Category: Internet

An update for a neglected blog

I keep forgetting I have this blog and I need to spend more time writing on it. I don’t know why I don’t make it more of a priority. I have my iPad and could write on that or I could use my iPhone and write quick little posts. But I tend to enjoy more of a long form style. But writing long form takes more time. Which is not something I want to do when I am on a computer all day at work.

I bought a new domain for this site you can use if you would like http://tristanp.com I also have http://tristan.pipo.me which I thought could be new domain names if I ever want to migrate.

I really miss the whole community around blogging and people coming to my site. I guess that happens when you are an adult and work the 9-5 and have stuff to do. But I will do my best to write more about that soon. But just wanted to check in with everyone and wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

Post #1057 – Social Networking

Having been around the internet a few times and seeing things come and go I have made a few observations about social networks. This first major site I ever joined up on was MySpace in 2002 or 2003 I can’t exactly recall. But since the beginning of the site I thought it was doomed to fail. It was slow and cumbersome and it put the major design elements at the hands of the user. Which for me took the site back to the days of the mid 90’s when glitter and background music was the “cool” thing to do. But if you wanted to connect with people it was the place to be. It seemed like a place to sell yourself online and I was never a huge fan of that platform.

I opted to setup my own site because I figured that would be where things would be going. So the first domain name I ever purchased was xmdude.com and I used blogger as the blogging platform. Because I thought XM satellite radio was the most amazing thing on earth. Mainly because I was in Indiana and well the radio and music variety was rather limited. I then moved to Sirius satellite radio and got rather bored with that after I moved back to Seattle. So I got tristanpipo.com. Lately I have been debating moving away from tristanpipo.com to pipo.me or something like tristan.pipo.me as a domain name. But save that debate for a future post.

But lately I have felt like blogging isn’t really my style I like the short little quips that I can post on twitter from my iPhone or iPad. I enjoy the interaction from twitter and reading about a whole group of strangers. I have some friends that I know on there in real life and always enjoy that experience. I feel like twitter is a hive mind of people that I want to follow. Since I prefer twitter I have it update the other social network platform that is the king of the world at the moment Facebook.

Facebook does okay but I feel like there is so much garbage to dig out of. I find myself blocking every app under the sun so I don’t get flooded with the annoyances of people playing the pointless games. If you have an obligation to a farm in the computer I think your mind isn’t in the right place to push the human race forward. But people are kinda either in the Facebook camp or the Twitter bandwagon.

I feel like the intelligence level on twitter is a great deal higher. For some reason people view it as being more complicated then Facebook. When I see it as just the opposite. Twitter you sign up and all you get is a text box for 140 characters to say whatever. You can mention people in a response and follow people for the latest news. You can either be totally private or not and it’s settings screen is rather simple.

Facebook on the other hand is a giant complicated mess. Have you gone to look at the privacy settings? There are so many things you need to configure on there it’s a rather large pain in the ass and then you have all the clutter all over the page and updates and so forth. But to each their own.

There is a new trend lately “Checking In” at locations which is something I tried for a while. The services I used are Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp. I find these to be annoying getting updates as to what people are doing. The main thought I have when people use these services. Oh so and so is out and broadcasting it to the world. Other people can see this and they are not as honest as myself. I hope that person doesn’t get robbed. Or the other thing I tend to observe “Hey! Hey! Look at me! I am pumping gas or I am buying this” nobody really cares so I don’t bother. Why not check in somewhere cool? I would prefer to see things like “I just got into a fight with a ninja unicorn in Las Vegas at the top of the Luxor here is a picture” but sadly it’s people pumping gas or having dinner.

I guess in the end it’s all about feeling like we are all important. We all are important in different ways but I think posting about how we are doing mediocre things is kinda lame. Probably just like this blog post is rather lame. But if you would like to follow my random encounters with life as they happen you can check me out on twitter.

http://twitter.com/tristanpipo

Or if you would like to see all my social networking links they are in the sidebar or at http://about.me/tristanpipo

Thanks for reading

 

The Spammers

I don’t get why spammers on Instant messengers think messages like the following would ever be useful to them. These always occur on Yahoo.

(10:43:02 AM) esotericsinqln: Hey tjthephantom 19gmWOMENehhejreiandzgettingeknu.devgonmumyvwebcamoloook@www.rndKeyletters,%symbols2%,1-2chatlivetodayrndKeyletters.info ywyj pspaiw

I do not even know where to begin on this one. I see 19 and women there ok that might spark some interest. Also a webcam 19 year old women on webcam that could be good. But they can’t even spell look properly. I think the spammers need to rethink their delivery since that message appears to not serve any purpose.

