Category: Uncategorized

Life hacking is an interesting phenomenon that’s been making its way through the blogosphere over the last few years. The term was presented by Danny O’Brien at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in February 2004. Via Wikipedia:

The original definition of the term life hack referred to quick and dirty shell scripts and other command line utilities that filtered, munged and processed data streams like email and RSS feeds. Examples of these types of life hacks might include utilities to synchronize files, track tasks, remind yourself of events or filter email.

As the meme spread, the definition of the term expanded. Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is primarily used by geeks who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can overclock their workflow.

O’Brien own site with life hacks failed to materialize but others jumped on the idea. 43 Folders launched in September 2004, January 2005 saw Lifehacker.com and May of the same year saw Lifehack.org. Each of these sites provide links and posts about how to better manage your time, your finances, neat little programs that provide all sorts of services, uses for random items and more. Combined it’s an interesting encyclopedia of helpful hits and tips that can apply to any area of life.

A good number of people have welcomed to the Virginia blogosphere two recent entries in the aggregator list: Conservativa, Jane Dudley’s collection of conservative blogs, and the ODBA Aggregator, maintained by yours truly as a one-stop-shop for the Old Dominion Blog Alliance blogroll. Many have been very nice about it (and thank you all) and a couple, particularly from the other side of the aisle, have added disclaimers of sorts, both of which caution about the “daily me”.

Anyone who has read J’s Notes for a period of time has seen me drop the term “daily me” before. Coined (as I found it) by Cass Sustein in his book “Republic.com”, the “daily me” refers to an increasing instance of people using the Internet to limit their exposure to competing ideas, instead only reading the websites and blogs that present what they want to hear.

Does Conservativa and the ODBA Aggregator feed into this?

Thomas Krehbiel fears so:

As an evangelizing tool, I’m not quite sure what the point of a conservative-only or liberal-only aggregator is. People who subscribe to them are either going to be converted already or looking for a fight. If you want to reach a new audience and perhaps sway moderates to vote differently, which seems to be the entire purpose of politics, I would think you’d want to be involved in a more non-partisan aggregator.

Granted. But you’re assuming that these tools are meant for evangelizing purposes. I can’t speak for Conservativa, but the ODBA Aggregator exists more as a service to the ODBA members than anyone else. I for one wanted to have a way to view all the ODBA blogs without having to visit twenty-some-odd sites and without having to wade through BlogNetNews to get to it (BNN does have an ODBA option). If others choose to visit the ODBA for reading the member blogs, great, more power to them. But it was ultimately created as an extension of the ODBA community more than a tool for converting individuals.

Jack commented over at Waldo’s blog:

This whole business of conservative versus liberal blog aggregators isn’t a good thing. It will eventually lead to each group going off into it’s own corner with it’s own kind and never seeing what the other side has to say. We are all better off being confronted with opposing opinions every day. It keeps us all sharp and agile.

I don’t think the fear is justified, but I certainly agree with the last couple points, that opposing opinions are a good thing to have and view. I don’t believe Jane intends for Conservativa and I certainly don’t intend for the ODBA Aggregator to replace VAPoliticalBlogs or BlogNetNews, simply to supplement them.

The left has had many means of limiting their message and building their community for years within the blogosphere, whether it’s through LeftyBlogs or DailyKos or Raising Kaine. Now that the right is catching up through creating its own community, people are going to start critiquing. And that’s fine. I just hope that the same people are willing to take the came critical view of their end of things.

UPDATE: On a side note, the ODBA Aggregator has had a good number of hits from all over the place in the two days since it’s activation. An audience exists, and I’m more than happy to provide them a site to peruse.

Thomas Krehbiel also made a good point in his post:

I wish the new aggregators would put the name of the underlying blog in the post titles. A newcomer might not realize that the posts are all coming from disparate sources and authors. Maybe that’s by design.

Unfortunately, the platform that the ODBA Aggregator runs off of limits my ability to tweak how the posts appear. If I do get the ability to change that, blog titles will be more prominently placed with respect to the post. But this also highlights one of my issues with BNN in that when you click on the blog’s name over a post you aren’t taken to the blog but to BNN’s listing of that blog’s posts. I think it’d be nice if clicking on the blog’s name took you straight to the blog, but that could be a limitation of their software.

My knowledge is around 80% according to this quiz (admittedly I outright guessed correctly on two of them). Brought to you by the Richmond History Center.

Via WOTBN.net, Carytown Bicycle Company is coming this April. Seems it’s going to be in part of the old Storehouse store. Just another place to want to spend money I don’t really have…

Woo!

