This morning, I realized a little late that the State of the Union Address was today. For those of you that follow me on twitter, you might have noticed my tweet somewhere around 9 am this morning that read as follows: “LOL! comment on engadget: “I’m more excited about Job’s state of the union address than Obama’s… What does that say about us?” This was promptly picked up by the Obama twitter bot. The reality is that I realized that the state of the union address was today when I read that comment on Engadget.
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Well… it had to happen sooner or later. I think I have posted one of these before, but it needs an update and I have a few folks on twitter asking me the question: What are your favorite apps?
Well, here they are. These are the apps I can’t live without. Post yours in the comments! I’m always interested in looking for a new app!
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The last few years have been very cathartic for me. I have had to say good bye to a lot of things that I loved from the time that I was very small. My grandmother passed away last summer, just ten days before my birthday. I had to haul ass to get home to talk to her just one more time before she left and she didn’t even get to say good-bye to my children. That was how fast I had to move just to be with her. After I said good bye to her, I said good bye to the house where I grew up. The yard was overgrown, but the trees were still there and I could still see the scars on the old maple where my swing used to be. I never knew how my grandfather managed to get the swing put up there, or if he made my dad do it. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter. But then, in that moment all I could see was that the swing was long gone and the remnants of my childhood hung in that yard like ancient material, too strong and durable to give way, and at the same time so delicate and fragile that a single touch would rend all to dust.
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Tags: facebook, grandmother, grief, optimus prime, peter cullen, star trek
Essays, News from the Random, Rants, Tech, Writing and Reading | Random Gemini | 
July 9, 2009 10:17 am | 
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The Pre is hitting shelves at Sprint stores on June 6th.
Yes, I really did say Sprint. Sprint, with its shrinking customer network. Sprint with its crappier than Verizon customer service. Sprint, with its “cheap” calling plans. Sprint with its cellular coverage that is so poor that it’s the reason that Verizon, AT&T and T Mobile are the taking the carrier world by storm in North America. Sprint had its chance. I’m surprised they’re still in business and admit it, so are you.
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So… here I am. Twitter is down for scheduled maintenance and I have nothing to do. I feel like I used to in the days when our Internet access would go out because the phone company was working on the lines in the area. Naked, useless, listless, alone and worst of all…
…I am so bored that I think my head is going to start spinning.
In order to keep myself entertained, I had planned to clean the house, but for some reason I am glued to my mac. I can’t seem to get the motivation to get away and pick up socks out of the family room floor because well… twitter’s down and waiting for it to come back up just seems like THE thing to do! I mean after all, there are people that @replied to me just before Twitter went offline and dammit! I have to answer them! I MUST!!!
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My wonderful husband chose to get me a Kindle 2 for our anniversary this year. I felt so shocked. I hadn’t quite made up my mind on what was the right e-reader for me, he had spoken out harshly against the Kindle, but when I opened the box, I just stared at it, sort of numb. Of course, I kissed him a lot and truly appreciate the gift. I immediately slid my new Kindle into its cover and downloaded some books from Feedbooks and went to town. So if you see my “reading list” page expanding rapidly this month… you now know why.
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A dear friend of mine, and I call him that in spite of all the arguments we’ve had lately, has been considering the idea of getting a Mac. I think part of the appeal to him is that Macbooks are lightweight, versatile and well, he’s probably heard more than a bit from me telling him to just dive in and drink the kool-aid, but we’ve run into a few problems that have caused him to drop names at me like, “Mactard” and this drives me insane, and oddly enough, he finds this amusing. I think the guy gets a kick out of seeing me get passionate about the things I love.
When I first got my mac, I was confused about some things. My macbook is the first mac I have ever owned. I’ve used a couple, but those were always in school labs because Apple donated computers to public institutions for years. I had never had to seriously live with Mac OS before and I didn’t understand how to do very simple things and once I was told how to do it, I felt like a complete idiot because it seemed so obvious to me afterward.
One of the first issues I ran into was installing software.
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I’ve been reading ebooks with Stanza on my iPhone since early January. I had never honestly entertained the idea of reading ebooks, until I hit a huge reading phase and realized that as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten harder to hang on to hefty hardbacks. After a while, it makes my hands hurt to hang onto a paperback in such a way that I don’t crack the spine, which, as all good readers know, eventually causes the pages of the book to fall out.
For eons, Stanza has been the de facto standard for e book reading on the iPhone, and I was very happy with how it worked. Text colors and font sizes were completely customizable to make reading easier on the eyes. Tapping to either side of the screen advanced pages forward or backwards. Accessing the menu was done through a simple tap in the center of the screen. There was also the advantage of having direct download access to the entire width and breadth of the Gutenberg project without having to sign into an account. Stanza is just incredibly intuitive to iPhone users. It works like an iPhone user expects an iPhone app to work. So pitting yourself up against something that just plain works is a pretty brave thing to do.
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The world has become an interesting place over the last 15 years. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I looked at the world and wondered what amazing changes were going to take place in my lifetime, but if I had to pick one… I’d say it was the internet.
It has really changed everything that we do and the way we think about doing it. Thus begins the story of Johnny and the Popcorn Popper. I’d like to preface the story by saying that any similarities to persons living or dead, is purely coincidental and almost assuredly, this story was not inspired by people that I follow on twitter or their escapades in the newsroom. Absolutely nothing to do with it. Definitely not.
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For those of us that tweet, getting new followers is a bittersweet event. There is that moment when you think, “Wow! Cool! Look at this! I’ve picked up ten followers in the last 24 hours! That’s great! People really care what I have to say!” and then you go to look at the people that followed you and you find that most of them are places like JimBob’sShoeShack, or Kedida’sLovelyHandMadeHandGunSales and you know… you have been plagued by the vague, but ever present.. twitspammer.
I’m sure that top 10 lists like this abound on the internet, and every blogger that tweets has written one, but I felt that for the sake of my sanity, I had to write mine as I blocked and reported ten spammers to twitter admins today alone. One of whom, only tweeted links to his ebay sales page… and somehow thought I would be interested in an xbox 360 controller, even though there is absolutely no mention of the console on my user info, or in my tweets.
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