Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
What to do, what to do…Part Two
As I wrote before, I have been trying to think of what to do with this site. I’ve come up a conclusion…
Please take a look at the ALL NEW TimothyPatrickMcMahon.com!
This new “ultimate nexus of all things Timothy Patrick McMahon Online” allows me to keep this site going, still run my Tumblr, and not feel guilty about having to choose one site over the other as the official home of TimothyPatrickMcMahon.com. They’re my babies, I can’t pick a favorite! (is it odd that I would grapple with this dilemma and actually feel guilt about such a thing?)
Let me know what you think.
What to do, what to do…
I have a “problem”.
I’ve been spending more and more time on Tumblr. And by time, I also mean I am posting more and more stuff on Tumblr. Tumblr is becoming my “real” site, more then this page is.
So, I’m debating weather or not I need to redirect TimothyPatrickMcMahon.com over to my Tumblr site for good. I would love to, but, I don’t want to lose all the junk I’ve already posted here. However, i get much more traffic over on Tumblr then I do here.
I have been double posting, putting the same stuff up on both sites, but I’m kinda getting sick of doing that.
What to do, what to do…
(Not that any of this really matters, it’s only important in my head and no where else.)
Anyway, just thinking out loud. I’ll make up my mind soon.
In the meantime, please go visit TimothyPatrickMcMahon.tumblr.com.
Number Ten!
Eleven days ago, I listed nine boring facts about my recent days. Nine? Who makes a list of nine things? That’s just stupid.
Well, I’m stupid, and at the time, I could not think of a tenth thing to write. But today, it dawned on me what that tenth thing could’ve/should’ve been…
I recently installed a new flapper in my toilet. Yup, I’m practically a plumber now. But not just any kind of plumber. I’m a plumber who is saving the Earth!
You see, when I changed the flapper in the toilet, I also inserted a new-fangled device into it, and then I changed the handle on the outside of the toilet to a button. Two buttons to be exact. The type where you press button number one if you did number one, and button number two if you made a number two. Supposedly, when pressing button number one, I use 70% less water. Over the course of a year, for a family of four, that would be enough water to stack water bottles 45 miles high! -Or something like that. I can’t quite remember what the box said, but it had a neat graphic of water bottles stretching into space.
Another thing about the box that the device came in; it proudly proclaimed that this hardware was designed by a fourth generation American plumber. This is so awesomely American to me. Here, you have a trade, passed down from generation to generation… Here, you have a person who, with the wisdom of their family behind them, tinkers to make things better… Here, you have someone who saw a problem, and found a way to make it better… To me, it’s such a storybook American tale of family, ingenuity, and entrepreneurial-ship; I love it!
But of course, the device is made in China, which is also to typically American as well.
Anyway, there you go, another boring fact about recent life.
Faaaaawwwwwwwwwk!
WordPress just screwed me over for the second time in a month.
After writing a long post about my adventures in Boston last night, WP ate my post before I could click “publish”! It did this after my ROFLcon weekend too. AAARRRGGHHH!!! Frustration!
I should have learned after the first time. But I didn’t. Well, I have now.
From now on, I’ll write up my stuff in a seperate document before posting.
As for last night… Here’s this to hold you over until I can get around to re-writing about the night.
I’m sick of Facebook. I think I need to give it up for a while. Here’s what I posted today…
I’m sorry Facebook, it’s not me, it’s you. We need to go our separate ways. I’ve found someone new. Her name is Tumblr. She’s younger, slimmer, and way cooler. She doesn’t have the crazy streak that I all too often see in you, and none of the extra “bloat” that you carry around. She’s prettier to look at too. Anyway, I’ll still post to you from time to, remotely. But, I can’t bring myself to spend so much time with you each day. You’re dragging me down. See ya around.
ROFLcon II
Wow, is it that time already? Time for another ROFLcon? Cool! Cuz I love me some ROFLcon!!!
If you are coming to TimothyPatrickMcMahon.com after visiting ROFLtuxes.Net, hello and thank you! I bet you’re probably looking for an explanation. Well…
I went to the first ROFLcon back in 2008, and it was great. Except for the fact that I had the flu and should have been in bed. BUT, I wasn’t going to miss the event for anything. Instead, I loaded up on medications, water and trudged through the weekend. Look, here is a picture of me that was in WIRED, feeling puffy, light headed and a bit out of sorts.
