For the past couple weeks my traffic has been down drastically. I can’t figure out why. Some days it’s down to a third of what it once was. Other people have also mentioned how their traffic seemed to be down. Then I noticed that I didn’t seem to be reading as many feeds as I usually do. Usually every hour I have about five new updates from various websites and blogs. Up until yesterday I was lucky if I saw five for the day. Then something happened. Yesterday my feed reader exploded. In the hour and fifteen minutes I was doing after school tutoring, 28 new feeds hit my reader. In the five minutes it took for me to get home from work another ten hit the reader. I probably received another 20 or so last night. When I woke up this morning I had 32 feeds waiting for me to read. I don’t know if there was a problem with Google Reader or if it has anything to do with people’s traffic being down. I do know that strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Not long ago I bought a 500 GB usb external hard drive. I wanted to keep backups of all my documents, music, and pictures on it. I partitioned it so I could also back up my MacBook using Time Machine. I’ve been searching for a program to sync any new documents and music and whatnot on my Vista machine onto the external drive when I’d add it to my primary hard drive. I couldn’t find any decent free program that would do this and copying all the files manually just wasn’t efficient. Windows Vista has a backup solution built in but it wasn’t what I was looking for. In the Vista backup utility you can select types of files but not specific folders and directories. I wanted something that would allow me to select which files to backup and where to backup to. I posed the question in #habari and h0bbel gave me a suggestion, SyncToy. It’s a free download from Microsoft and does exactly what I want. As you can see in this screen shot, I was able to tell what directories to sync on my machine and which directories I want to sync them with.
It has a great, easy to use interface that is quite intuitive. You add folder points on each drive then click sync. It worked perfectly when syncing up all my files. The only thing I wish it did have was a schedule so it would perform syncs daily, weekly, or monthly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a feature that’s added in 2.0. Maybe sometime in the future that feature will be added.
I am by no means an Apple fanboy. I only have one Apple product, and that’s my MacBook. I will say that since I’ve gotten my MacBook, I now think all my future computer purchases will be Macs and not PCs. This has nothing to do with me being a fanboy. I just really enjoy using my MacBook and Windows Vista drives me nuts more and more each day. That being said, I have to say I was disappointed in this year’s Macworld. I was expecting much more from Apple. While I didn’t think they would actually release a tablet portable device, the thought was cool. Instead they release the MacBook Air. Excuse me while I yawn.
iPhone and iPod updates were surprising. First, the lack of a 3G 16gb iPhone upset me. I was expecting this to debut at Macworld. At least I was hoping it would. My current contract is up in April and I was hoping to maybe get an iPhone when it ended. I doubt that’s going to happen now. Especially since AT&T promised a 3G iPhone in 2008. Why would I buy one when a new one will be coming out later in the year? The only thing they did was update the firmware for the iPhone and iPod. Those were good upgrades but I can’t believe they expect people to pay $20 to update the iPod touch. That seems a bit ridiculous to be, but this is the Apple culture. The fanboys are known to pay anything that Jobs pushes, so Apple will get their $20 from thousands of fanboys.
A new Apple TV came out, but that gets another yawn from me. I’ll stick to Netflix or Blockbuster Online thank you. Overall, I thought the expo was disappointing. The one big announcement was the MacBook air. I like my MacBook as is. I don’t want to sacrifice an extra USB port and user-replaceable battery for extra thin body. Besides, I use my optical drive. No thank you to that product, especially at it’s hefty price. Oh well, there’s always next year.
There is something I don’t quite understand. Maybe someone can explain it to me. A few months ago Google gave IMAP support to Gmail. Everyone was happy to have this sought-after feature enabled finally. In my opinion, it was a few years too late. I never use desktop mail clients anymore (except when I was working for a technology company and we used Exchange). For something like Gmail, I just don’t see the point. The only thing I use a desktop email client for (and I use Thunderbird for this) is to back up my Gmail accounts. I don’t send mail from Thunderbird and I don’t read mail in Thunderbird. Maybe I would use a desktop email client if I used a different email service. I like Gmail’s interface too much to do that though.
Recently, Newsgator released their popular NetNewsWire and FeedBurner desktop RSS clients for free. You no longer have to pay for them. Again, I don’t understand why people would want to use a desktop RSS client. Sure, it can synchronize all your feeds so even if you aren’t at home it won’t give you the same feed as unread over and over. But you know what else does that? Web-based feed readers, such as Google Reader. Why download something to read when you could just as easily open up your browser to read it? Chances are, you’re already going to be on the net anyway.
Another thing I never understood was using things like Microsoft Live Writer and other such desktop blog publishing software. Why work with desktop software to publish to your blog? I know a few people who do that, but for me, writing in the administration of my blog software is perfectly fine. I don’t need to write my post in a piece of software that wasn’t even specifically designed for the blog engine I use.
It seems to me, and this is based on various people I know, blogs I read, etc, that the same people who supported Ralph Nader in 2000 are the same people that are supporting Ron Paul this election. The funny thing is, the platforms of both men are not that similar at all. So what makes these people jump beliefs. Are they really just sheep? Morydd in #habari made a good point. The supporters are “rebels” fighting the “establishment.” Doesn’t matter if the candidates have different beliefs than the supporters. They just want to be cool and vote for the guy who is the most different. They don’t have to actually believe what the candidate is saying. Morydd also said that “if you back a candidate who has extreme views, and is unelectable, you guarantee yourself at least 4 years of holier-than-thou ‘If my candidate had won, this would all be different.'” Again, a very good point, because that is the exact type of attitude established by any of the Ron Paul supporters you talk to. Interesting.