NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Archives for February 2010

The Condenser Mic

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For Christmas my brother bought me a Samson C01U Studio Condenser Microphone. That’s basically fancy talk for a high quality microphone I can hookup to my computer:

I always wanted a nice mic but never got around to buying one, and now I realize all the fun things I can do with it.
For example:
  • I can speak like I’m on NPR radio and talk like the Saturday morning classical music announcer. Today we’ll be listening to Concierto Number 5 by Beethoven.
  • I can even talk like God.
Silly stuff aside, I can record written posts into audio, all in a high quality format. I have some expensive software such as Adobe Sound Booth, but the free and open source program Audacity is by far my favorite and easiest to use so far.
I wrote this post simply to have a script to read from. You can now hear the whole thing here:
(or if that doesn’t work, download here).

iPhone Goals = Awesome

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I stopped making monthly goals a while ago because I rarely followed up on them. They always get stuck on a sheet of paper somewhere which I promptly forget about on day 2 of the month.

I wrote my goals for February recently and snapped a pic on my iPhone….then had a brilliant moment where I SET IT AS MY WALLPAPER:

Now every time I look at my phone, guess what I see? Monthly goals staring me in the face waiting to be completed!

2009 In Numbers

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IN 2009 THERE WERE….
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154,458 Unique visitors to NevBlog according to Google Analytics.

442,307 Unique visitors to NevBlog according to Plesk Stats on my server.

84 Number of posts on NevBlog

5 Days spent homeless.

11,453 Miles put on my car.

87 Gigs of bandwith transferred to HouseOfRave customers.

377,176 Unique visitors to House Of Rave according to Google Analytics.

722,329 Unique visitors to House Of Rave according to Plesk Stats on my server.

$35,244 Amount of money I spent to live.

54 Times I rode the Cal Train

$1,892 Money spent on iPhone service.

1 Time I almost bashed my face in doing back flips on videotape.

Blogger’s Almost Dead (To Me)

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Google officially announced it will be cancelling FTP support for all of Blogger.

You can read about it here.
This blog was started roughly 5 years ago and Blogger seemed to be the easiest blog platform to use at the time (and still is for most users).
However I use a custom-domain version of Blogger where it publishes files on MY server, not Blogger’s….this of course causes much engineering difficulty for them, so they’re pulling the plug.
Kind of sucks, but I completely understand their logic. 0.5% of people on Blogger use FTP support, but it probably drains 25% or more of their engineering resources. That’s just bad business.
Anyhow, this blog has to move somewhere. I could easily pop this whole blog onto Blogger (which offers a lot of very easy to use tools), I can even still use my own domain name…but Blogger isn’t very customizable as open-source platforms.
I asked myself, “If I was going to start this blog TODAY, what platform would I use?”
…the obvious answer is WordPress, so I will use that.

I already use WordPress for all business related blogs because it’s MUCH faster, extremely customizable and has a MASSIVE library of free templates and widgets. I can’t program very well, so customizing templates myself is a wee bit harder than Blogger, but something I’ve in the past been able to do (or pay someone to do).
I’ve many times considered crossing this blog over to WordPress but there wasn’t a real need….so this is actually a fortunate nudge in the right direction!
So pretty soon this blog will cross the blogging platform see to the WordPress side. What do you think Adam?