I'm the Ickabod Crane stand-in in the back.
I went with my buddy Roe, also seen in the photo above (not the one in spandex). We had a great time, but we knew that when ROFLcon II came around, we needed to have a better time!
But how? Well, we wanted to stand a bit closer to the ROFLcon spotlight. But, neither of us had anything that would deem us worthy of being on a panel, we didn’t have an audience, we didn’t have cyber-fame, we were not innovators or creators, we were not Internet Superstars.
So, we would have to find a way to stand out from the crowd. And how could we do this? One word…
Tuxedos!
At first it was jut a joke, but we decided to do it. We have no goal other than to get people to stop and say hello. Simple as that. We want this weekend to be a social adventure were we meet new and interesting people, have conversations with intelligent strangers, and, as an ego stroke, we want people to approach us and ask to have their pictures taken with us. (Yes, I’ll admit I can be just that shallow!) Simple as that.
So anyway, that’s all.
This site isn’t much, just a place I share stuff I’ve found other places. I’m sure these links, photos and videos are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they made me lol, and so I’ve reposted them here. I keep telling myself I need to do something “original” with this site, but I’ve yet to come up with an idea. Stop by again in the future, look for me elsewhere online, and let’s be internet friends!
I’ve never sent or received a video message on Facebook. Do any of you ever uses this feature? Just curious.
3D TV
“LOL” is so overused. But this time, I honestly did. And so will you. I guarantee it, or your money back!
kewl!
This gives me nerdgasms. Also makes me sad cuz my PS skilz are so weak.
#HuluFail
Hulu will let me watch some shows today, but on others, it claims I am outside of the US. Ugh! frustrating #HuluFail
Joy Of Tech
THE JOY OF TECH hasn’t made me laugh in a very long time (why do I still read it?) but this one did. Cuts a bit to close to home I guess. enjoy
What You’ll See on Chatroulette
Luckily, I haven’t seen THAT many dicks.
Google Wave Cyber Sex – CollegeHumor Video
I like Google Wave, but I cant find anyone to do it with me. :-(
Why The Internet Will Fail
Last week, BoingBoing linked to this article from 1995, published in Newsweek magazine. I liked it, so I’m reposting it in it’s entirty.
The Internet? Bah!
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana
By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEKFrom the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”
Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.
In my humble opinion…
Every Facebook fad puts FB one small step closer to being the next MySpace.
THE DAYS OF MIRACLES AND WONDER
A humorous short story about time travel, technology, politics, cynisism and perspective. – I enjoyed.
Written By Greg Knauss, From his blog “An Entirely Other Day” – Entitled THE DAYS OF MIRACLES AND WONDER
“AAAAAaaaaaagh!”
“Please calm down. Breathe deeply. Anxiety is a normal part of the temporal displacement field. It will pass quickly. OK. OK? OK. Now: Hello. I am you, from the year 2010, two decades in the future.”
“Aaaaaaaagh!”
“I said, calm down. The panic will pass.”
“Calm down? Calm down? You’re fat! And bald! I’m going to be fat and bald!”
“Hold up there, Sparky. You’re already fat. And will it help with the bald thing if I assure you that you’re, um, romantically involved on a regular basis?”
“But…”
“Regular basis.”
“Yeah, OK, fair trade.”
“I’ve come to the past to tell you two things.”
“Other than the bald thing?”
“Yes. Other than the bald thing.”
“Is it about nuclear war? Because radiation would explain why all your hair has fallen out.”
“In 2010, Apple will introduce a new computer, called the ‘iPad.’”
“Hee!”
“You’re thinking of a sanitary napkin joke, aren’t you?”
“Hee!”
“Would you like me to describe this computer to you?”
“Is Apple even still around? Microsoft just launched Windows 3.0 and—”
“It’s about the size of a piece of paper, half an inch thick and weighs a pound an a half. It has 64GB of storage, can play tens of thousands of songs and can display everything from photos to high-quality video. It has a touch-sensitive screen, is completely wireless and can connect to the Internet from just about anywhere.”
“Aaaaaagh!”
“Pretty cool, huh?”