Blogging Tools

I have been trying to find an excellent blogging tool for a while now. I have used many blogging engines over the years since I started a weblog back in 2003. I got into blogging back in September of 2003 for two reasons.

#1 – My relationship with my then current girlfriend was fading. We broke up in December 2003.
#2 – I saw that Google had purchased Blogger and all of it’s services went from being limited free to being totally free.

It was interesting back in those days. Blogger.com had I think 7 templates. None of them that great. It was mainly a way to talk about my hobby at the the time. Satellite Radio. In fact the first domain I purchased for myself was XMDude.com. Now it just redirects back to TristanPipo.com. At that point I felt like I was losing faith in the XM Satellite radio community. When the XM Community fan site that I ran clubXM.com (Now Defunct) got ignored and XMFan.com came to be. So I then migrated to SiriusDude.com. Then I got tired of the entire Satellite Radio game when I got an iPod. TristanPipo.com was then born. But I have moved between a few webhosts and blogging engines.

Currently I am hosting this site using the WordPress blogging engine. I feel that it’s the best. I have been told I should be using Drupal and I have also been looking at moving to a SquareSpace hosting solution. But I kinda like GoDaddy but some of the tweaks I had to implement to get the site to load properly I am not a huge fan of.

But I should really get back on point. I am really trying to make an active effort to get back into blogging. But I find myself working on a computer all day. I get home and the last thing I want to do is touch a computer. I am currently sitting at my desk with 3 Mac Laptops.

Now most people would just login to WordPress and post via that method but the interface seems to have gotten cluttered over the years. I like the features that it offers. But most of the time I just want to write some text. But I also find that things that are bothering me or I want to discuss should be private. I would love to post like I used to. I felt that no feelings happened to be involved. But if I post something that bothers someone I feel like I am going to get put in a place I don’t want to be. I prefer to pick and choose my battles. Getting in trouble over a blog post hardly seems worth it to me. If you want to view my less censored version of things you can follow me on Twitter. twitter.com/tristanpipo.

Ugh I really want to talk about blogging tools.

So I use a Mac for most of my blogging interactions. I have a few tools MarsEdit is one of my currently favorite tools. It’s nice when I don’t want to launch a web browser and just write a blog post with media or fancy formatting. It’s also nice to use when you manage blog posts on multiple blogs.

Most of the time I find myself just using Textmate because it’s a very powerful text editor. I can just open it up and hit new blog posts and then publish in about 2 seconds. I am writing this blog post with Textmate as we speak.

Textmate Interface

Otherwise I just use the post editor built into wordpress. Does anyone have a particular blogging tool or platform that they like to use? I like to host it on a server that I full control over just because of the nerd in me. But I find myself not wanting to deal with spending so much time managing that. But anyways as we approach the holidays. I hope everyone has a good one. This is going to be my first year cooking a Turkey. I am going to deep fry one. It’s been a bit of a debate in my family. But I am excited to try and hopefully nobody dies or gets burnt.

Tristan Out….

Blogging From a Coffee Shop

So I thought today I would try a new experience. I am currently sitting in a coffee shop. I never understood why people go to coffee shops to sit down and use their laptops. Most of the time I thought people just wanted to do anti social activities in a social place. It doesn’t seem like sitting here people are just going to come up to you because you are on a laptop. It seems like it would make people stay away from you. So far I have yet to have any social interaction with anyone.

I wouldn’t describe it as being a cool experience. So I am just going to assume that people that do this are cheap. They don’t want to fork out for their own internet access. The WiFi at this coffee shop sucks to begin with. 768Kbps DSL I decided to bust out my MiFi and use the 3G access on that. Much faster oddly enough at least I can stream a Netflix movie if I decide to. But people wanting to be around people and free internet is what I am going to assume is the reasoning for people in coffee shops on their laptops.

Hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy the remaining hours of their weekend. Tristan is out.

Some new things

So for my birthday I decided to cash in a couple gift cards I had received over the years to pickup a Wacom Table. I got the Bamboo Fun tablet which I must say was a nice upgrade in size. It’s especially nice when running dual monitors as each monitor is 1/2 of the tablet.

I’ve been using this table with a program called Pixelmator as it’s an alternative to photoshop for performing some touchup work. Lately I have been into creating black and white photos and then painting in  only part of the color. I have an app do to this on my iPhone called Colorsplash. But using Pixelmator with the tablet is a bit more fun.

Since it is essentially a digital piece of paper I thought it would be cool to create a digital signature that I could put into an e-mail so my name actually looks like it was written by a real person. But I have really crappy handwriting. I am not really sure I should be doing something like that.

