The fabulous Santastic mix series has released this years compilation: Santastic V: Snow, Man!. Haven’t listened yet, but based on past experience, it will be good.
Month: December 2010
Momma’s got a brand new detergent
Listened with whatever word it is that describes amusement crossed with shock and dismay to this NPR story about phosphate-free dishwasher detergent on my way in to work this morning. One Mrs. Sue Wright of Austin, Texas, single-handedly made my day when she flexed her reasoning prowess thusly:
I’m angry at the people who decided that phosphate was growing algae. I’m not sure that I believe that.
You have to listen to the story to get the full effect of the delivery of that line because, man, it’s glorious. I’ve listened twice now, mostly because I’m sure I just keep missing the part where NPR enumerates Mrs. Wright’s biochemistry credentials. At least they did us the honor of not correcting Mrs. Wright’s grammatically interesting sentence.
PandoraJammin’
In which our humble narrator lays out an ambitious web portal plan under the guise of a paltry review of PandoraJam.
Just today I decided I’m making a commitment to keep iChat open when I’m online just because it seems like I need more distractions in my life. nickspictsatbfp in the event you’re in the same frame of mind… Anyway, this created the need to have my status message be updated with what I’m currently listening to. In iTunes, you get this for free. In Pandora–what I’m always plugged in to–you don’t. Enter PandoraJam, a useful stand-alone app to listen, scrob, and update. Free version seems to do everything I need so we’re all good on that front.
The upshot of all of this it seems is a strong urge to rearrange stuff on my vanity domain (the very same one you’re reading this blog post from). I want to keep the blog but would like to rebrand and rename it I think. Primarily, though, I want to create a dynamic about me page that pulls from all of my various online presences into a portal of shameless self-promotion. Kind of like Facebook, only without it being on Facebook. I also want to write a new portal for myself that pulls from around the web into a single page that I can use as a springboard.
It’s not a new idea by any means. My first web page did the same basic thing. The coolness of this one, however, is that it is more aggregator than springboard. It should also help clean up my inbox as I presently consume > 500 RSS posts a day via my collection of feeds. I do this because I want to archive the damn things, but, after a few years of usage, I haven’t really used the archive in any meaningful way.
Besides, I’m feeling sad about the decline in my webmonkey skills, having primarily written C# and Java the last few years. I haven’t the faintest clue as to CSS and HTML5 support in modern browsers, much less the degree to which they successfully implement W3C standards. In all, this would be a useful learning experience now.
So…we’ll see how far any of this goes given Cataclysm went live earlier today and the holidays are just around the corner.