Commodore’s big beige glory days may be long past, but the familiar name is still out there kicking (such as it is), lending its considerable cachet to an array of otherwise unremarkable devices. Now the company appears to have decided to bring things back a little closer to its roots, prepping a new line of Commodore-branded PCs aimed at gamers, pitting them against the well-established likes of Alienware and VoodooPC.

So Google Finance has pages for all the different stocks and on those pages they list the most recent blog posts concerning that company. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, Jones Soda has a page through this and my post on their new and improved forumla has pulled some new viewers to J’s Notes:

Neat. So to you shareholders or would be shareholders who are visting J’s Notes, let me hook you up with a little (and perhaps illegal) insider tip:

I’m buying me a case of Jones Soda this weekend. Maybe two.

I’d say the stock’s a safe buy.

From high fructose corn syrup to cane sugar:

The change at Jones Soda comes at a time when high fructose corn syrup, which became a common sweetener for sodas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has received negative publicity as being linked to obesity and diabetes. 

Even Oprah Winfrey, who wields influence over consumers, has encouraged viewers on her show to avoid high fructose corn syrup. 

Jones is following the lead of other small bottlers who are touting the use of pure cane sugar as making their products taste better.

Not sure if they even still sell it, but last Summer 7-11 started selling their own brand of 20oz soda in their stores that used cane sugar in lieu of corn syrup and it wasn’t half bad. Not sure if it’ll really translate into more sales because, well, if you’re worried about corn syrup you’re probably just worried about soda in general. But if it makes it tastier, maybe it’ll be a hit. I wonder how it’ll make their Turkey and Gravy soda taste…

I had this really neat, long review of my experience with Sandisk’s Sansa e260 and then lost it when IE7’s pop-up blocker kicked in on an attempted spell check. So poo on that. All I’ll say now is I dig this puppy and highly recomend it to anyone looking for a low end entry level MP3/WMA player. Check out PCMagand CNet reviews here.

While at the Times-Dispatch I noticed that Daniel Newman reviewed the Tenacious D movie and obviously does not get it:

Kyle Gass is a passable guitarist, but Jack Black’s vocals are desperately inadequate. To compensate for this weakness, he clowns around vocally, turning his singing voice into a joke. And like all the jokes in the film, as we have said, it is not funny.

But even if the music were better and Black could sing (as he did in “High Fidelity”), there is still the problem of their words. Lyricists, they ain’t. Cole Porter could spend weeks perfecting a song, but Black and Gass must write their pieces in less time than it takes to sing them.

How else to explain their rhyming “honesty” with “honestly”? How else to explain the line (to the tune of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”) “He is going to kick your bleeping bleep/And you know his name is Kyle Gass”?

How else to explain? How about, that’s the freakin’ point?

Tenacious D is not about making the best music in the world. No, it’s about writing a tribute to the best music in the world and mocking the metal genre while paying homage to it, highlighting its worst elements in the best way possible.

I caught this movie while in NYC for CMJ’s convention a few weeks back and I left impressed. I’ve been a D fan for a few years now and wasn’t so sure how the movie would play out, concerned that it’d just rehash the television show and also about Liam Lynch’s ability to carry a full length film given his short work wasn’t too impressive (“Siffle and Ollie” the exception). But they pulled it off. While the movie played off of some elements of the TV show, it was more as a hat tip toward the old fans than a repackaging of old ideas. The music, while not as good as their album, was good and played up the joke.

Pretty much, you have to get it to enjoy it. If you’ve never heard of Tenacious D I highly recomend you check out their album before their movie. If you have heard of them and weren’t too impressed, then save your $8 for something else. Like a decent sense of humor (oh, snap!).

If you’re a fan of the D, you’ll dig the movie.

Yesterday’s Times-Dispatch reported that the Virginia Performing Arts Center will forever now be refered to as Richmond CenterStage:

The planned arts center in downtown Richmond that once was touted as a statewide project now has a city-focused name.

The complex, which is being funded largely by city taxpayers, will be known as Richmond CenterStage.

It will include the Carpenter Center and several smaller venues, assuming that $9 million in private funds can be raised by the end of next month.

“Richmond is the center of the metropolitan area. This is for all of the metropolitan area, but it’s in the center city,” said Susan H. Fitz-Hugh, a member of the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation’s board of directors.

So take pride in this project and the tax dollars it’s going to suck out of your pocket, Richmonders. It’s got Richmond in the name!

Can I call my apartment Richmond StageLeft and ask for tax subsidies?

Don over at SaveRichmond continues what has been a great effort to take VPAF to task for this whole debacle, coming away from the article with a shopping list of questions and concerns.