Here are 3 drafts I created on my tablet.

sig-1.jpg

sig-2.jpg

sig-3.jpg

My handwriting looks like chicken scratch. But it could be the fact that I am still getting used to the tablet. I think this will requite a bit more trial and error. But so far I am loving this tablet.

Life has been treating me pretty well the past few months. I haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog. I did update the wordpress blogging software. Added a plugin that will grab all of my tweets and post them on the site.

But I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend. Would anyone want to read a review on the iPhone 4 or any other piece of technology that I own.

Viva the Digital Overlords

I was sitting here at my desk working on building an HTML version of a digital scoreboard to show who is awesome at Air Hockey. I used to play with my coworker Greg and we both just got extremely busy at work. So we are going to start it back up again. When we left off I was ahead like 131 games to 126 I believe. We would play 3-5 games a day.

But the title of this blog post doesn’t really mean anything. I was listening to iTunes and had it on Random and Octopuses Garden came up on iTunes. For some reason it inspired me to open up MarsEdit and write a click little blurb.

I have been working on converting all of my families home video tapes to a digital format. I must say it has been a rather intensive process. A bit more expensive then I imagined.

The first expense was the Elgato Video Capture device. Scored that for $84 off Amazon with the free 2 day shipping ala Amazon Prime. Another expense was actually getting a VCR. My girlfriends mom had one to lend me. It works pretty well. It has some tracking issues so I ordered another VCR off ebay and now have two VCR’s on my desk.

I remember being a kid and thinking VCR’s could possibly be the coolest thing ever. Now they are just large annoying black boxes on my desk. I picked up the other VCR for $30 from eBay. The lady that was selling lied to me on its condition. But it works as expected.

Also I needed a place to save all of this video as most videos come up after compression to be 2-3GB of data. Then a DVD version ends up being another 4GB or so. Then I make 2 different formats m4v and Divx AVI. Not really sure how my family is taking this. But oh well I am happy to have digital copies of all the tapes. But this all takes up space so I now have 2 1TB Firewire 800 HDD. I have 2.5TB of data hooked up to my laptop for all of these home movies.

Good times. Well I better get back to work. Just thought I would blog some random thoughts.

Where the Hell is Rachel (2009)

Hey Everyone! If you follow my twitter you probably saw me make notes about the “Secret Christmas Project” well I thought I would show it to you now.

Some Tech Specs : We captured this on December 14th 2009 at various locations around my hometown of Kitsap County, WA. I used a Flip Ultra HD camera for all of the video and we went to various locations and I would capture my sister dancing from 15-30 seconds depending on the location. The video was inspired by the “Where the Hell is Matt” video which you can see here.

The music is Praan and you can grab it off iTunes at the following location : http://bit.ly/91XPu4

I edited the movie on my MacBook Pro using iMovie 2009. Which made it incredibly easy to do. I captured about 58 minutes of video in various locations and had to cut it down to 4 minutes and 29 seconds to match the other video. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them leave them in a comment below. I am not sure if we will do this again next year but who knows what the future holds.

Remember Remember the 5th of November

So here we are in another glorious month. I haven’t updated the blog in a while and I usually get reminded by my lovely girlfriend Raleigh. “You need to update the blog!”

November is usually the month where the world is winding down. Getting ready to bundle up for the holidays. I am really excited for Thanksgiving. I was listening to this podcast called No Agenda and they were discussing Turkey. They were talking about this thing called Heritage Turkey’s so I decided to order one of those for the family thanksgiving. They are the “original” style of Turkey and they are supposed to taste amazing. So looking forward to that.

Today I had the carpets in the Pipo Palace shampooed. It had been a while since it had been done and it really brought some new life back into the place. Taking a little longer to try then I expected. So having a rather chill Friday night lounging around the bedroom updating the world via laptops.

The household has 2 Mac Laptops a Mac Mini and Raleigh uses some old 2003 Dell. I can’t say I understand why she keeps that thing. But I bought a new laptop last June to replace my old Powerbook G4 that I bought in September 2004.

Other then that work has been rather insane. Everyone is drinking from the fire hose lately and it seems like patience is wearing a bit thin and we are hoping the holiday lock downs mean we get a little break for a short while.

Raleigh and I are heading to Hawaii in December so look forward to tweets and facebook pics of that while we are away. If you don’t already follow me on twitter you can check me out at http://www.twitter.com/tristanpipo

But I wish everyone a great weekend and I will work on getting back into this blogging thing and lay some social commentary on the line soon. Next weekend I will be heading back to Poulsbo, WA to go to my mothers art gallery. If you would like to grab lunch or something let me know.

Tristan Out.