company Picnic … aside from the coolness that is showing everyone just how much I love Danielle and how cool she is, I probably got to do about 10 rounds of their go-kart circuit at Sports Ohio. I bet I ran 50 laps, enough to likely get myself home in a kart if I did it in one fell swoop! Was definitely fun, figured out quickly which cars were the best, and I enjoyed both passing and trying to keep up in inferior equipment.

Just for laughs … the undoubtedly slowest car? The #6 Viagra cart.

If you want to know what makes this site tick, it’s a combination of two things. Wordpress and the Binary Blue theme.

I thought I would bring this up as I just updated the Binary Blue plugin to 1.4.0 and Wordpress is going to get an update soon. It’s a great theme, has some cool AJAX options, and is very easy on the eyes to navigate. I highly recommend this theme if you are setting up your own blog for the first time.