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Cigar Boxes

I use a lot of index cards at work, and wanted something to toss them into. The idea of a cigar box came up, and a little searching, I found a seller on Etsy that sells lots of excellent cigar boxes in great shape. Blissfuldragonfly took care of the transaction quickly and I couldn’t be more happy with the result. I bought a lot of five, and now have really nice landing spots for index cards, pens, and stray motorcycle patches I don’t know what to do with.

DIY Weekend

I did a bit of DIY this weekend. I love my car, but also really wanted bluetooth audio with the stereo. The factory Toyota options are a bit on the pricey side, so I screwed up some courage, picked a cool new stereo off of Crutchfield, read many websites, and watched many sample videos, then installed the new stereo.

Taking apart the dash turned out to be pretty darn easy, and not all that frightening. It’s all snapped together, with two screws holding the base pieces. To be honest, I wouldn’t have accomplished this part with the instructions alone. Watching a couple of video’s on youtube showing how the dash comes apart to access the built in stereo really helped.

"Breaking the Surface" by Greg Louganis

As I mentioned in a previously, I am working on recovering all of the old ClubReading.com reviews. We had some good reviews on that old site, and I’d like to have that content available again. I did not write all of those old reviews, and will include the reviewers name when I have it. So I’m going to post a few as time allows in the blog stream, and they will be in their own ClubReading category. Enjoy!

Blogs and Stats and Objectives

Jordan McCollum has a great post for writers introducing site analytics and what to look for. Web marketing is a strange combination of advertising, customer appeal, and raw magic.

Tracking your blog: using the data: “What do I do with this information? Again, look for trends. What makes these posts your most popular? The subject? The tone? The search engine presence? Was it informative? Social? Fun? Funny? Personal? Then do that again!
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Common Questions

People are funny. Most folks require a certain comfort level to ask certain questions. But coming out on your blog does encourage those close acquaintances or friends to ask questions. That’s cool. So here are the most common couple of questions.

By the way, I’ve noticed including certain words in a blog title, such as big, ass, gay, and party generates an interesting array of visitors to the site. I’m not sure what they are hoping to find :-) but I hope they are not too disappointed.

Dan Is All Class

I don’t know the reasons, but I agree with what others have said, the show has been sliding, and Dan’s response is all class.

I would ask for more The Incomparable, Back to Work, Amplified, Build and Analyze, Hypercritical, The Ihnatko Almanac, Mac Power Users….but I can’t keep up now!

(Odd, I always assumed Roderick on the Line was on 5by5. Should be…dang funny show.)

5by5.tv has some of the best darn shows in the internet. Thanks!

Why You Should Quit

Chuck Wendig does these great “25 things” posts, taking the lists trend to a wonderful absurd. They are funny, very irreverent and often insightful. The latest one, reason 7 spoke to me:

25 Reasons You Should Quit Writing: “And at this point you make up some excuse about publishing trends or writer’s block or The Muse, but it all adds up to the same thing: you’re not very good at finishing what you start. Your life is littered with the dessicated corpses of countless incomplete manuscripts, characters whose lives are woefully cut short by your +7 Axe of Apathy. You’re so good at not finishing, embrace this skill and quit.”
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Annular Solar Eclipse Video

Agreed! This is a very cool video.

The coolest video of yesterday’s annular solar eclipse

Scalzi's Take on Privilege

John Scalzi ruffled some feathers again on his blog when he used a gaming metaphor to try and explain to the Straight White Male players in life that they are on the lowest/easiest setting. It’s an interesting read and plenty to think about.

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is – Whatever: You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the ‘Gay Minority Female’ setting? Hardcore.
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Macdrifter Summation of Text

A Simplenote Affair « Macdrifter: “WriteRoom Dropbox sync is amazingly fast. It’s faster than Simplenote with a large collection of notes. I use WriteRoom to quickly add a note. The launch and refresh time beat Simplenote by a large margin. The only thing I don’t like is the enormous margin in landscape.”

I’ve settled on Byword on my iPad for writing, and Elements for search if I can’t find what I’m looking for by the title.