Statrix Redux

Call me a sucker for a deal. I have MacJournal on my Macs and today I was sent a notice that Mariner Software was having a year-end sale, 40%. Since I do have XP on two different machines (though to be honest I’m more likely to be using Ubuntu on them), I thought I’d give WinJournal a try.

I’m using to write this entry and I will say that it’s pretty much the same as MacJournal, which would make sense. I usually edit Statrixblog online, but I keep trying to convince myself that an offline tool is just as good.

Well…we’ll see.

Aloha!

I’m afraid I’ve not been riding my bike as much as I’d like to over the past few days. I’ve got a few excuses I can trot out:

1. The weather has sucked mostly.
2. My butt hurts.
3. It’s been inconvenient with all the holiday stuff going on.

And those are all mostly true…
The weather has sucked. It’s winter in Hawaii and it rains. Riding to work, even though I’m only going just over a mile, becomes problematic. It’s not enough of a distance to be bothered with extra clothes, but sitting at work, in air conditioning, isn’t a good thing.
My butt hurts. I’m not going to say any more about it other than it will go away. I think it’s diet related if you get my drift. Holiday foods will kill you.
It’s inconvenient. It’s not any more inconvenient now than it was before the holidays. Sigh. I’m just lazy and looking for excuses.
So, for the new year, I resolve to make fewer excuses. It’s time to get going again. Starting tomorrow…unless of course I’ve got a butt. 🙂
Aloha!

I’ve always been a radio fan. I recall listening late into the night on a tiny AM radio when I was a kid. During the recent blackout on Oahu, indeed all blackouts here. I take a radio to UH Baseball games. And I’m a fan of public radio.
These days I don’t generally take a radio with me everywhere I go anymore though. I carry an iPhone and I’ve enough other stuff in my pocket I don’t need yet another device. Mostly it’s been okay, I can listen to my music on the iPhone and listen to NPR podcasts. At work there’s so much computer equipment around it makes listening to the radio problematic at best.
Now I’ve got a solution.
I’ve been a fan of the Weather Underground weather site for quite some time. I use it on my desktops, laptops, and my iPhone.
Now they’ve released WunderRadio. It’s a $6 app that let’s me listen to some 20,000+ radio stations streaming on my iPhone. Excellent. I’m hoping it’ll work just fine at UH baseball saving me the trouble of carrying two devices. We’ll see soon enough.

There won’t be anything new in this post, I’m sure any thoughts I have on Twitter, to which I am new, have been said before.
To begin, I’m using twhirl as my client on most of my machines. I like it because I can have the same interface across OS X, Linux, and XP. The only thing I don’t have twirl for is my iPhone and I’m using Hahlo on that.
On Twitter I’m @statrixbob btw.
Okay, what’s so interesting?
Today I was trying to explain Facebook to a friend of mine who is new to it (as am I for the most part). He mentioned that over the years (and we’ve been playing on the net since the late 80’s at least) we’ve used:

You and I have figured out how to trade files with one another
over the course of a couple of decades. We went through…
ftp
chat
split
talk/ytalk
kibitz
screen (I still use it)
etc.
etc.

We’ve also been involved in a mailing list for years, though we’ve now seemed to have migrated to Facebook for that. So what is the difference?
It seems to me that much of what we’ve used over the years has facilitated communications on a ‘one to one’ basis. You email me, I respond. Expanding that to a listserv we get to a ‘one to many’ communication. Using some of the unix tools like kibitz mentioned allow for different sorts of communcations, but they are still mostly either one to one, or one to many.
Facebook seems to change that a bit by really allowing ‘many to many’ communications. Responding to a listserv can mimic ‘many to many’ communication, but only serially. Facebook does it in a parallel fashion, many things can happen at once.
Twitter however isn’t really ‘many to many’ in the way facebook is, it seems to me to be more of a massive ‘one to many’ tool, but with a difference. All of the tools above more or less require that those in communication form a community by giving explicit permission. You can spam me once, but I’ll filter you out after that. I have to choose you as a friend in Facebook, you have to allow me to do so.
Twitter does away with that. I choose who I want to follow and do so – no permission necessary. You do the same to me (not many do) and I cannot prevent it. Thus the growth of communities, such as they are, isn’t so much designed as formed chaotically – patterns emerge, but they aren’t planned.
I’ve noticed more than a few hits in a Google search point out more or less what I’ve just pointed out, so as I said, nothing new here.
Aloha!

I just heard a report that TMobile is down. I’m on AT&T so I’m good for the moment, but that might, of course, change. Here’s hoping I stay up.
This laptop, a big Toshiba running Ubuntu is claiming it’s out of power so it’s probably time to switch to another one. 1 down, 3 to go.
HECO is now telling us that the power went down because 4 power lines were lost throwing off our grids. Since it’s night, rainy, and there are thunderstorms so it will definitely be a “long haul.”
I just took a look at the radar screens on the Weather Underground and the last pictures are from 6:50pm. They are now “down for maintenance.”
Aloha!

Well I just finished a cold sandwich, a delicious one at that, but I’m out of the fridge for a while now. While dining I learned from the radio that it seems the only generator that was up, giving power to Makakilo, seems to have gone down so the island is probably completely dark.
I’m hearing that there’s lots of lightning outside, though I haven’t heard any thunder.
Tomorrow I’ve got to get some more batteries. Sigh.
There isn’t much more to say. Blackouts on Oahu, at least ones this large, tend to last a while. Because we are an island we can’t bring in power from another grid, there isn’t one we are connected to, so we are on our own.
Aloha!

Wow, another holiday blackout. Oahu seems to be mostly dark because of an island-wide blackout. I’ve heard on the radio that Makakilo has power and there was a report that Nanakuli has power.
Luckily I have a radio that is currently working and about 3 charged up laptops.
The laptops, of course, wouldn’t be much use if I were only using my cable modem as it’s out, as is my wifi (running of the cable of course). But I do have broadband so I’m up!
And now I’ve just heard the blackout was due to a lightning strike, but that is unconfirmed.
The power went out at 6:45pm HST – I was taking a nap at the time but woke up at 7:00pm wondering what the heck was going on.
I had planned to go out to something at 8:00pm, but there’s no way I’m heading out on the road.
Aloha!

Now here’s a topic that I mostly try to avoid…resolutions. Actually I’ve changed my life quite a bit in the last few years with things like quitting smoking, quitting desserts (mostly), and excercising. What’s next?
Clean my apartment. Serious cleaning.
Take control of my spending. Seriously.
…and…
Can’t think of much else really…besides those two things I’m pretty near perfect (hah!). 🙂
Oh yeah…
Get my ego under control. 🙂
Aloha!

As you can see in my sidebar I have a widget showing my Amazon Wishlist. Now I don’t expect everyone to run out and buy this stuff for me (but do feel free to do so), but I would like my widgets to work.
The plugin/widget in question is the AVH Amazon plugin. As you can see it appears to work, but that is only on the outside. Inside WordPress it’s not so pretty. Once I’ve installed the plugin and added its widget to my sidebar I lose the ability to edit any of my sidebar widgets – they don’t even show up on the page for managing widgets…

They just aren’t there.
If I deactivate the plugin, control comes back.