Month: February 2011

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It’s been an interesting experiment so far

[As handwritten on Feb. 26th]

First off, I have to come clean and admit that I’ve done more than check my e-mail on my laptop. I’ve taken a look at the blog’s stats a couple times, see how many people have visited, delete spam, etc. I’m also using it to listen to music as I write this, but I had given myself permission to use my mp3 player during this weekend when I wasn’t allowed to surf the web or watch TV. There’s just one problem.

There’s no music on my mp3 player.

I’ve been using it to listen to an audio book and never got around to switching/deleting those files and replacing them with music, so… I’m cheating a little.

Honestly, I’ve been surprised at the siren’s song which is my computer. I went to bed early last night since I was tired, didn’t sleep well and eventually woke up around 3AM. Normally, I’d probably open the laptop and surf the Internet for a couple hours until I got tired again. This time (after a minor internal struggle), I read a book for a while, then rolled around in bed until I finally fell asleep.

When I woke up this morning, my first impulse was to check my e-mail. After hitting the snooze bar a couple times, of course. That was a little disturbing, to be honest. If it happens again tomorrow morning, I may want to consider signing up for EA: E-mailers Anonymous.

I’ve been fortunate in one sense because I have some friends who are moving into a new house this weekend, so I’ve been helping them pack and carry stuff, thereby keeping me away from computers. (Thankfully, I devised the experiment so I can use my phone. If I hadn’t, I would have been fucked—it’s important to know which house I should go to at which time if I’m going to help.)

There’s also a downside to helping them move (isn’t there always something?): I’m writing this by hand now and typing it out later, which means that sore hands and arms from lifting and carrying = hand cramps while writing.

So it’s true that I’ve been doing some more reading and other stuff that doesn’t involve having a computer in my lap. However, I miss the immediate access to information. I’ve had some conversations the last few days and I’m left to wonder when “Uncle Sam” was created as a kind of icon to represent the U.S.

I was also talking with someone about X-Men: First Class coming out this year and how we’re both disappointed that Kevin Bacon is in the film. She’s more upset about his presence; I don’t like the fact that he’s playing Sebastian Shaw. He’s supposed to have a more physically imposing presence than Kevin Bacon can muster, but I can’t just jump on Marvel’s website or Wikipedia to show pictures of them next to each other. (When I type this out as a blog entry, I’ll include some pics so you guys can understand what I’m talking about.)

Which one looks more like an evil mutant who could beat up the X-Men?

I guess that’s all for now. I’m looking forward to typing this (and other stuff) since it’s faster and more efficient, but I doubt that having to wait will lead to any twitching or sweating. The lack of Internet porn, though… go ahead, make a joke about the hand cramps. Then I can make a joke about having two hands. Now which one of us is gonna have trouble sleeping tonight? (It’ll probably still be me—not using the computer makes me want to go to bed earlier and it’s totally messing with my sleep schedule.)

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Time to unplug

This is something I was inspired to do months ago, but never got around to it for various reasons (the most frequent one being I didn’t really want to). Blame it on the friend who sent me a link to this webpage.

My reliance on technology isn’t as extreme as some people’s, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to spend hours at a time staring at my laptop. I’ve found myself doing that more and more frequently these days, so it’s time to step back and take a breather.

I was tempted to add a video to this blog entry according to the unplugging challenge, but this way, I don’t need to worry about getting it right in a single take. (Seriously, this would be a problem for me—if I started babbling or stammering, I’d want to do it over again.) Instead, I’m making a list, checking it twice, finding out which kinds of tech are naughty or nice…

The big sacrifice will be no computers. (I don’t have Internet access or free texting on my phone, so that won’t be an issue. If I don’t answer the phone and don’t return your call, this experiment is probably why. Or maybe I just don’t want to talk to you.) I might check my e-mail once or twice, but beyond that…

Twitter? Poof.
Facebook? Nope.
YouTube? Nada.
Internet porn? Wait… I’m giving up Internet porn?! Shit.

I’ll probably stick with this over the weekend and see if I get twitchy and break into a sweat at random times, but I picked that amount of time primarily because my class at Augsburg is working in the computer lab now and I’d rather not lose points for the sake of an experiment.

So I better use my technology well for the next couple hours because once I turn my laptop off, it’ll be off for a while. I’m sure it won’t get too lonely—hopefully, I won’t, either.

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Note to self: shave before attending visitations

I heard about my friend’s grandmother passing away over the weekend from her father, but that was the extent of my knowledge until Jeremy Gustafson sent me a link to the obituary in a local newspaper. They were holding a visitation this afternoon with the funeral tomorrow; since I wanted to support my friend, I showed up today prepared to give lots of hugs and comfort. (Awwww…)

As it turned out, I was running behind schedule this afternoon and opted to take a shower and skip shaving, saving myself half an hour or so—my facial hair fights back if I don’t cut it every two or three days. So I went to the visitation clean, but very scruffy. That had its upsides and downsides.

Upside: I was there at a decent time to give lots of hugs and comfort. I got to see a few photo albums of her grandmother, talk with some relatives, lighten the mood when I could… I’m glad I showed up and it sounded like my friend and her family appreciated the support.

