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The personal blog of an old-fashioned geek

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Amazon is becoming my new favorite company

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I’ve been a long time customer of Amazon.com, going way back into the mid-90′s when all they sold was books.  But lately, I’ve found myself using their products and services more and more often, and I am very impressed!

Since buying my Roku XD I have since become an Amazon Prime member to gain access to the unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows that Amazon Prime has to offer.  While the interface of the Amazon On Demand channel for Roku needs much improvement (their customer service dept was happy to hear my suggestions about creating a queue/playlist/subscription), it gets the job done, and it has a good selection of content to watch.  I’ve also puchased a couple season of TV shows to watch On Demand, and their HD movie rental rates are cheaper than what I get direct from Charter (my cable provider).

Moving on from their video services, I’ve been very impressed with their new cloud storage and MP3 cloud player service.  I’ve purchased several albums from Amazon that I would have previously purchased from iTunes because they were a few dollars cheaper.  And with the Cloud Player on my Android phone, it makes having my music with me wherever I go as simple as a click of a button. (I just wish there was a native cloud player app for my iPhone/iPad2).

I’m also an avid book reader and enthusiast, and the fact that the Amazon Kindle app works on my EVO, my iPhone, and my iPad2 means that I can take my whole library with me wherever I go.  Granted, I also have the Barnes & Noble Nook app on all 3 devices as well, but the Kindles whispersync is so much nicer to keep my books synced between devices.  With the Nook, it’s annoying to have to figure out where I was in the book when I want to read a quick chapter on my EVO after reading for a bit on my iPad2 before bed the previous night.

Amazon’s seller marketplace also makes it easy for me to convert my old collection of physical books into money, which in-turn helps me expand my Kindle library.  I’d love it if they had a book exchange program where you can send in physical books and receive discounts on the kindle versions of those same books.

All in all, I’m a very happy Amazon customer!

Site back online!

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After over a month offline, I finally got my sites moved to a new server. yay!   I’m trying something new this time, so my site is now running on nginx instead of apache.  I’m interested to see if I get any performance gains from nginx. :)

HTC Evo & Apple iPhone

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I’ve had an iPhone 3g for just over 1.5 years now, and I LOVE IT!   I’ve also had the Samsung Instinct as a work phone for the past 2 years, and it’s been pretty meh.   Today, our new work phones arrived, the new HTC Evo, the worlds first 4G smartphone blah blah marketingspeak.

All I can say is this thing is HUGE!  And when I turned it on, it’s got a nice, crisp, hi-res display and it looks fantastic.  I can’t wait to get it activated and start playing with it.  I primarily use my iPhone for personal, but I use the email / web features of it for work because it was so much better than the instinct.  I might actually start using my work phone for work (email/web) as well as personal.

Here is a picture of the phones side by side while I wait for the new phone to activate…

Building a Blog Empire

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I’ve always had a bit of entrepreneurial ADD, and I’m always thinking of the next project or idea.  Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of building a network of websites, and to get somewhat serious about blogging, (well, as serious as I can be, doing it in my free time between work and family).

One of my hobbies and habits is to pick up domain names that match some “big idea” that I’ve had, and I’ll throw up a simple site or something, or just hold onto the domain for one of those “rainy day” projects.

I recently picked up a copy of WP Robot, which is an auto-blogging plugin which will automatically post and update a blog with content from ebay, amazon, articlebase, and other sources.  I think this will help me keep some of my sites updated, and hopefully be able to generate some affiliate commissions as well.  It is SLICK!  I showed it to a couple of my co-workers and they were impressed with how it worked, and how it simply automated a blog.

Now, I understand that SE’s and readers alike prefer to have genuine hand-written content, and so for my blogs, I’ll still post articles that I write myself.  As well as comment on happenings and other things.  But by having an automation tool, I can also have some filler things within my blog.
Who knows! perhaps in a year, I’ll have a nice little blog empire that will pay for a vacation to somewhere tropical. :)

New side project – Trollfodder.com

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I got bit by the project bug again, and set up a new blog – Troll Fodder

The purpose of the site is to chronicle and post about instances when people fall for internet trolls, good rants/raves/flame fests, and when people just wear their blatent stupidity on their sleeve for all to see.

Ye Flipping Gods! Too late to the party :(

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For the past, oh, two years, I’ve had this grandiose plan for a really neat website service.  It would be an aggregator of web services, allowing you to link to all of your various accounts around the web.  I never really had much background in programming, so I never started to endeavor on the project.   Other things drew my attention, and it kept being pushed back as a “someday” idea.

Well today I just found a service: MyBlogLog.  Apparently someone else thought that concept would be a good idea too, only they were able to execute on the concept.  And it looks like a pretty neat service!  I would have done some things differently, but for the most part, it has all of the features I wanted.
I guess if you can’t do it yourself, wait long enough, and it’s bound to be done by someone else.

Time for an upgrade

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Well, I thought it’s about time to upgrade from wordpress 2.0.5 to 2.6.2.  Hopefully this new version of wordpress is somewhat impressive, as I’ve been starting to lean towards MovableType as my new blogging engine of choice.

But we’ll see… :)

The Rusty Blogger

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It’s been a while since my last post.  So I figured I’d dust off the old keyboard and try to get back into the habit :)

The past few months have flown by, I’ve been working on my cars quite a bit.  It seems like I’m either at work on the computer, or I’m out with a wrench tinkering under the hood.

On my NG900, I’ve done quite a bit of upgrades.  I have a nice 3″ downpipe, a larger front mount intercooler, and a Nordic Stage 3+ ECU.   Last fall I dyno’ed the car bone stock and it put down 185hp and 198tq at the wheels.  With these upgrades, I should be putting down 240-250hp and 270-280tq.  In June there is another Saab Dyno Day at Marty’s dealership in Iowa, so then I’ll know what I’m putting down for numbers.

This August is SOC, Saab Owners Convention.  This year is the 25th Annual SOC, and it is Saab’s 60th anniversary as well.  I’m planning on going to it, and an overwhelming majority of people want me to bring my SPG instead of my NG.  So I have quite a bit of work to do on the SPG before it’s ready to go to SOC.  I’ll be posting more about that later.

Paintball Fun

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So tonight is Monday. That means Monday night paintball at Pastor Jeff’s house.  Jeff has 20 acres of land up on McQuade rd off of HWY 61 north of Duluth.  Every Monday, a bunch of people get together there and play paintball in his woods.  Tonight, we had about 20 guys, so we had some good sized teams.

During the 3rd game (capture the flag), I was defending our flag.  I was hiding behind it up on a small ridge, shooting down through the trees at the opposing team as they were rushing for the flag.  One of them got a lucky shot and hit me in the face.  Everyone thought it was a Kodak moment, so I grabbed my phone and had some pics snapped.

The ball hit me right in the mouth area, and splattered on through my cheek.  I still have a faint paintball aftertaste.    It definitely was a fun time tonight, I look forward to next week!