Category: Web/Tech

This is an official inside joke between me and Dave. It’s a secret code.

My big birthday gift was the iPod Nano. I’ve always wanted one… not sure why, but it’s a cool gadget. So I spent a little time (OK, a lot) today figuring out how to make this contraption work with my laptop… enjoying listening to it… and buying some accessories for the thing.

I love it! It’s far cooler than I thought it would be. I knew they "did stuff" but I had no idea how much stuff iPod’s did. No wonder everyone has them. The thing has the most amazing sound I’ve ever heard from a portable. Mine holds 4 gig of stuff (currently about 600 songs/podcasts) and it only weighs a couple ounces.

It’s well known that I get what I want to buy. While I thought these were cool, I knew I could never really justify buying one. That’s why it’s so cool that a bunch of my friends broke the "no gift rule" and got this for me anyway. It’s a very nice luxury item. Wohoo!

Today I am working a little at the Romeo Big Boy. I know, that may sound funny… but they offer free wireless and I’ve found recently that I can work better in a busy place than in the solitude of the church. Go figure!

This hardly qualifies as eavesdropping, but I can’t think of a better term. But there was this woman behind me who spoke entirely too loud about her business that she is trying to get going. She was basically talking about how much money she will be making (Note: The forward thinking aspect of it and not the actual profitability now!) and some of her start up expenses… she said "I just spent $3500 getting a website set up and it’s taking about a year." I thought… are you serious? I guess there are a lot of suckers out there!

Why on earth would people start-up a brick and mortar business with all of the start-up costs she was talking about. Just my rough estimate from what she said so loudly… $10,000 so far and she hasn’t even gotten a single client. Wow! She was saying this and I was thinking… there really is a better way to do what you are talking about…

It’s been about 2 months now since I stopped the madness and started keeping one single lone blog. When I thought about doing this I was really concerned that changing my audience… combining them really, would ruin my blog and my sense of blogging. It hasn’t. In fact, it has made it better.

Along those same lines. There is a troubling thing going around the "student world" of blogs. There is this thing that basically goes like this… "Write notes to 10 people of things you want to say that you would never say. Turn off comments and just say it." This is stupid on so many levels it almost isn’t worth commenting on, but I will anyway.

Why is it dumb? First of all, it is dumb to say something rude that you know the person is going to read. Yes, get over it… there is no anonymity on blogs! (So if you are blogging something and you don’t want your mom to read it, don’t blog it!) Secondly, just because you turn off comments for a post doesn’t mean people’s feelings are not hurt. To see stuff that reads, "I hate your guts and I wish you weren’t so annoying" isn’t going to help. Why not just tell the person for real?

This stupidity (great thing about blogs is that I don’t have to sugarcoat, right?) isn’t limited to students. I see something very similar on some of the pastoral blogs I read. Then they wonder why their words get them in trouble? Genius!

As for me, I am happy to have everything nice and simple. One blog, and I am careful to not say things that I wouldn’t want my mom to read. (Heck I even gave my mom the URL… as if "adammclane.com" isn’t public enough.)

Here’s my recommendation: If you are blogging, realize it’s public and the things you say there are real.

For about the last two week the church has been experiencing problems with our internet connection. So if it’s taken a bit longer than usual to hear back from us that’s why. We’ve ordered some parts and everything should be back to normal early next week.

I woke up yesterday to an error report from a YMX user. She said, "Hey, I can’t login no matter what!" I blew this off as a report to a known bug… the dreaded "double login" where people have to login twice in a row to access the forums.

Well, a couple hours later I logged myself out of the forums to sign in as our test user, bob. Would you know it that the error report was true and the site was screwed up?

Well, thankfully this is an off week from the church for me and I was able to spend a few hours fixing the thing. I think we’ve got it all ironed out now.

YMX has calmed down since it’s launch earlier in December. The first 48 hours I think I worked on the site 40 of them with registrations and answering questions. The goal is that, like it was the last 10 days or so, I can administrate the site in under one hour per day. That is a hobby I can handle!

I saw this today on the Purpose Drive Youth Ministry Conference website. Then I got to thinking… is this my buddy Todd Porter? I mean, he was at PDYM in 2005? Maybe it’s him.

I came home from work to find that the game I ordered just last Saturday has arrived already. I mean… it was a holiday weekend and i still got it in 3 days! That is absolutely amazing.

As of today, you can now access my blog by going to adammclane.com. If you’ve already got this site linked at http://adammclane.typepad.com that’s cool… it will still work. I’ve just made it easier for me to find myself when I get lost.

I know there are plenty of ladies out there who are desperately waiting for this weekend’s Free Press… and even more terrifying… Wednesday’s Free Press so they can plan out their course of attack on the biggest shopping day of the year, lovingly called Black Friday by retailers.

Long story short, check out Black Friday Deals. Thanks to Derek for pointing that out to me.