Downside: when you’re giving a hug to someone who has long, smooth, silky hair, it can get caught in scruffy facial hair… forget can. It does get caught in scruffy facial hair. When I stood up and leaned back, a lock of her hair followed me. It looked and felt pretty silly, but when a 7-year-old who’s going stir-crazy sees someone’s head attached to someone’s face by long hair, it makes him laugh and slightly less stir-crazy for a couple minutes, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad.

I decided to keep this blog entry as generic as possible for the sake of my friend’s privacy, so there’s no guarantee that she’ll read it and know I’m referring to her. (I would hope so, but some people…) Regardless, I want her to know that if she ever needs me for hugs and comfort again, I’ll be there. And I’ll be clean-shaven next time, too.

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Testing, testing, 1-2-3…

I just installed a Twitter-based plugin that’ll send out a tweet every time I make a new blog entry on here. I fiddled with the options a little—I’m smart enough not to mess with coding anymore—and I’m wondering what the new tweets will look like. It’ll even show over on the right sidebar of the blog in the Twitter feed… who knows, maybe that’ll just fill up with a list of “Hey, look at this blog post!” Whether it does or not, it’s time to satisfy my curiosity and then fiddle with any options that need refiddling.

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Technology Haikus

To celebrate our final class in Strategic Technology, the instructor passed out a sheet of paper that had some limericks and haikus written on them for our enjoyment. Also for our enjoyment, she invited everyone to write one of their own. The other people in class may have started chatting with each other at that point, I really don’t know—I was too busy thinking about what to write.

I ended up writing three haikus, the last one because it seemed more related to business, and read them out loud to the class. I got the best reviews from the second (it’s also the one that I mumbled an apology about after saying it), so I’m ordering them 3-1-2 on here. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
____________________________

All these ones and all
These zeroes rule my workplace.
I can’t escape them.

I’m hooked on Facebook.
Addicted, I can’t log off.
Be my Farmville friend.

Surfing day and night.
Suddenly, Internet is gone.
I can’t access porn.

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I had a little work done

A few days ago, the blog croaked. The reason? Me. But it was for a good cause, I swear!

Before said croakage, this sucker was ancient. WordPress has advanced to 3.0.5 (don’t ask how they figure out the decimals, ’cause I haven’t the slightest idea). Meanwhile, shawnbakken.net was somewhere in the early 2s. I thought that maybe because I wasn’t hosting the site, I didn’t have the administrative power to make the upgrade. I was wrong.

The problem was that the site was using an old web server. The person who is hosting this website switched web servers, which has much better customer service and has been much more effective overall. (I’ll get back to that in a minute.) Their instructions were to go to the site where I registered my blog, change the old web server information so it would connect to the new server, then wait until the new people upgraded the blog. It sounds complicated on paper… or on a computer screen, for that matter… but once I figured out where to go and which changes to make, it seemed fairly simple.

A few hours later, I went to look at the “Administrative Dashboard” and found a new login screen. I typed in my name and password to discover a whole type of dashboard: the type that you find on WordPress 3.0.5. Hell yeah…

As you may have noticed, the blog’s background and a bunch of other aesthetic things have changed with this new upgrade. Part of it is to make it all look prettier, although I’d like to find a picture of myself that I could use for the header instead of flowers or something (because I’m vain like that). Another part of it is because this background allows the use of “widgets”, which is how I added my Twitter feed to the right column of the screen. The old background didn’t have that option, but that didn’t stop me from trying to add them.

I surfed around WordPress’s help section and found something that referred to adding widgets to a site. It had instructions for adding a few lines of programming text to the “sidebar” and the “theme editor”. Assuming those changes worked, I could add some nifty new toys to the blog. As it turned out, the changes didn’t work. Or perhaps they would have worked if I’d done them correctly.

I copied and pasted all of the text from both pages into a Word file so I could undo the changes easily. However, that doesn’t do much good when you accidentally get rid of a line of programming from the theme editor and everything stops working. And I mean everything.

I couldn’t edit anything, I couldn’t get back to the Dashboard, I couldn’t even look at the blog. Whenever I tried, a notice came up about an error in the theme editor in line 3 (where I was making changes). It might as well have been a flashing neon sign on the screen saying, “Nice work, dumbass!” Honest to God, I had trouble getting to sleep last night because of it.

Thankfully, I got a message out to the Powers That Be (a.k.a., the new web server people who are much more awesome than the last ones) and they fixed the problem by the time I logged in today. *victory dance*

So the blog is back online for people to read and now has all sorts of little unnecessary toys that may never be used, but I thought they were neat. It shows the last five Twitter posts I made, you can “like” individual posts on Facebook, share the posts using different programs… there are some statistical toys that I can use on the Dashboard, too. Yay, toys!

So I spent a lot of time downloading and upgrading and playing with stuff this afternoon, but one thing I’m not going to do is mess with the editing tools. After all, if I screw up and the blog stops working again, how am I supposed to put a picture of myself up in the header?