IM in Hell

Posted on May 20th, 2008 in Admin, Editorial by Robb

And I blame Hotmail.

I have had a Hotmail account(s) for well over ten years now. In fact, I think the only communication tools I use that are older are ICQ and the US Postal Service. I used to use the hotmail address specifically as a gaming account. Whenever I registered for a game, online or otherwise, I would use that email. By the time I stopped using it, about 8 or so years ago, it had become utterly useless as an email account due to the vast amount of spam it collected. I haven’t been to the in-box there in I don’t know how long and, unless they recycle inactive accounts, I shudder to think of what the spam box must look like.

Still, though, I used their IM service to keep in touch with some friends, so I didn’t turn it off completely, regardless of how much the MSN Messenger application sucks tiny brown dust bunnies. Interestingly, to this day, I have friends who use only MSN Messenger. I also have friends that use only ICQ, and others that use only Yahoo, so, naturally, I switched to solutions that allowed me to run a single app. Currently, I use Pidgin (thanks Nick!), and I find it more than suitable for my minimal needs (not to mention it has a very active dev community). But, alas, I digress… back to Messenger.

I am not sure how I am suddenly such a popular fellow to the IM Spam artists out there. I don’t publish my hotmail address anywhere. I don’t publish my MSN handle anywhere. Somehow, though, I have landed on some porn site’s list, and I am getting flooded with adverts for webcams bimbos and other assorted nonsense. I just received my fifth since starting this post, actually.

The reason I blame Hotmail? They are easy to blame, and they won’t care anyway. And they are owned by MS, so what other reason do I really need? Most likely it has nothing to do with Hotmail at all, though. Most likely someone mined MSN addresses from somewhere and mine got sold to some crazy blast IM service not too different from the blast email services that fill up our in-boxes with Cialis ads.

Needless to say, I am a bit irked. But, there is a solution to my irkness. Those of you whom I chat with on MSN, you have about a week (or less, depending on my mood) to contact me about my handles on other services (ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo, AOL). After that, I am going to disappear from MSN, most likely for good. In the world of IM, there are other options, and one less app to load at startup makes me happy.

Site Plans

Posted on August 21st, 2007 in Admin by Robb

Just a quick update on the plans I have for the website. Mostly I have been working on backend and design stuff the past couple of weeks which has, by and large, now been completed. On to the content!

The first major addition will be the return of the online photo album. I am likely going to be switching over to Coppermine, as I grew extremely tired of wrestling with Gallery. Hopefully it will prove to be less of a hassle.

Once that has been installed and populated, I’ll be working on returning the PMHS pages to new found glory for the Class of ‘85 (Go Vikings!). Even though I now work for a rival HS here in town, I’ll do my best to remain unbiased in the presentation.

Lastly, I want to try and find some sort of monitoring/statistical package I can install on the site. My web host has one built in, but I need to upgrade packages to use it and right now I don’t want to do that. Anyone have any suggestions? By the way, one of these days I am going to put a call out to de-lurk and register, especially if you subscribe to the RSS feed. I have no idea if anyone besides Sangi and Nick even visit me here in my little corner of the web.

Realistically, that right there should take me the rest of the year, unless I am seriously misjudging the lack of free time I am going to be having between work and grad school. I have plans beyond those 2 projects as well, but things change so fast with technology I won’t even bother announcing them until I am about to push them live, sometime next spring.

So hang in there. Lots more stuff coming down the pike, and I’ll still be posting during the school year as well.

New Template Info

Posted on July 21st, 2007 in Admin by Robb

(originally posted July 9, 2007 - Updates at the end)

Things are going just swimmingly with the new website design. I hope to be able to have at least the new template up within the next week, maybe two weeks at the outside. I found a couple free templates I like and am busy ripping apart the CSS and combining elements from each that I like into a single template. Even when I get a version up here, it won’t be anywhere near finished, but it wont be a hideous eyesore, either, like this one is (yes, I hate this one a little more every day).

Unfortunately, I can only spare a couple hours a day to work on it. School has started back up (summer session) and between that and the writing and just, well, life in general, I have every day planned out to the minute.

Speaking of which, let me introduce you to a handy little application I found. It’s freeware called TimeTo and can be found at http://www.davidberman.com/software/timeto.php. I have only been using it a week or so, but already I am really liking it. I have used several time management type software solutions in the past, and they were each either way more than I needed or way too simplistic. In the end I reverted to a regular old Excel Spreadsheet with some custom VB scripting. It was a little unwieldy, but since I built it, I knew it’s quirks and worked around them easily enough.

Happily, after about a week of use, I haven’t given up on TimeTo and am actually beginning to get more complex with a few of it’s capabilities. I will not even try to extol its virtues or decry it’s shortcomings, as I just don’t know the product well enough yet. I will say, however, that just by using it for a week, I have become solidly aware of problems I had with my old system, and so far any concern I had has been happily cast aside.

TimeTo is, for now at least, a perfect solution for me. That may change come fall semester when things start going crazy again, but for now I am enjoying a new system and actually finding ways to gain myself an hour or so of free time a day. If you are someone that is easily distracted or just never seems to get to the bottom of your To Do list, you might want to give it a try. I did, and so far I don’t regret it a bit.

**Update**

2 weeks left in the semester, so work on the site has been sparse as I prepare my final paper and presentation. It will pick up again soon.

TimeTo is still working well. It will be interesting to see how it works with the daily details of employment when that kicks in next week. The more I use it, the more I like it, and I think I am ignoring all the big-time “power-user” options. Hopefully I’ll figure out some of those during the 2 week hiatus between semesters.

Site is Live

Posted on July 18th, 2007 in Admin by admin

This just in from the “No Kidding, Really?” Department, the new template is live. I am still configuring things so it isn’t fully implemented yet, but I’ll likely begin re-posting entries shortly.

Feel free to leave site-related comments here, especially if you find something broken I haven’t caught.