“Holy crap! Oh, my God! Do you guys have, like, flying cars, too? Did aliens come and give you this technology? That means I can get USENET anywhere.”
“Um. Yeah. The Internet expands a bit from USENET, by the way.”
“Gopher?”
“Yeah. Gopher.”
“Oh, man. Can I see it? Do you have one?”
“Well, no, I don’t have one, because it won’t come out for another two months. But, here, I’ve got a smaller one that can make phone calls, too.”
“Aaaaaaagh! Oh, my God. This is so cool! All this, and I’m getting laid, too? People in the future must be so happy!”
“Actually, no. People are sort of disappointed.”
“What? How is that even possible?”
“That brings me to the second thing I want to tell you. In 2008, America elects a black man President.”
“What? Really? Like Morgan Freeman in ‘Deep Impact’?”
“No, you anachronistic goober. That movie doesn’t even come out until 1998.”
“So, he’s like Disraeli or Thatcher, right? Only Nixon can go to China? He’s really conservative? Please tell me you don’t elect Alan Keyes President.”
“No, no. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
“OK, now you’re just screwing with me.”
“No. Totally serious. He’s liberal, intelligent, deliberative, pretty much everything the country needs after Bush.”
“Bush? But Bush is President now. Please don’t tell me that he’s still around in 2008!”
“Oh, no. You’ve got the good Bush. The other one is who Obama is cleaning up after.”
“Wow! That’s awesome. That’s wonderful to hear. People must be really— Oh. You’re going to do that thing again, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. A lot of his supporters are disappointed.”
“With what? A liberal black guy got elected President!”
“And in his first year, he prevented a second Great Depression, has stopped torture as official policy, is winding down an unnecessary war, has dramatically opened up the transparency of government and has gone a good way towards restoring America’s place in the world.”
“And people are disappointed?”
“They want more.”
“Like the people disappointed with the computer?”
“Yes.”
“So people in 2010 are dicks?”
“They’re cynics.”
“Oh, please. I’m a cynic, and all this stuff sounds incredibly great.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you, 1990 me. Your cynicism is important, even vital. God knows, there are times when it will seem like bunnies-and-rainbows optimism given what actually happens. Things get really, really bad for a while, and no amount of cynicism seems like enough.
“But I also wanted to make sure that there are some things that are, in fact, awesome. The world’s been through a hell of a lot, and I’m not sure I trust my own eyes anymore. I don’t agree with every one of Obama’s policies and I doubt that I’ll buy an iPad, but does that make their existence any less amazing? What would the bright-eyed, long-haired, involuntarily celibate version of myself from two decades ago think?”
“I think it’s amazing. All of it. And I’m even ignoring the fact that you can apparently time-travel.”
“Good. That’s good to know. I look at some of the stuff that’s going on, what we can do and what we’ve done, and I want to be astonished. But some small, mean, broken part of me thinks it will all go to hell, that it’s a trap.”
“Wow. You really are cynical, aren’t you? It all looks great to me. Magic. The future! Man.”
“OK. Thanks. Oh, and two more things.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ever used the words ‘Meh’ or ‘Fail.’”
“OK.”
“And in a couple of years, when you’re deciding if you want to go on a blind date with someone’s lawyer friend, do it.”
“Seriously?”
“Talk about awesome.”
Well Worth The Read
I can really relate to this list. The 20 Nerd Commandments. Rule 20 ruined my life though. I’ve had to go cold turkey on collecting, of everything, except for Star Wars Books (I’m The Jedi Librarian, Bitches!). Too much stuff I “needed”, and not nearly enough money.
In The Year Two Thousand… (and ten)
Here is what people in 1972 (the year I was born) though 2010 (the year I am in) might be like – http://ping.fm/i1l53
Backin’ it up here boss
I need a new external hard-drive. Any recommendations?
I love this mash-up
I am a b-tard
Are chans the next step in human consciousness? – http://ping.fm/jWiHN
#hastags
I don’t think that I am using enough #hashtags in my life. Gotta work on that.
Electric Boogaloo
ROFLCon II!! – Who’se coming with me? – http://ping.fm/9AsYw
The Portland Press Herald part two
My letter to the paper got a write up! http://ping.fm/IY8zy
Stop! Camera Time!
All I want for Chrsitmas – http://ping.fm/aDRSI
